On Saturday June 9th, rongo rongo, Burn Unit and Ink Tea went to Como Park and did an epic coloring exercise. We paced it off and rongo rongo measured approximately 300 feet; Burn Unit stayed a little later and added another 20 or so feet to the overall size of the coloring. So make it the length of a football field plus an end zone.

From Burn Unit:
First: A Chalk Manifesto
Chalk gives you access! Chalk is forgiven! Chalk is welcome and exciting for people of all ages! No one will yell at you if you fill a hundred yards of public space with chalk drawings! They will ask you for miles of the stuff! The evidence is clear that people want chalk drawings, lots and lots of them, in their public spaces! Give the people what they want: go out and make chalk drawings everywhere! The transience of chalk subverts the paradigm of the will to power as art and the artist as the continuously existing subject over against time!

Epic coloring is exercise! As I'm entering my parts of this proof I am experiencing all manner of aches and pains! Maybe I'm really getting old. But crawling around on 300 feet of Como Park asphalt for two and a half hours is hard work. I was exhausted and dehydrated for most of the rest of the day! My hands and knees hurt and I have abrasion pains on several of my fingers. It certainly feels like I did something pretty epic.

Quick inspirations. I found myself more and more engaged by the place we were working in. Right at the start there was a police memorial service up in the pavilion. I (and perhaps I was alone in this) felt an urge to connect with those people. Hence at one point the words "SF0.org Honors the Fallen Also" make an appearance, right below the pavilion observation deck. This also led to a brief discussion with rongo rongo's husband Dave (who is very nice and interesting in the way he plays SF0 "vicariously" through her!). He expressed concern along the lines of (I'm paraphrasing obviously) "I'm concerned about the lettering because we don't know what kind of impression people will take from this." At the moment, dazed seized by the experience of making art in public, I didn't do a very good job explaining what was going thru the fevered brain. However, I also feel like it wasn't a major "breaking point" so I kinda just kept going. In any case, what I did discover as I worked through the "exercise" was I really wanted to interact with people. People were fairly good at this, actually. They asked us questions, little kids wanted to participate, and they were generally enthusiastic. The number one question was "are you going all the way around?" to which I always said "no!" (the Lake Como walking path is three miles long--that's not only an epic thought, that'd be a ... monumental coloring exercise I suppose). In any case, as more things began happening around us, I felt like I wanted to incorporate them into the piece. So for example, beyond the memorial to the fallen there was an overheard conversation where a man who apparently had either lost someone to cancer or was himself afflicted, kept repeating to his friends "Every step I take is just sand through the hourglass. I know that. Every step is more sand and I'm thankful." His phrases stuck in my head as I was myself working with transient materials. So "every step is sand and I know that" got into the piece. Someone else said something about "not being the earth" someone else something about "a green wave". Just these snippets of conversation floating in the air subtly worked into parts of the piece for me. Like with the memorial plaque--that was a simple one to interact with in chalk, but it drew my attention.

I wanted to keep going but by then it was really hard work and I needed to get back to my family. Once rongo rongo and Ink Tea had to leave I was only able to stay about another 20 minutes. But I left behind some chalk and a note for others. And as I was leaving, one woman who'd seen us earlier came back with her boys and wanted to play. So I pointed out the bucket of chalk and said, "Please go for it!"

The main thing I take from this is: I really want to do it again. So if anybody else wants to go epic coloring, I am totally up for that! I'll remember knee pads, gloves and possibly a good chalk holder next time. But I'm totally up for it!

inktea

I woke up in the morning and checked my email to find an invitation to Epic Coloring. I had to be at work at noon, but I'm kind of a seat-of-my-pants kinda gal, so I was there for the time I could be. I drew a dragon, a leafy undergrowth, a soldier, a huge fish and a small fish, a sleeping girl and her window, a field of wheat, and as B.U. pointed out, I lean towards drawing *things* rather than just shapes and curves.

I was a little nervous how people would react, but all I heard were compliments.

One woman said to us, "I wish my kids would draw that beautifully with their chalk."
I responded that they just needed more chalk, encouragement, and practice.

It was a good morning.

Burn Unit inre: "things", she's right. I described Ink Tea as a "more lucid artist than I am." I thrive in abstraction, tension, contradiction, and absence. That's not to say she doesn't, she just seems more... coherent than I am often. Plus, I can't draw very well at all.

rongo rongo

I was excited to be going to Minnesota to have a chance to meet up with SF0ers for some collaborative tasking. It was so much fun, and I hope to do more collaboration in the future. If any of you come to Boston, drop me a line!

Originally, I had just been thinking about the act of coloring, but it turned out that the really special part of this task was talking with the people passing by. Some people asked for permission to walk over the art, others complimented the work, and kids joined in. It felt like being here and drawing anything that came to mind on this path while people biked, jogged, skated, and strolled through was the perfect thing to be doing on this day.

Like Burn Unit, I was struck by how physically demanding this completion turned out to be. I had a chalk blister and stiff muscles, with knee bruises and scrapes from the pavement. But we imagined what it would be like to get hundreds of people to chalk around the lake, maybe as a charity event. The potential is there for monumental collaborative ephemeral art!

Ink Tea's knees do not hurt, nor do her hands feel chaffed from chalk. She has been going rock climbing in unconscious anticipation of this task! Rongo Rongo had an adorable hat that made her instantly recognizable, and Burn Unit is probably one of the coolest guys you'll ever meet.

BU: awww! Seriously though. It's true. The future's so bright I wear my sunglasses at night.