BAINBRIDGE ISLAND – As a regular on the Bainbridge ferry route, Cynthia Lait is no stranger to sitting in the Winslow terminal, killing time waiting for her boat to arrive.
Typically, commuters are glued to glowing screens, surrounded by a sea of bland, hospital-green walls. There’s not much to look at beyond a few brochures and the ferry-frog sculpture.
It seemed to Lait that the walls were crying out for art.
And so the Bainbridge artist pitched an idea to Washington State Ferries: a large mural that would liven up the terminal and perhaps inspire commuters to close Twitter and chat with those around them. Ferries signed off on the idea but told her she’d have to raise the funds for the project.
Within a couple weeks of launching a Kickstarter fundraiser for the project, Lait had pulled in more than $3,200 for the project. She began putting down color on her mural Wednesday.
Her art project stretches floor to ceiling, depicting a tangled mass of waves – a roiling mix of blues and greens – reflecting Puget Sound’s waters a stone’s throw from her canvas.
Her purpose: inspiring conversation and interaction in a normally quiet ferry terminal.
“Just realize how gorgeous it is here, we have so many beautiful things,” she said Wednesday between brush strokes. “I want people to get off their phones and talk about something other than Facebook.”
As a kid, Lait spent a lot of time at her grandparents’ home, a formal place with fancy furniture, where one couldn’t break anything or get anything dirty, she said. But when they took her to the beach, she could let loose, play in the sand and splash in the water. It helped to give her a fascination with waves and motion, she said. She’s pouring that enchantment into her mural for her community to see every day.
“We’re right next to Puget Sound, and so I thought this would be a really good representation of the area we live in,” she said. “I love that the Puget Sound, it’s never the same color even when you’re looking at it, it’s like it’s 15 different colors. I just wanted to reflect that here.”
She’d love to see her painting grow or to have other murals cover the walls there, to have kids contribute their visions as well, perhaps even a mural festival could happen, where art could be painted over every few years to keep the designs fresh. She could see more murals going up in the region’s ferry terminals.
“There are tons of artists on Bainbridge, tons of artists in the Seattle area,” she said. “It’d be great to do something, where we have this space and it’s not being used, so why not?”
Ferries is open to the idea of more public art in its terminals, said WSF’s Jadwiga Kellock, noting that it’s willing to consider any kind of volunteer beautification work. Like Lait’s mural, projects would have to be self-funded, she said.
“Any wall that’s in a terminal that isn’t spoken for by advertising, safety and security messaging, if there’s a space available, we’re always willing to take a proposal and consider it,” she said.
“We liked the fact that someone came with an idea to beautify (the terminal) for the sake of the community, there was no advertising in it, it’s just to make it look pretty in there,” Kellock added.
Lait enjoys the idea of a new challenge in public art, of finding a way to create something that won’t just sit in someone’s living room, of making something everyone can see. She'd love to see others take on similar projects.
“I’m thrilled to be able to do this,” she said. “You want to contribute, and this is a way of giving back a little bit. I just hope it makes the waiting time a little bit nicer.”
