With the sculptures generated by the stick drawings of the kids for Autoglow came the idea to fill the event space with ladders. Why? These ladders symbolized for me the leg up a donation to the Children’s Center would provide to the kids they help, but also the process by which all of us climb into our lives, and get to be contributing members of our community-one step up, at a time. In the dance floor/foyer I hung from the ceiling what seemed like an endless number of ladders- borrowed from everyone I knew.
I have had a leg up from others plenty of times, just like most people. I could have never done without this. All any kid needs is a leg up from a set of parents, a greater family, a good school and a focused community and a fair world. When any part of this goes awry, all of us who are able, need to step in.
We cut what seemed like a zillion stars from thin masonite, and painted them gold. Gold stars-this a simple visual representation of the achievement of my babyhood. I still remember the gold stars I got-don’t you? My figures were happily floating in the airspace-as any kid should be.
I did all of the figures, save one. The interior designer Charles Dunlap donated a figure, walking a dog, on his own. His dog went up the ladder and was already crossing over to a new place-his version of an enabled child not far behind.
The tables were not fancy; the not fancy chairs were every version of black we could find. The tablecloths-collages of photographs of kids printed on giant sheets of copy paper, overlaid with clear acetate. The centerpieces? Flashlights-shine the light wherever you can. Bottled water energy drinks-water, essential to life. Some of the steel ladders we welded up crossed over from one table to another-fun.
Its important with any fundraising event that the message be simple. There are those in need. There are those who can help. Helping others is the best possible time anyone could hope for. My job is to put together a visual telegram from those in need to those who can help. Let some visual sparkle do the rest.
The few moments before an event designed to raise money for a cause begins- I treasure. No matter what works or falls short, in the end, everything is about the sincere energy of the effort. The lighting people, the catering people, the entertainment people, the Children’s Center staff-so many people came together on this day, to a worthy end. I am lucky to know and have worked with all of them.
Those figures whose creation delighted me so much were not the star of this event. They just took their place along with the efforts of a lot of other very creative and energetic people. Once the room filled with people, there was a party going on. I am a member of a big group whose names and particulars may never be known-fine. We were just all hoping for the best, for the kids.
Not so long after this picture was taken, this room was jammed with people, every one of them a gardener busy nurturing the landscape.
Everyone in my town knows the Auto Show is in progress downtown in Detroit. Not as many people know that the automobile companies have for years sponsored the NAIAS Charity Preview event in tandem with the show-which has raised over 81 million dollars since 1989 to benefit a number of children’s charities in southeastern Michigan. I had occasion a few years ago to be involved in an event to benefit 
The ting ting was tightly zip tied to the flexible wire-but I was still able to pull individual ting pieces away from the wire-giving this figure a curvy shape. She had a curly ting head, hairdo, hands and feet. The legs were wrapped in ribbon, and studded with small cream colored paper roses. Her outfit-a tee shirt covered in paper hydrangea petals. The velvet ribbon at the neck and wrists-can you tell I was having a good time? 
I use dried and preserved natural materials for lots of projects-bringing the garden indoors is an activity I like. Invariably there are bits and pieces left over-I keep them. Who knows what might come up where a couple of green rope balls, or a few bunches of preserved grass might come in handy? The idea that this might help someone felt great.
I wanted all the kids to have a sense of lively animation-just like any real kid. As each one got finished, I hung them from a bar on giant S hooks in the greenhouse. Each one had a different set of materials, and a different personality. 
This figure made a lot of some green floral foam cones I had left over from a party for a client. A spool of metallic peach wired ribbon made fast work of a hairdo, a necklace and some bracelets. Though it took the better part of 5 days to make them all, the time flew by. In retrospect, the occasion to design and play with materials, shapes, volumes and colors was the gift of this project to me. Should I ever decide to give up gardening, I might consider making hats. Outlandish hats. 
I was able to hang my figures on a convenient fence at Mocad-the venue for the event. 
This ting man got his whirling dervish look from multiple strands of curved aluminum wire. The wire is very light, making it possible to make the wire appear as though it were floating. One pierced aluminum hanging votive made a great starting point for a head. 
Amazingly enough, it was my fifth grade science teacher that taught me the color basics. I remember that she covered individual panes of some of the classroom windows with sheets of red, yellow and blue acetate. Her explanation of the term “primary colors” was simple-these three colors come standard issue in nature-they cannot be made from any other colors. She had a stack of giant acetate rectangles every color imaginable, and we did spend a lot of time trying to overlay sheets in some form that would produce yellow. We never made any yellow, but we did make lots of other colors-the secondary colors. Secondary, meaning the result of the mix of any two primary colors. Then we made tertiary colors-any mix of three colors. 
This may have been science, but it was pure fun. Once we had green from mixing blue and yellow, and orange from yellow and red, and purple from blue and red, we pasted these combos on the windows. Over a period of days, every window in the room had a distinctly different color. In the center, the single sheets of the primary colors. At the edges, stacks of acetate sheets that looked like the color of mud. I remember how enchanted I was with all that color; to this day a set of pastels, markers, yarn samples,colored pencils, paints and the like interest me. I did not so much grasp the relationship of color to light, but I could see it. The quality of light greatly influences the appearance of color-anyone who has loved a paint chip at the store, and put it on a wall at home to disastrous effect understands this. 
Color in the landscape functions the same way. The primary colors have an electricity that comes with the territory, but where and how color gets placed determines how it looks. Yellow reads brilliantly at a distance; use it in places far away from your eye, or to back up other darker or more subtle colors that would otherwise fade from view. The transparency of yellow makes it a perfect choice for areas in the landscape that are back lit-it will look like the lights are on. The edges of these dahlias petals have gone green; they are too thick to transmit light well. The dark behind the dahlia turns the yellow dirty yellow-green. 
This composition is first and foremost about yellow. It draws your eye, and keeps your visual attention. It is secondarily about tulips, yews, boxwood, geometry-and so on. Notice how the color far away in this photo are subdued, muddy, and indistinct-but for the green of the emerging leaves. New leaf green has a lot of yellow in it-that yellow reads at a distance.
Princeton gold maple leaves are really yellow with a green cast when they first emerge.
In a sunny spot, the leaves read yellow to the eye at the top, where they get the most light. As your eye looks at this tree from top to bottom, the color changes. The leaves with least exposure to light are the darkest. The change in value-or relative lightness or darkness-from the top of this tree to the bottom is considerable. The trunk of the tree looks black, given all the light behind it. 
Yellow has the ability to light up a shady area. The gerberas at the top glow in front of the yews whose color almost appears black. Densely shady gardens can die visually if some effort is not made to introduce contrast. One landscape project involved a densely wooded area; cutting out the brush and sapling trees in a few selected areas created pools of light. The contrast of light and dark added visual interest, but also made it possible to see the more subtle colors of the plants in the ground. 
Likewise, painting the concrete floor of one room in the shop these grassy-shaped variations of chartreuse and yellow green made it easier to see everything that would be placed in the room. Milo’s coat color is known as “dark brindle”. All the individual colors present in his coat read much more clearly than they would should I have photographed him with a dark background.