[Art_beyond_sight_learning_tools] gardens, artists, Monet, game commentary

[Lisa Yayla]

subjects:Grand Rapid's gardens and art, 2 artist N.H. Association of the 
Blind, music transcribed from genes and proteins, Staunton scented 
garden,Monet, artist and teacher, game commentary
http://www.mlive.com/entertainment/grpress/index.ssf?/base/features-1/117871852198450.xml&coll=6
Gardens' open house makes art more accessible
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
The Grand Rapids Press
GRAND RAPIDS TOWNSHIP -- Sometimes a wheelchair can indulge artistic 
urges in ways a paintbrush can only dream.
Curious to know how?
Then come out Saturday when Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park 
hosts Anybody Can Day, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. The community open house 
will feature cultural programs for those with disabilities, including 
specially equipped wheelchairs in which people can paint.
Last year's Anybody Can Day drew about 100 people, said Heidi Holst, 
curator of art education. She expects a bigger crowd Saturday.
"Last year, we we're trying it out to see how it would work," Holst 
said. "We found different ways to get the word out earlier, and I'm sure 
the end result will be many more people."
Audio recordings will explain the garden's sculptures, enabling visually 
impaired and blind visitors to tour the grounds independently with a 
global positioning system, Holst said.
Interpreters will be available for deaf and hearing impaired participants.
Touching will be encouraged as well. Visitors will be allowed to feel 
the curvature of the garden's sculptures, experience the prickly 
sensation of a cactus spine and breathe in the fragrance of a daylily.
"Our hope is to express our accessibility with some of those things we 
have at the garden," Holst said.
"We want to express to the community our commitment to accessibility for 
people with and without disabilities."
If you go
When: 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday with 11:30 a.m. musical performance by 
Michael and Elizabeth Kazmierski, 2006 Young Soloists of the Year by VSA 
arts of Michigan-Grand Rapids.
Where: Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, 1000 East Beltline 
Ave. NE.
Admission: Free.
http://www.sightcenter.com/about/news/2007/05/arts.php

http://www.seacoastonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070512/ENTERTAIN/705120301
Artists with the N.H. Association for the Blind exhibit work at library
N.H. Association for the Blind artists exhibit work at library

May 12, 2007 6:00 AM
Advancing independence for people who are blind and visually impaired. 
This is the mission statement of the N.H. Association of the Blind.
On Wednesday, May 9, the association held an arts exhibit at the 
Portsmouth Public Library. The two artists featured not only exhibited 
their art, they were living examples of the mission statement.

Vincente A. Paratore was born and grew up in Argentina. He came to the 
United States three times before he decided to make this his home, in 
1959. He now lives in Derry, but spent most of his years in this country 
in Cranston, R.I.

Paratore has been an artist since his youth. He spent time in Europe 
before deciding he loved New England best of all. He now has almost no 
vision, except for a little bit of light in his left eye. He has been 
without sight for 22 years, but this has not stopped him from painting, 
his art and passion. Yet, he also admits that he loves to cook and 
considers himself a gourmand.

"I learned to see the many, many, many shades of gray," Paratore said, 
"Lying on my bed and watching what light I could see, I was not 
dismayed. I saw so very much."

Paratore figured out to do his art. He uses clay, plasticine, to mold 
the shapes he wants and places the clay on a large piece of paper. Then 
he paints the background for his painting. He only uses four colors and 
mixes them. Each tube of acrylic paint has a wooden clothespin clipped 
on the bottom. He has put the letter of the color on each tube, raised, 
so that he can feel the letter to identify the color.

Then, he cuts inside the shapes of the clay that he has painted around. 
"These become my windows," he explained. After this, he paints the 
shapes through the "windows." Before painting the foreground objects, he 
paints the background for the painting. It sounded very complicated, but 
he demonstrated just how he does this at the exhibit The result? Beauty.

"I see with my inside mind," Paratore said. "I remember color."
Paratore uses a specially designed light box to mix his colors. "It is 
very exciting for me. I can see things and I have the memory." When he 
was living in Rhode Island, two professors from the Rhode Island School 
of Design came to see how he uses his light box to mix his colors. "It 
has a very strong light inside the box. The professors were so 
surprised. They told me they could feel the vibrations of the color I made."
"I can see everything in my head," Paratore said. "I have spent 22 years 
without vision and colors. I can see even better now, in my head and mind."

One of his favorite paintings on display is one of a man playing a 
saxophone in the foreground. There are explosions of color, like bubbles 
all around the musician. The painting seems to resonate with the sound 
of the saxophone. You can practically see the sound. He said it took him 
three months to do this painting.

