Colette Miller
the Creator of wings
By ELLEN LIU
Anyone who has been to Los Angeles would recognize these wings, human-sized, rose-colored, painted in all corners of the city. These wings are mostly by the hand of Colette Miller, who also created the Global Angel Wings Project in 2012, which originated from Los Angeles, the City of Angels.
Living in LA, Colette has been driving around LA. She often sees blank walls an canvases, and she would project what she wanted to see on those walls. During 2012, Colette kept seeing angle wings, that represented white light, “to me, maybe they were enlightenment, maybe I was trying to enlighten myself.” The artist soon decided to put them on the street so that everyone can see them and be reminded of their true self.
“Life is very confusing, people go through many difficulties and challenges, but we can always be reminded of the who we truly are and the divine of humanity.” The wings are mostly in the color of violets and blues as they are the colors of meditation, and the artist chose these colors because she believes that people need more self-contemplation about the choices we make.
Colette was doing the wings illegally at first, and she couldn’t even sign her name “I had my friend doing lookout when I painted the wings, we were scared of those bicycle cops.” But not long after that, Colette’s work received immediate and spontaneous responses from people of all sorts and backgrounds, even the mayor candidates in 2013 took pictures with the wings as a part of their campaign.
It seems that the city have fully embraced the unique street art culture. According to the artist, the city’s brave characteristic is not the only reason for this unique openness, the city’s infrastructure is also very cohesive with the painting of murals, it is full of architectures built in the 70s, the walls and buildings are the perfect canvases for murals.
After widely know for her work, Colette has been invited to paint her wings all over the world. Her work can be found in Kenya, Australia, England, Japan, China, and more. The artist said she hoped to do more wings in areas like Israel and Palestine so that they could bring pause to people and remind them of the humanity within all of us through this unifying art piece in concept.
“Life is very confusing, people go through a lot of difficulties and challenges, but we can be always reminded of who we truly are, and the divine of humanity.”
