John Grade and the Art of Decay

Ron Judd, in our News Partner The Seattle Times, has a fascinating piece on world-famous artist John Grade, who graduated from high school in Shoreline.

John Grade really might want to think about charging admission.

Couple reasons. One, an afternoon spent watching the Seattle artist sawing, gluing, scheming and dreaming in his clandestine laboratory — spread throughout various basement spaces of the old Publix Hotel in the Chinatown International District — is better than any conceivable reality TV.

It's like putting "Monster Garage," "Iron Chef" and "American Masters" together in a supercollider, throwing the switch and pulling up a lawn chair with a cold one to appreciate the splendid wreckage: Lots of big chunks of big, cool stuff, interspersed with great ideas, everywhere you look.

Gleefully in the center of it all is Grade, 41, a Minnesota-born, Ravenna-raised artist who somehow fits in comfortably on an alpine glacier, in a white lab coat, or on lists of notable contemporary landscape sculptors — although Grade (pronounced "Grah-day") is stretching the bounds of that term.

Two: This is a see-it-while-you-can situation. Most of the brilliant stuff that gets created here won't be around forever. Much of it is built to erode or be disassembled by something.

The rest of the story here.

Photos of his art projects here.