Light-Motif Tired Of Reflected Glory, Artist Turns Talents To Making Neon Sculptures
First it was bicycle reflectors by the dozens, then by the hundreds. Smitten by the fleeting glow of red and amber, Dick Elliott nailed so many 1- and 3-inch plastic disks to his house that it became this central Washington town’s No. 1 roadside attraction.
From there, he put a 50,000-reflector hatband on Yakima’s SunDome, 17,000 reflectors in New York City’s Times Square and 15,000 reflectors on a water tank in Pateros, Wash.
He’s following the light “like a crow that follows glittering things,” said Elliott’s wife and fellow artist, Jane Orleman.
Now, a vision inspired by the glow of roadside reflectors on county highways has led Elliott to pursue the allure of neon.
“Neon brings out another feeling, I can’t verbalize it,” Elliott, 50, said as he scurried to prepare a Bellevue exhibit that will come to Spokane’s Cheney Cowles Museum later this year. “The combination of the neon and reflectors brings out that, ‘Oh wow.”’
But it’s a curse as much as a vision, forcing Elliott to learn the fickle ways of molten glass, electricity and glowing gas.
Elliott’s yen for neon grew out of a 1992 reflector installation at Cheney Cowles in which visitors viewed the works with a flashlight in a dark room. The thought of using a light source other than a flashlight or passing headlights led Elliott to the Neon Art & Tube Bending School in Portland, where he learned the trade alongside more commercially oriented neon sign makers.
Now Elliott is working in a cavernous concrete-floored shop filled with three gas torches, glass tubes and a periodic table of elements displayed prominently on one wall.
“Helium, neon, argon, krypton and xenon are the noble gases,” Elliott explained, pointing with a mixture of pride and fascination to the brightly colored elements on the far right side of the chart. “All of those can be used in this process, but typically just neon and argon are used.”
It’s one thing to imagine a great work and, as Elliott is learning, another thing to bring it into the material world. A single tube of glass can require painstaking work on each of the three burners, bending, curving, even looping the tube with pretzel-bender’s flip of the wrist as it cools from a latex-like consistency to candy-like brittleness.
“I have moved into this high technology just in the last two years, so at times I’ve been in way over my head,” he said. “But to accomplish the vision, you’ve got to be able to do it.”
This new craft, Elliott has been told, typically takes eight years to master. Now in his third year, he has already fashioned 4-foot-wide boxes and 15-foot-wide fluorescent mandalas that look like glowing images from a Spirograph or a computer.
It’s a world far removed from the one Elliott abandoned 15 years ago when he broke away from realistic graphite drawings and hit a road first lined with reflectors, now neon.
“In 1980, I lay down the pencils, lay down that whole direction and struck off,” he said. “I had absolutely no idea where I was going except I knew the feeling inside of me that I was trying to express.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo