An L.A. Artist’s Blue Line Period : Art: Tom Eatherton’s light panels along the Metro Rail line inaugurate the Art for Rail Transit program.

Art for Rail Transit, a public art program designed to put artworks in Metro Rail stations, will be inaugurated on Thursday in a flash of cool blue light. “Unity,” the first installation, is a series of 82 fiber-optic light panels by Los Angeles artist Tom Eatherton. The multipart light painting will be turned on at a 9 a.m. ceremony in the Flower Street Tunnel of the Blue Line.

Eatherton’s work, which is located 30 feet underground, will be visible only while riding the train. Passengers pulling into the station at 7th and Flower streets will glide between circular patterns of blue light. Commuters whose heads are buried in their newspapers may only perceive a blue aura, but those who look out the train windows will see a changing parade of concentric circles and points of blue light in circular arrangements.

“We think of this station as the portal to the city,” said Jessica Cusick, director of Art for Rail Transit (ART), noting that the heart of downtown’s business district is an appropriate place to launch the program. “Unity” eventually will be only one of many ART projects at Metro Rail stations. But for now, it shines alone as the symbolic--and radiant--center of an ambitious project that has already commissioned 29 artists and has requested proposals from 15 others.

“I’m delighted,” Eatherton said, enjoying his place of honor shortly before his work made its debut. “It was a hard job and the time was tight, but we did it.” The 57-year-old artist, who has worked with light throughout his career, has built temporary pieces at galleries, studios, museums and storefront windows, but this is his first permanent installation.

“Unity” evolved as he had envisioned it, Eatherton said, but it presented complex problems. He initially planned to fashion the panels in neon, until he learned that the transformers would interfere with the train’s communication system. When he hit upon fiber optics as an alternative, he also avoided neon’s potential dangers of breakage and gas leakage. “When fiber-optic material breaks, the piece still works,” he noted.

The plastic fibers produce a quality of light that Eatherton had sought unsuccessfully in the past. “Fiber optics doesn’t shed or project light like conventional light sources,” he said. “The light stays within the area that is lighted.” In “Unity,” the plastic strands are sheathed in specially fabricated glass (as a safety measure) and mounted in 42-inch-square, box-like panels.

The circular configurations that run throughout the piece are a trademark image for the artist. “I have worked with these patterns from the beginning. They are very important, basic, strong determinants in my work, but they will be interpreted differently by different people,” he said. “To me this is just straight abstract art, but the general audience tends to look for associations. One guy who saw the work said, ‘Oh, water! It’s like when you throw a stone in water.’ Another friend of a more scientific bent reminded me that sources of power radiate similar patterns.”

As for the color, it has nothing to do with the Blue Line. Instead, blue is Eatherton’s most-favored hue. The panels that consist of points of light remain a constant blue, but some points shine more brightly than others. The concentric circles, on the other hand, change from blue to white about a quarter of the time on a random basis. These variations were designed to heighten long-term interest in an artwork that commuters will see repeatedly, he said.

“Unity” was selected for production last September from a field of six finalists, who had been chosen from more than 100 applicants. While Eatherton’s is the only ART project so far to have been selected in a national competition, the other artists’ commissions now in progress have also been awarded through a lengthy process.

For each commission, a five-person panel (including an artist, a community member and art professionals) reviews hundreds of works that have been filed in a slide registry. The panel selects 15 or more to study in depth. When an existing station is being “retrofitted” with art, as on the Blue Line, three artists are invited to submit detailed proposals, Cusick said. When artists are being selected to work with architects on station designs, five or six artists are asked to present proposals. Final selections are made from these short lists.

In the meantime, artists tour the community surrounding the station and receive a printed profile of the neighborhood, developed by a community advisory board. The idea is to help artists relate their work to its location and to set up lines of communication so people who live and work in the area understand the process and have an opportunity to satisfy their curiosity about the art. A series of public meetings is held prior to selecting art for a Metro Rail station. In addition, Cusick cheerfully seeks opportunities to talk about the program at business luncheons, homeowner associations, Elks Club gatherings and PTA meetings, where she solicits participation from people who will use the stations.

“People tend to think of a public art project in terms of a single artist, but no public project gets built without a lot of people,” Cusick said. And that takes time, but she believes the investment is well worth the trouble.

“I really do believe that if you are doing something for the public, the public should be involved. Contemporary art is thought to be too difficult to understand, but that is rarely the case if information and avenues to access are provided. The best way is to talk to the artist,” Cusick said. People generally want to know if the art is really intended for them, but the only questions she has received about wasting money on art have come from politicians, she said.

The Los Angeles County Transportation Commission allocates one half of 1% of the construction cost of the 150-mile rail system for the Art for Rail Transit program. When artists are included at the design phase, they can stretch their budgets by incorporating some of their ideas into the original construction. Private donations can also boost the artists’ spending power.

Eatherton’s project--which Cusick calls one of the program’s “show stoppers”--cost about $345,000, including a $40,000 grant from Pacific Enterprises. Other works along the Blue Line, commissioned by Robin Brailsford, Mark Lere and Sandra Rowe, average about $60,000 apiece, she said.

Costs can vary from station to station depending on the size and design of the facility. Most artworks being developed for the Green Line, which runs from Norwalk to El Segundo, have budgets of about $85,000. But Carl Cheng’s imaginative project for the Marine Avenue station has won $458,000 from the Redondo Beach City Council and $100,000 from TRW. Cheng has designed a sort of underwater space station, combining metaphors of the city’s past and future.

Other artists selected to provide art for the Green Line are Meg Cranston, ErikaRothenberg, Richard Turner, Charles Dickson, Daniel Martinez and Renee Petropoulos. Their concepts cover a wide range, including Martinez’s 30-foot metal hand shooting a paper airplane with a rubber band, at the El Segundo station near Los Angeles International Airport. Charles Dickson took some of his cues from the name of his station, Mariposa, the Spanish term for a blue butterfly indigenous to the area. Images of butterflies and metamorphoses will mingle with references to the computer industry in his ambitious work.

The Red Line, which will run from Union Station to the San Fernando Valley, has a roster of 18 artists. Cynthia Carlson, Christopher Sproat and Terry Schoonhoven will produce pieces at Union Station; Jonathan Borofsky at the Civic Center station; Stephen Antonakos at Pershing Square; Joyce Kozloff and Roberto Gil-de-Montes at 7th and Flower streets.

Therman Statom, Aleksandra Kasuba, Peter Shire, Frank Romero and Richard Wyatt are working on stations along Wilshire Boulevard. George Stone, Robert Millar and Michael Davis will produce works for Vermont Avenue stations, while May Sun, Gilbert Lujan and Sheila Klein will be represented at Hollywood Boulevard stops.

Cusick arrived on the job about two years ago, and she admits that progress appears to be rather slow. But that’s because most of the work has been done out of the public eye--in downtown offices and neighborhoods. It took six months to form ART’s policy and get it adopted. From there, the program has gone full steam ahead, laying the groundwork for art projects that will pop up in rail stations all over town.

When will the next work be installed? “I don’t know,” she said. And, given the pitfalls of building public transportation and the complexities of public art, she’s not about to hazard a guess.