Sky Art Gives Students A New Perspective

By Martinique Davis

“Just imagine yourselves as human paint drops.” With that statement, Daniel Dancer, a conceptual artist from Oregon, caught the attention of a room full of Telluride Elementary Schools second graders Tuesday morning. Dancer brought the Telluride youngsters into a quiet attention by encouraging them to use their imaginations, to envision themselves as small, colorful components of one larger-than-life portrait. To in fact “become’ the paint that will create a 140-foot long, 80-foot wide golden eagle.

“You have to use your imaginations to find your ‘sky sight,’” said Dancer,  “using the wings in your mind to rise up and look down on the earth to see like an eagle”. Dancer’s proposition was more than just imaginative thinking, however. Yesterday, hundreds of kindergarten through sixth graders and school staff, wearing gold or black T-shirts, made his concept a reality. They arranged themselves on the Telluride High School field to create the fleeting “Art for the Sky” in the shape of a golden eagle.

Dancer and 12 members of the Telluride High School art class crafted the living image of the endangered bird, an image that lasted just long enough for Dancer to be raised above the field in a Telluride Fire District bucket to snap a quick photograph. The human “paint drops” then quickly dispersed, leaving only the faint spray-painted outline of the eagle, wood chips and used clothing that formed design details on the grassy turf.

“This is art that is about impermanence,” Dancer said of the project in an interview with The Telluride Watch earlier this week. While it is an art form that lasts only briefly and can be preserved only in photographs, it is the project’s impermanent nature that is the major aspect of its artistic and educational value.

“Creating art that lasts for only an hour is a reminder to us that in every moment, our life and our world are changing,” said Dancer. “I think that the idea of impermanence is something important for people to learn about when they are young, to enable them to appreciate every moment of their lives as precious and live their life to the maximum.”

Dancer has facilitated “Art For the Sky” projects in schools around the country for the last 5  years but has been engaged in this larger-than-life art for much of his adulthood. Although he has never taken an official art class and only once enrolled in a photography class, his interest in aerial photography and “sky art” has been a nearly lifelong love. More than twenty years ago, Stan Herd, a friend of Dancer’s, began creating huge portraits on field of Kansas farmland, using a tractor as a paintbrush and plants and soil as paint. From the ground the images looked like the haphazard plow work of an inept farmer. From the sky, the apparently random-spaced plow rows explode into an oversized canvas for a portrait of a stately Native American or a colorful vase of sunflowers, and came to be known as “sky art.”

Sky art is not a modern concept however. In one of the driest places on earth, the Nazca Desert of Peru, ancient artists or native cultures created enormous pictures of birds, insects and symbols by meticulously digging trenches upon the barren earth. The impetus behind this ancient form of sky art remains a mystery to anthropologists, said Dancer who traveled to Peru a few years ago to photograph the region, since these ancient people did not have the means to view their art from high above the earth like we do today.

Dancer believes the sky art in Peru evolved from the concept of “give-away,” or the belief of many native cultures that art and other creative ceremony should be practiced for not other reason than to give thanks for the beauty of the world. He explained the concept of “give-away” to his audience of second graders on Tuesday as one of the things sky art can teach, along with the concept of impermanence.

“It also allows children to begin to develop their sky-sight,” Dancer said, which in turn can be used as a problem solving tool. Sky sight allows one to imagine rising above a problem and viewing it as a part of the whole.

Perhaps the most challenging concept Dancer hopes will come out of his Sky Art projects is that of collaboration;, the ability for hundreds of people to open their collective mind to create something larger than themselves. Successful collaboration requires a good deal of patience, as demonstrated yesterday when an excited mass of Telluride students and teachers wearing black and gold, organic cotton T-shirts spilled onto the ball field and Dancer was left the task of shaping them into a work of art. The living image of the golden eagle may have lasted only a brief moment, but the lessons learned will remain with the participants much longer.

“It is simply a way to give thanks for the beauty of the world,” said Dancer, “and teach people how to use their sky sight to look down on the world whenever they can and find the creative solutions that live in the ‘big picture’ view.”

For more information on Dancer’s Art For the Sky programs, visit www.artforthesky.com. Dancer is the author of Shards and Circles: Artistic Adventures in Spirit and Ecology.