Under the watchful, compound eyes of West Main Street’s colorful dragonfly sculptures, the Spokane husband and wife artist team of Tom Askman and Lea Ann Lake sweated Friday’s blazing sun to splash life and color into ghostly images of insects sandblasted into the concrete.

A squinting Askman assessed his handiwork as he daubed concrete paint into one of the dragonflies.

“I am very pleased with how all this has all turned out” said Askman, an art professor at Eastern Washington University. “Dragonflies are such fascinating creatures.”

Lake, working nearby under the protective shade of an umbrella, explained what she was doing.

“We sandblasted them, then we acid etched them, then we primed them, then we stained them with concrete stain and then we will seal them,” she said. “We are caressing these dragonflies because they are so precious.”

The couple’s five dragonfly sculptures, perched on 15-foot-high stalks of steel bamboo, went up earlier this year, three static between D and H Streets Northwest and two built to turn with the wind near the Interurban trail crossing.

The artists’ idea all along has been to complement the future Auburn Environmental Park taking shape in wetlands to the north and provide a fun introduction to the city.

Their work is the artistic component of a series of improvements to West Main Street that began in 2007 to overlay the street surface, replace damaged curbs, gutters and sidewalks, create bike lanes, replace existing street lighting, improve storm drainage and water main facilities, removing existing trees and plant new ones and build an 11-stall parking lot on F Street Northwest.

The Auburn City Council asked the 12-member Auburn Arts Commission two years ago if it could integrate a public art component into these improvements and the answer was yes. The contract was for $30,000.

The entire project is called Tobu Bo, Japanese for flying pole, which is the expression for dragonfly.

“Dragonflies are also just a great creature,” Askman said. “They are fun to look at. There are more than 300 species of dragonflies, and each one has a unique coloration, just like fish.

“So they represent so much of what nature is in its rich diversity. We thought there was something about what that represents to wetlands and trails.”