Kon Dimopoulos Painting Chattanooga’s Trees Blue

Konstantin Dimopoulos is a New Zealand artist heading up an environmental art installation in Chattanooga, Tennessee, titled “The Blue Trees,” which Dimopoulos says is about bringing attention to the plight of old-growth forests around the world.

About 18 million acres – roughly the size of Panama – are destroyed each year, according to the National Geographic Society. About 36 football fields’ worth of trees are lost every minute, the World Wildlife Fund estimates. Such damage leads to soil erosion, eradicates animal and plant habitats, ejects more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and reduces the number of trees to pull pollution from the air.

After hearing these statistics from the Australian chapter of Friends of the Earth, Dimopoulos, who lives in Melbourne, wanted to spread the word.

“As an artist, I thought, ‘What can I do to make people more aware of this?’” Dimopoulos says. “I thought, ‘I wish we could do something that would make people in the cities aware of this because it’s happening thousands of miles away and is invisible.’”

Along came the idea of painting trees blue, something far from invisible, although the paint will wash off in three to four months, he says.

“Blue, I think, talks about serenity. It’s almost like the cathedral windows, the stained glass,” the 60-year-old artist says. But he admits that vibrant blue “also grabs attention and that’s what we’re here for. If I coloured them brown, nobody would care, and part of it is to create something that is the apotheosis of what a tree is.”

Dimopoulos was born in Egypt. He completed a Bachelor of Arts in sociology at Victoria University and later studied part-time at the Chelsea School of Art in London.

“The Blue Trees” is on until 15 November.

Original article by Shawn Ryan, Chattanooga Times Free Press, October 23, 2016.

Photo by Dan Henry.