[Art_beyond_sight_learning_tools] art and christmas lights

[Lisa Yayla]

Hi,
Best wishes to you all in the coming New Year. Enclosed 5 articles, 
links to articles first with text following.
Best regards,
Lisa

links

http://www.democratandchronicle.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051225/LIVING/512250311/-1/ARCHIVE3

http://www.fayettevillenc.com/article?id=221731

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/183804/1/.html

http://www.newsday.com/features/printedition/longislandlife/ny-vitalsigns4552671dec18,0,5416625.story?coll=ny-lilife-print

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/22/AR2005122201845.html

article 1

Visually impaired youngsters find creative touch

Stuart Low

Staff writer

(December 25, 2005) — In a Village Gate classroom, five youngsters run 
their hands through a colorful jumble of foam hearts, shells and 
marbles. Their fingers eagerly sift through shapes and textures that 
their eyes can barely make out.

"Try any of them!" urges Shannon Halligan, an art therapist at Village 
Gate's Sage Arts Center. "Each feels a little bit different. You're 
going to design a tile using these pieces."

Josh Watson, a Gates pupil wearing a Spider Spider-Man T-shirt, daubs a 
few shells with Elmer's Glue-All. Peering intently through thick 
wire-rimmed glasses, he arranges the shells in bold geometric shapes on 
a tile.

Nearby, four other blind or visually impaired children experiment with 
paint and spools of tape. Like 13-year-old Josh, they are pioneers in a 
new program launched by the local Association for the Blind and Visually 
Impaired- – Goodwill.

ABVI spokesman Timothy Gleason says that the Creative Vision Program 
"allows a child to understand art beyond the use of sight ... as a guide 
for self-expression." That may seem an ambitious goal, but the 
organizers insist it's well within reach.

"Art is always thought of as a visual medium," says program coordinator 
Sarah Favro, an ABVI children's specialist. "But even if children's 
vision is limited, they still can create art. And they can get the 
satisfaction of building something of their own."

She speaks from experience. Nearly blind herself, she can perceive light 
but not shapes. She believes that the new hands-on course will give 
youngsters improved motor coordination, concentration and self-confidence.

The materials used are largely tactile. Children make prints by rubbing 
crayons over textured designs, build puppets and construct plaster masks.

The materials and two art therapists hired from Sage Arts are funded 
through a $5,000 grant from the local Dorothea Haus Ross Foundation. The 
seven youngsters — all clients of ABVI — are 3 to 17 years old and 
travel from Monroe, Wayne and Orleans counties.

They can enroll in three free courses, each meeting for six 1½-hour 
sessions over three months. Topics include art and self-expression, 
learning about artists and art based on nature.

article 2

Art classes teach visually impaired students

By Nomee Landis

Staff writer

4 Photos

Staff photos by David Smith

Winnie Kucas looks closely at a painting by her teacher, Kim Cowger, 
during class at the Vision Resource Center on Monday morning. A 
bacterial infection made her completely blind in her left eye, while 
complications from a cornea transplant left her legally blind in her 
right eye. Below, Kim Cowger guides Levon Harris, who is blind, during a 
painting class .

Timmy Smith has never seen the ocean.

He does not know what water looks like or how drifting clouds brighten a 
sunset.

Smith has been blind since birth.

But he painted a picture on Monday with a blue ocean and a colorful sky. 
Art teacher Kim Cowger helped him.

“Timmy, are you ready for this today?” Cowger asked. “We’re going to the 
beach.”

She taped a paintbrush to his canvas, at the horizon line, so Smith 
could distinguish between his sky and his sea. She dipped his paintbrush 
in deep blue paint and placed it in his hand.

He had already finished the sky. He painted ocean with sweeping strokes, 
side to side. He kept his left hand on the paintbrush taped to the canvas.

Once a week, Cowger works with students at the Vision Resource Center in 
the Lions Club building off Rowan Street. All of them are blind or 
nearly blind. Most of them are seniors. Some, like Smith, are younger 
but disabled.

