"Twenty-four hours around the clock we are funneled through a highly controlled space," Christo says with a thick, somewhat demanding accent. "Somebody designed the sidewalk, roadway, even airway. It was designed by politicians and property owners who are often insensitive to that space."

We are in a large, brown, modest room with sketches of both yellow and blue umbrellas on the walls. A small library of Christo's projects faces me. A yellow-dotted topographical map fills a corner. Behind me, a window looks onto the unpruned foliage behind the project offices in Gorman.

"You need to look when you walk when the umbrellas are installed or you'll trip," he laughs gently, his eyes darting over the top rim of his glasses. "You have to adjust yourself, and by doing that you re-evaluate the space that's there."

As a boy growing up in communist Bulgaria during World War II, Christo had first-hand experience adjusting himself and reevaluating his environment. The government ordered the farmers where he lived to stack their hay just so, and park their combines, tractors and other farm equipment in view of the passing Orient Express. Such was the propaganda intended to impress onlookers with Bulgaria's prosperity and vigor. Christo "hated" it, but admits that it greatly developed not only his sense of aesthetics, but also his ability to understand and communicate. Since many of the artists who influenced him from that time were either killed for their ideas, or acquiesced and became proletariat puppets, Christo learned quickly the relationship between listening, communicating, environment and creativity.

"There they are," the photographer smiled, pointing to the horizon. On the next hill over, the silhouette of seven people spilled out of a van. They were, I was told, one of 90 "crews" charged with opening 27 umbrellas each. Decked in special staff tee-shirts, hiking or military boots, hard-hats, and attached to gallon jugs reading "potable water", fire extinguishers and wrenches, the crew approached us in a purposeful trot. Once they reached their first target, each member knew, as if by instinct, what to do. And they did it with toothy grins that highlighted the yellow and blue stripes painted Indian style across their cheeks.
 

"I love to work with people who like to work," Christo says with the reflection of the back yard embossed on his glasses. "I like very much their energy and I try to create projects that relate doer behavior."

There's plenty of that in Japan and the US which is one reason he chose these counties for the Umbrellas. But Christo also wanted to show the contrast in how the landscape looks and is used.

"It's really my most complex work in the way it's dealing with physicality," he explains. "The umbrellas carry a tremendous interplay between memory and reality. You are sitting under a yellow one, and it's only half of it. You know one thousand miles away there are blue umbrellas, the other half." He fluidly uncrosses then recrosses his legs. "In Japan, the configuration of the umbrellas and the whole project is very different. It's controlled, restricted and regimented space in Japan. The umbrellas are intimate and saturated together there because when you have 124 million people on only 8% of the land, you do much different things with the land."