Seattle’s Surreal Blue Trees

Something surreal happened in Seattle’s Westlake Park last week, when all trees suddenly turned blue. Don’t worry, it’s not some tree disease but a fresh landscaping project by Egypt-born and Melbourne-based sculpture artist Konstantin Dimopoulos. To raise awareness about how important trees are to our survival, Dimopoulos painted the trees with a “biologically safe pigmented water” on 2 April. According to WebUrbanist, the color will naturally degrade over the coming months.

Dimopoulos, who did similar paint jobs in Richmond (Virginia) and Melbourne in the past, explains that “each year, an area at least the size of Belgium of native forests is cleared from around the planet. (…) Trees are largely invisible in our daily lives, and it’s not until it’s too late that we realise how important they are to us both aesthetically and environmentally.” He considers his landscaping project to be a “magical transformation”, as the paint job “suggests to the viewer that something unusual, something out of the ordinary has happened”. Click here for a photo series of the blue intervention.