For three years, the Seniors Call to Action Team has offered the 
classes, said Bob White, president of the nonprofit group. They allow 
disabled people to get out in the community, to meet other people and to 
learn something new.

Together, they create works of art, respectable paintings that seeing 
folks would never know were painted by those who cannot see.

A grant from the Arts Council of Fayetteville/ Cumberland County, 
combined with matching funds from the action team, have supported the 
program for the last three years, White said.

Two similar classes are offered for Hispanic people who speak little 
English and for poor minority seniors, White said.

On Monday, John Denver Christmas songs sang out from the boom box as the 
artists worked on their paintings. A slight smell of oil paint lingered. 
They sat in folding metal chairs around a long table.

They all painted the same scene, but each work was unique. Cowger helped 
here and there, filling in bare spots in her students’ seas.

Frances Cooper dabbed blue paint onto her canvas. She could not see her 
pink and purple sky or the perfect clouds. She can distinguish light 
from dark, she said, but she can no longer see colors.

Cooper, who worked for years as an accountant, is losing her sight to 
macular degeneration. “I’m thankful,” Cooper said. “The Lord has left me 
enough to be able to get around.”

Art is new to Cooper. “I don’t know much about art. This is my first 
experience. We’re at the beach today. Last week we were at the mountains.”

Frank Dallas, a retired Army lieutenant colonel stood before his easel, 
looking intently at his canvas. His hands shook, a symptom of 
Parkinson’s disease. He gripped the easel with his left hand. With his 
right, he dabbed yellow paint where his sky was appearing.

When his eyes were good and his hands less shaky, he used to be a 
woodcarver, Dallas said. He whittled all sorts of songbirds and 
beautiful crosses. He painted in oils, too, and taught Cowger when she 
was just starting out.

Cowger teaches at Fayetteville Technical Community College and at 
Michael’s Arts & Crafts stores. She teaches an oil painting technique 
called wet on wet that was popularized by Bob Ross, the artist who is 
the star of the show the “Joy of Painting” on public television.

Before they painted on blue, each student brushed white paint onto the 
canvas first, part of the technique.

Levon Harris is another student in Cowger’s class.

“Levon, you know where your paintbrush is,” Cowger asked him. “Take that 
brush and scrub it in hard. All right, Levon, go down. Let me pick up 
some more paint for you. Don’t forget the right side of your canvas.”

Harris said he remembers what sky and sea look like. He can imagine. But 
when he could see, he “couldn’t draw a straight line.”

Cooper said something about sand. She thought there would be sand. 
Cowger said no, just pretty water.

Still water? Cooper wanted to know. Calm water?

“Well, honey, we’re going to put some waves in there.”

Cooper called across the table to Smith. “Ok, Timmy, how much are you 
going to charge for yours?”

He just laughed.

Bob White said the Seniors Call to Action Team has received another 
grant for $2,400 that will take the art program into another year. They 
want to expand the program and eventually turn it over to the Vision 
Resource Center. He said the action team depends on community support to 
provide the matching money that is required to receive the grant money 
from the Arts Council.

Donations may be sent to Seniors Call to Action Team, P.O. Box 1745, 
Fayetteville, NC 28302.

On a recent morning, they pass around a mask made by Macedon student 
Brandon Packard. It bears a flashy image of rocker Phil Collins, whose 
early hits are playing on the classroom CD player.

"Listen to that! It's the first Genesis album in which Collins sang," 
announces Brandon, 17. "Really great. Before that, he mostly played drums."

His pep rally seems lost on his classmate Teale Bradley. She decorates 
two large marbles as her mother, Ellie, talks to her in sign language.

Embracing an overstuffed Winnie-the-Pooh doll, Teale seems exceptionally 
high-spirited. But she packs into her 7 years a harrowing history of 
medical setbacks. She has a hearing loss and is blind on the ?????/maa – 
change to 'can't see from the right side of both eyes' or right side of 
both eyes.

