Through the Gates

On Sunday, my stepbrother, Jay, my husband and I went to see The Gates, the Christo and Jeanne-Claude installation in Central Park. It took $20+ million and nearly 26 years for the husband and wife team to complete, and get approval for, their latest project: 7,500 free-standing, orange-painted steel "gates" with matching vinyl curtains strewn along 23 miles of walkways through the park. The effect is somewhere between surreal and superfluous.
I was a skeptic, I'll admit. I've always thought the park, whose chief architect was Frederick Law Olmsted , was distinctive in its design and hardly needed accountrement.
And when I first viewed the installation from my vantage point on a co-worker's terrace on the 17th floor, the dotted orange lines created by The Gates seemed as out of place and intrusive as traffic cones lining a hiking trail. But walking through them is an altogether different experience. You're walking through a living canvas. You become part of the art itself.
When we approached the entrance at Columbus Circle, I saw The Gates as exactly that: 7,500 "gates" of steel frames with orange flaps. But as we walked through them, the fabric changed shape and shade with the wind and setting sun, and The Gates were transformed from objects to art.
The saffron fabric flaps became waves against a grey-white sky, then flames lapping at the skeletal branches of the leafless trees that line the pathways of the park.
I thought of the way Jay depicts the landscapes he paints. The world divided into bold, broad bands of color. Triangle trees and shadowy seas. And I wondered how he would paint The Gates.
Before we'd begun our walk, Jay had presented us with one of my favorite paintings of his--a wedding gift, he said. It's his view of the ocean off the coast of Newfoundland, one of a handful of paintings he did last summer during a four-week trip to Canada he embarked on the day after our wedding.
I will hang it beside a painting of the New York skyline by my stepsister-in-law, Leanne. Now, wherever we live, I will always have a view of the ocean and of New York.