Artist Uses Mini-Windmills to Create Illuminated Art on Vail Mountainside
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
VAIL, Colo. – Even Don Quixote didn’t try tilting at windmills in the dark.
Denver artist Patrick Marold has installed 2,700 mini-windmills along a Vail mountainside, each powering lights inside tubes the windmills are perched on – creating a tableau dependent on the stirrings of the breeze.
“If there is a statement in my art it is that I try to completely release it. Nature takes control,” Marold said, his hands covered with cuts from gouging holes in the mountainside for the past week. The project took three months.
“My hands are off now. I just let it happen.”
The wind generally dies down in the evening here, so in a sense Marold’s mission with “The Windmill Project” could be as daunting as the quest of Miguel Cervantes’ mythical hero.
Weather forecasts called for a front this week that Marold hopes will illuminate the tubes. It takes at least a 15-mph breeze to drive generators inside the white, 8-foot-tall polycarbonate tubes and really make them glow.
“A couple of nights ago we had strong winds and they lit up like a birthday cake. It made me tingle,” said Leslie Fordham, in charge of public art for Vail. The project, which cost $94,000, doesn’t officially open until Friday.
It’s another bid to make Vail, the nation’s busiest ski area, a cultural destination. Vail already hosts international dancers and singers, including the Bolshoi, and major orchestras.
“Now we want to get into the visual arts,” said Fordham.
The town and the ski resort are committed to using as much green power – such as wind – as possible. So “The Windmill Project” makes a statement for the town as well as the artist.
The windmills, whose blades are customized anemometers 4 inches in diameter, can be seen above a golf course from nearby Interstate 70. At first glance, in the daylight, they could be mistaken for another grove of winter-barren aspens in the snowy background.
The roar of nearby Gore Creek covers any sound the windmills might make, as well as highway noise.
The 32-year-old artist, a Fulbright scholar who studied industrial design in Rhode Island, has worked with windmills before. In Iceland he lived on a farm where it was so dark most of the time that he gravitated toward light as an art form. The wind there averaged 30 mph with gusts of 80 mph every day; he built 200 windmills – prototypes for the Vail project.
In Vail, there were other obstacles. The rock was so hard Marold and his crew broke two or three drill bits daily. Some tubes fell apart while being carried to the site on a snowcat.
The Vail windmills come down after April 22, and Marold hopes to take them to Santa Fe, N.M. He hopes to move the exhibit from one spot to another every week or month.
“We’ve even had interest from Chicago – the Windy City,” he said.