"She was born dead, but after seven minutes doctors resuscitated her," 
says Ellie, a Pittsford resident. "She has cerebral palsy, epilepsy and 
can use only her left arm."

None of that slows Teale down.

"I go to gymnastics with Mommy!" she shouts. This first-grader at 
Thornell Road Elementary School also enjoys bowling, ice skating and 
horseback riding.

Ellie believes that the arts program works well for Teale — and it has 
little to do with masks and ceramic tiles.

"She's had great social interaction and met new people," she says. "The 
teachers are very patient and understanding. Teale has behavior problems 
and can get angry and frustrated."

The teachers say that a lively social experience is one of their goals 
for the whole class.

"We really encourage the kids to interact," says Halligan. "We pass 
around objects for everybody to touch and pair kids up to work together."

She and fellow teacher Trish Pellegrino trained at ABVI this fall to 
prepare for the Creative Vision Program. They used distorted goggles to 
simulate visual disorders that their students live with.

Though unique in its focus on children, the program has one local 
forerunner. For seven years, the Memorial Art Gallery ran classes 
teaching blind and vision-impaired adults how to make and appreciate art.

That program disbanded three years ago, but one component remains. Blind 
visitors can still touch selected pieces of art with gloves, touring the 
museum with audio guides. The museum's library also has textured 
diagrams of art from ancient Greece to European modernism.

"We'd certainly welcome visitors from the ABVI program," says Susan 
Dodge-Peters Daiss, the gallery's education director.

The youngsters hope to make a field trip to the museum this spring. But 
first, they'll create more masks, murals and mobiles at Village Gate.

"Want to do this again, Josh?" Halligan asks as the boy puts away a 
glue-smeared brush.

article 3

Photos at exhibition converted into tactile displays for the visually 
impaired

By Jason Tan, Channel NewsAsia


SINGAPORE : The visually impaired are now able to enjoy the "Earth from 
Above" photographs on display along Orchard Road.

The photos have been converted into tactile displays with captions in 
Braille, in a first ever exhibition called "Touch and See", organised 
solely for the blind.

French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand wanted to share his vision with 
all people, including the visually impaired, and eyewear designer Alain 
Mikli helped make it happen.

Mr Mikli said, "I like to share with everybody especially with blind 
people...because always we forget them...they cannot see really all the 
pictures, but at least they have a sensation, at least they have a 
feeling, at least we can communicate with them, and that to me, that's 
the most important thing."

Visually impaired artist Victor Tan said, "There are two ways I felt I 
experienced the work. First just by touching the tactile image itself I 
feel is a piece of art, the feeling, the tactile, the flow, the 
movement, the line, the strokes, I think it's a masterpiece. Followed by 
the descriptions that were given to me, I started to realise and 
identify what those signs and symbols represent in the image that was 
taken by the photographer."

The exhibition is open 24 hours daily till January 17. - CNA/ms

article 4

WHAT A LIFE

Artist learns to paint with a lens

BY ELLEN YAN

December 18, 2005

Suddenly blind in one eye, landscape painter Robert Ketcham thought his 
art career was about over. And just as he was working on canvases for an 
upcoming exhibition.

Then a camera's zoom lens took over for his right eye.


Ketcham, 78, has found that painting by photos is a way to win out over 
macular degeneration, an incurable eye disease. With his Canon camera, 
he zooms in on portions of the scenery, such as the lake behind his East 
Marion home, and snaps photographs to make a big collage of one scene. 
The lens captures a visual depth of field that was robbed from him when 
his right eye started bleeding two months ago.

"I rely totally on this lens," said the artist, a retired sign painter 
whose impressionist landscapes have sold for about $600 each. "It's 
given me a great boost in being able to get back to the natural world 
again."

