SPARKLE THEN FADE

The child's interpretation of Ma Chihuly's Floats, 2006 by Dale Chihuly.

---

A great joy is watching the child, sprawled upon the floor of the Tacoma Art Museum, colored pencil in hand, sketching. Other adults, including the museum docents, seem intrigued to see what the child is doing. They try to get closer to the child so that they can sneak peeks at the child's work, without trying to be obvious about it. The child is oblivious to such machinations since the moment revolves around a particular piece of art.

Our most recent visit was to view the Sparkle Then Fade exhibit. The above sketch is of a piece that was not part of Sparkle Then Fade, but intrigued the child as soon as it was seen. The inner "courtyard" of the museum, consisting of a "stone wave sculpture" by Richard Rhodes, was "littered" with thirty-nine glass floats from Dale Chihuly's Niijima Floats series. The floats and stone flooring can be viewed from all four sides of the building. The child sketched a landscape of overlapping circles, representing the most fascinating and colorful floats—as far as the child was concerned—and perfectly captured the Cubist effect of viewing them from all four windows.