MTA Tracks Down Artists to Beautify Rail Routes : Transit: Eighty have been hired--and many more will be needed--to decorate commuter lines. Applicants must be able to think big and put up with the project’s red tape.

She is more comfortable with scissors than with jackhammers. And definitely more at home with a sheaf of paper than a column of concrete.

So why has Beth Thielen put aside the exquisitely detailed handmade books that she creates to spend a year working along a grimy rail line between Los Angeles and Pasadena?

Because there’s an art to thinking big.

There’s also an art to convincing watercolorists, pottery makers and other craftspeople that their work can be converted to something wall-size and industrialized, officials trying to spruce up transit lines are discovering.

Commuter system planners are fanning out through artists’ colonies across Los Angeles in search of talent. Eighty artists have been hired to decorate subway stations and passenger platforms so far. Dozens more will be needed for projects further down the track.

Applicants need to have an eye for aesthetics. And a stomach for red tape.

For openers, their work must be sturdy enough to last “at least 25 years,” require “minimum maintenance” and be “resistant to graffiti and vandalism.”

To be hired, artists must pass muster with a five-member screening committee made up of art critics, curators and art educators.

Then their ideas have to satisfy an eight-person advisory panel consisting of homeowners, business operators and special interest groups near proposed subway stations or light-rail passenger platforms.

Finally, they must promise to work nearly full time for a year with station architects. And collaborate closely with engineers and builders--the ones who have a final say whether proposed artwork can actually be installed.

Money for art on commuter lines comes from a tiny fraction (0.05%) of each station’s construction budget. That totals about $50,000 for a typical Blue Line trolley station--an amount that must cover the cost of materials and the work’s installation as well as the artist’s commission.

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The beautification effort is being administered by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority through an office it calls ART--short for Art for Rail Transit.

The 5-year-old program’s first projects are proving to be a showcase of the diversity of Los Angeles, said Maya Emsden, ART’s head.

There are murals, mannequins and mosaics at the first five Red Line subway stations Downtown. More modest art displays are being installed at Blue Line platforms between Los Angeles and Long Beach and along the new Green Line to El Segundo.

Carl Cheng, a Santa Monica artist who normally works in glass, is incorporating a satellite dish that will “beam down information for waiting passengers to look at” at a station near an El Segundo electronics plant, Emsden said.

Multimedia artist Daniel Martinez, who works in the Downtown loft district, has designed a 30-foot hand holding a “paper plane” made of aluminum for a Green Line trolley station near the Hughes aerospace plant, she said.

Artists Kim Yasada and Torgen Johnson, a team known for gallery installations of sand and water, have created a tile image of a nearby tree for the Green Line’s Vermont Avenue station in the Athens area. The pair have also commissioned local poets to write a poem that will be embedded in bronze letters in the station’s wall and floor.

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Ceramic artist Bill Attaway of Venice has executed a series of eight-foot-tall pots specially engineered to be earthquake safe to serve as a gateway to the Metrolink rail station in Pomona.

Handmade-book artist Thielen says she used her experience in crafting pop-up paper pages to design the five images she will place on bridges and retaining walls along the planned Los Angeles-Pasadena trolley line.

“Even though my art is very small--you open a page and see a form--it can read like a public sculpture if it’s enlarged,” explained Thielen, of Pasadena. “You translate paper that’s six inches tall into metal that’s six feet tall and there it is.”

But concrete will be the medium for her visions of a red-tailed hawk, a pronghorn antelope, a mountain arroyo, an oak tree and a Gabrielino Indian. The figures, up to 14 feet wide, will be embossed at intervals in concrete as the walls and bridge supports are cast in place.

Thielen said she made about 50 sketches of the Native American figure in consultation with Vera Rocha, a chief of the Gabrielinos. Her encounters with other local groups along the trolley line and with project designers have also been positive, Thielen said.

But other artists have had rocky times with architects that the MTA has teamed them up with, acknowledged Emsden. The design process takes a year. And during that time the artist has to be in the architect’s office up to five days a week.

“The architect is required to provide space in the office for the artist. But don’t imagine you’ll get this beautiful space with windows. It doesn’t happen,” Emsden told artists who gathered the other day in East Los Angeles to learn about the program.

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Both architects and artists typically have big egos, she said. But both take a back seat to rail project engineers: “In the end, engineers rule the project, making sure it’s earthquake-proof and within budget,” Emsden pointed out.

The East Los Angeles meeting was the first of a series of MTA-artist sessions that will also take place in Koreatown, Highland Park, Watts and Santa Monica. Tomas Benitez, an Eastside artist who has served on past MTA artist-selection panels, urged the 35 artists on hand to let their imaginations soar.

“You’ll cut yourself off if you don’t know how to conceptualize how your batik or paper sculpture can work in a station,” he counseled.

The idea didn’t seem worth the effort to some. But others promised to apply for a commuter line commission.

“I’d be able to get the ego thing out of the way,” said Ricardo Mendoza, a muralist whose studio is in the loft district. “The big scale is interesting. And I want to take murals out of their traditional two-dimensional form.”

Count her in too, said loft artist Lynn Koniecki, whose specialty is handmade paper.

Molding techniques that she uses can be applied to concrete, she said. “The idea seems intimidating at first. But the translation is possible.”

On paper, at least.