Ketcham got his zoom lens with help from the New York Foundation for the 
Arts. Since 1994, the foundation has doled out $1 million in Strategic 
Opportunities Stipend (SOS) grants of up to $600 through local art 
councils, paying for immediate needs that could transform an opportunity 
into a sale or career advancement.

"I tried to find a way to continue with my work after I got my wits 
together," he said. "I said to myself, 'I can't see. Perhaps if I got a 
zoom lens, it would bring the distance in clearly.' And it did."

Ketcham applied two months ago for $440 for a 200mm lens and recently 
began taking photos.

"The thing that makes SOS so unique is it's a small amount of money at 
an opportune time, and it only takes two months to get it," said 
Penelope Dannenberg, the foundation's director of programs. "Everything 
is attached to a concrete opportunity. It's about advancing their whole 
career or a portion of their career that is new to them."

The program has paid for other, less traditional artist needs, from a 
truck rental to haul sculpting material to a return ticket for an opera 
singer, whose scholarship from an opera company in Moscow came with only 
a one-way ticket.

Life before the zoom lens had been dark for Ketcham. Not even harsh 
sunlight penetrates his right eye.

Once, when the doctor covered his good eye for a moment, the world went 
black.

Another time, when the sun was shining and he was taking a walk in East 
Marion, the stress became so much that his good eye went out, too.

"I stood there in complete darkness," he recalled. "It struck me so 
fast. Gradually, my vision came back, a little step at a time. I spoke 
to my eye doctor about that and she said it happens to quite a few 
people under stress."

The progression of Ketcham's eye disease can be seen in his paintings. A 
lakeside scene of empty white lawn chairs, painted before his disease, 
shows light and tree shadow and the opposite shore. One done about 18 
months ago, when his right eye began failing, highlights two beach-goers 
under bright umbrellas, but the shoreline and blue waters need a little 
more depth. One from this year, which depicts water rushing over rocks, 
looks flat to him.

Ketcham plans to start painting from his photos soon. He's sure the lens 
will bring the light and depth back to his art. He will show one work at 
the East End Arts Council Gallery members' exhibit Jan. 13-Feb. 11.

"Never give up," he said. "Better than sitting in the closet."

article 5

Christmas Lights, Overdone Just Right

Va. Artist Exalts in Tackiness

By Brigid Schulte

Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, December 23, 2005; B01

The white icicle lights came first, delicate and twinkly on her garden 
apartment balcony. They were so pretty, she bought more. The icicles 
turned into manic sheets of brilliance, like after an avalanche. Then 
came the colors: blues, pinks, purples, greens. Then the computerized 
LED lights. Then the fiber-optic Christmas tree with the stuffed 
tarantula on top. Then the glowing pink palm tree.

Llori Stein couldn't stop.

Stein's Christmas balcony disaster -- her words -- is now so ugly, in 
fact, that the Falls Church deck appears on the Web site 
uglychristmaslights.com, which documents people who "have no sense of 
decency in how they choose to celebrate." And it's featured in the 
latest planetchristmas.com book, which bills itself as "a delight for 
all connoisseurs of bad taste."

"It's not hard to create an ugly display. All you have to do is get 
carried away," Stein, 36, says proudly. "I look like Christmas 
regurgitated all over my balcony."

What else would you expect from a legally blind underground artist with 
tattoos of her husband on her arm, a dragon on her bosom and a peacock 
on her bum who once ran a, uh, "literary" magazine called Wormfeast?

"There are very few displays that look that good. And if they look that 
good, it's kinda boring," she says. "When I see Christmas lights, I want 
to laugh."

She's thought of creating a crown of lighted thorns over a silver disco 
ball and a whacked-out Mr. Bean nativity scene; not wanting to offend, 
she settled for a wig and sunglasses on the glittery ball. And now if 
only she could cram an outdoor grill on the 12-square-foot balcony along 
with the rest of the mess and cook up hot dogs and hamburgers. "I'd love 
to be out there and say to everybody who comes by: 'Have a free hot dog. 
Here, catch.' "

It's the kind of out-there Snoopy's doghouse Christmas concoction that 
could send Martha Stewart and her understated garlands right over the edge.

