Artist Chazz Miller is hoping his butterflies will lift the city up. By the end of summer, he hopes to have painted 1,000 butterflies throughout the city for a project he calls the Papillion Effect.
Excerpt from the
Detroit News:
It's a butterfly release of grand proportions. Literally, 1,000 of them by summer's end. Sounds pretty daunting, especially once you realize we're not talking about delicate flying monarchs, but 4- to 5-foot-wide plywood cutouts painted kaleidoscopically by Detroit artist Chazz Miller and a host of young volunteers.
Miller has dubbed his project the Papillon Effect -- papillon is French for butterfly.
"I thought Detroit needed a psychological readjustment," Miller said. "I mean, when you look at a caterpillar you would never imagine a caterpillar is going to turn into a butterfly. And when you look at Detroit, you never imagine Detroit is going to come up off its knees.
"It's a great metaphor for me to see Detroit as a butterfly -- a papillon -- to re-emerge."
The process works like this: Volunteers cut donated plywood into butterfly shapes, seal and prime them. Then Miller and volunteer artists draw designs on them with crayon so anyone with a brush -- regardless of talent -- can fill them in with psychedelic color. Miller can't seem to resist going over each one, adding details and shading.
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here.