Thousand butterflies to help lift Detroit, muralist Chazz Miller says

Artist Chazz Miller is hoping his butterflies will lift the city up. By the end of summer, he hopes to have painted 1,000 butterflies throughout the city for a project he calls the Papillion Effect.

Excerpt from the Detroit News:

It's a butterfly release of grand proportions. Literally, 1,000 of them by summer's end. Sounds pretty daunting, especially once you realize we're not talking about delicate flying monarchs, but 4- to 5-foot-wide plywood cutouts painted kaleidoscopically by Detroit artist Chazz Miller and a host of young volunteers.

Miller has dubbed his project the Papillon Effect -- papillon is French for butterfly.

"I thought Detroit needed a psychological readjustment," Miller said. "I mean, when you look at a caterpillar you would never imagine a caterpillar is going to turn into a butterfly. And when you look at Detroit, you never imagine Detroit is going to come up off its knees.
"It's a great metaphor for me to see Detroit as a butterfly -- a papillon -- to re-emerge."

The process works like this: Volunteers cut donated plywood into butterfly shapes, seal and prime them. Then Miller and volunteer artists draw designs on them with crayon so anyone with a brush -- regardless of talent -- can fill them in with psychedelic color. Miller can't seem to resist going over each one, adding details and shading.

Read the entire article here.