It's not that Stein considers her balcony a work of art. "Nah -- if it 
were art, I'd probably do something with noise, something that would 
attract even more attention. Like an exploding star."

Nor is it that she's particularly religious.

And it's not that she really meant to create something ugly. But when 
you're 5-foot-2 and nearly blind and all you've got is a coat hanger and 
a pair of rusty old surgical hemostats to hang up your lights with, 
things can end up looking a bit haphazard.

Once she got started last year, the urge to decorate overtook her. "I 
wouldn't call it an obsession. Maybe an affliction." She finds herself 
reading the personal blogs of the similarly possessed -- even people who 
confess of marriages falling apart because they couldn't help themselves 
with the Christmas lights. In that department, so far, she's safe. Her 
husband, Gregory Bryant, another artist who works at the National Air 
and Space Museum on the Mall to pay the bills, loves it -- especially 
her idea of mixing lights and sound.

"I think it's wonderful," Bryant, 52, says as he squeezes between the 
mix of real and fake plants, waterfalls, hanging beads and strings of 
lights that crowd the small apartment, awaiting their moment in the 
spotlight. He launches into a discussion of the Dadaists and 
synesthesia, or art that mixes the senses, like tasting color. "They 
were talking about that in the '20s," he says. "It's exciting to see 
that happening now and that Llori's a part of that."

Stein nods solemnly. "Yeah, like for me, when there's too much noise, it 
tastes like battery acid."

Matt Phillips, aka Santa, runs the uglychristmaslights.com Web site. 
Most of the photos on the site -- tangled displays of Christmas lights; 
blinding rows of inflatable snowmen, Santas, nutcrackers, toy soldiers, 
SpongeBobs and Scooby-Doos lined up like the Usual Suspects; neon 
juggling monkeys; armies of elves and grazing reindeer -- are taken by 
anonymous guerrilla photographers out on the prowl for Christmas on 
steroids.

"Some of these things, you just have to wonder what people are 
thinking," Phillips said.

But Stein submitted her own photo -- she even posed in the Christmas 
jacket she made by poking blue LED lights through the sleeves of a black 
jacket. (Her cane, with gold tinsel and colored lights snaking up its 
length, was out of sight.)

Rose Reed, who has managed and lived at Lee Square Apartments for nearly 
20 years, said she's never seen anything quite like Stein's balcony. 
Only one person's ever complained that it looks tacky. "Most people are 
anxious to see what she'll do next," Reed said.

Stein's reasons for creating what she calls her own Christmas horror are 
fairly simple. It's fun. And growing up, back in the days of big, fat, 
colored Christmas lights, stringy tinsel and plastic Santas, her 
grandmother and everyone on their street used to joyfully and garishly 
light up the neighborhood this time of year. She misses that.

But mainly, when she lost the ability to see, brought on by a stroke and 
malignant hypertension, Christmas lights became the only hedge against 
darkness. "The illumination is really about the only thing I can see 
anymore."

So let Llori Stein, the underground artist who believes that anything 
and everything is art, dream a perfect Christmas dream. In her mind, she 
sees a nice little house with rolling hills and trees around it. The 
house has a library, a Jacuzzi and a studio where she and Bryant can, in 
her words, evacuate all their emotions into something tangible. They'd 
sit around listening to Beethoven or Richard Pryor, drinking homemade 
wine and laughing.

She'd have synthetic Christmas trees in every room. And outside, a 
gigantic purple Christmas tree. And a kind of magic wonderland in the 
yard with tons of lights that would look like little UFO eggs.

"I'd definitely go overboard," she says, her voice faraway in a private 
Christmas paradise. "I'm sure it would definitely be ugly."