"You don't need patience when you like doing something," Paratore said.

Another painting is awash in colors from pale rose to red, yet it is a 
seascape with a small boat with two people on it. In the background 
could be the coast of New Hampshire or Maine, but you know it's New 
England. This painting has been on the cover of Yankee magazine and in 
many other publications.

Paratore often bends down to pet his black lab seeing dog, Cabrina. "We 
are one together," Paratore said, "He is my head and I am the tail."

Anna Krebs of Stratham also exhibited art at the library.

"I like to think of myself as an artisan," said Krebs, smiling widely.

She makes quilts, both hand sown and machine sown, as well as dolls, 
fake candies and Christmas ornaments.

Krebs joked that her husband used to say of her "she's blind in one eye 
and can't see out of the other one." Before losing most of her vision, 
Krebs worked with her sister for many years as an artisan, selling their 
work to regional vendors.

"Thanks to the New Hampshire Association of the Blind," said Krebs, " I 
found new ways of doing things. I wasn't sure I could keep sewing, but I 
was wrong. I still do and it's all done with love."

Krebs said her quilts are no longer perfect, but she loves it. People 
understand this. Her dolls are all original and each one has its own 
unique sense of humor. Her bunny doll is holding a carrot with a bottle 
nipple at the end. The kitchen doll has a little wooden basket around 
its neck holding tiny wooden utensils.
All of the dolls Krebs make have a little white cane, symbolic of the 
blind person. She makes these from round chopsticks and paints each one 
to resemble the real cane.

"I make my dolls in threes," Krebs said, "this way if I make a mistake, 
I still have two left."

The quilts on display range in colors from the soft to the brilliant. 
Even the ones that are machine sewn are hand-tied. Krebs said she loves 
to quilt and can't imagine stopping this love just because she can't see 
much.

"Sewing is just so much fun," Krebs said. "I've been sewing since I was 
a very little girl."

Krebs' brand of humor comes out in her work. Her "fake" candy (made of 
felt) comes with its own paper shell and a little cardboard box. They 
look so real you don't know they are not until you pick them up. Really.

Last year at the N.H. Association for the Blind's Spooky Auction, a 
quilt that Krebs donated was sold for $450. "This was really great," 
Krebs said. "I was giving back something to an organization that is 
always helping me." Krebs' work as an artisan is mainly promoted by word 
of mouth and repeat customers.

George F. Theriault is the president and CEO of the N.H. Association for 
the Blind. He was at the exhibition and sharing with guests information 
about the organization.

"We don't charge for our services," Theriault said. "We have 58 
volunteers and six or seven are here today."

This marks the association's 95th year of service to N.H. blind and 
visually impaired. The organization began in 1911, founded by a blind 
woman, Emma Coolidge Weston.

"Our mission has not changed since then" said Theriault. "She wanted to 
prove that blind and visually impaired people could live and function 
independently. The first thing Weston did in 1911 was hold a public 
education fair, not unlike what we are doing today."


article
http://rawstory.com/news/afp/Sounds_of_science_push_the_boundari_05152007.html
Sounds of science push the boundaries of art
Published: Tuesday May 15, 2007

Best known for exploring the code of life, DNA scientists are also 
challenging the frontier of art, with music transcribed from genes and 
proteins.

Cell receptors, flawed genes that cause cancer, hormones, proteins 
linked to generative disease, DNA sequences from wild plants -- these 
are just some of the sources for one of the most unusual, if not the 
most natural, forms of music ever heard.

The way it works is this: the code for a gene or a protein is fed into a 
computer programme, which transcribes it into a sequence of notes.

What results is random and, everyone admits, hardly a threat to Bach or 
Beethoven. Protein music, in its present form, is repetitive and often 
banal, yet it can also be sometimes strange and haunting.

Linda Long, a biochemist-cum--musician and research fellow at Britain's 
University of Exeter, has compiled two CDs of music generated by 
proteins in herbs and the body.

She believes the music has therapeutic value for relaxation -- and can 
also connect to something deeper.

"Music is not limited by words or logic and so may communicate with us 
on deeper levels, freeing us to directly experience the essence of all 
living matter and giving us an insight into the voice of nature," Long 
suggests on her website.

Paternity of DNA music can arguably be traced to Susumu Ohno, a leading 
American scientist of Japanese descent.

In the 1980s, Ohno wrote an influential paper pointing out that 
repetition is the underlying structure in both musical composition and 
DNA. Could the genome, he wondered, also make music?

Early explorers, though, found deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) to be a 
pretty limiting musical molecule.

Between its interesting bits -- the nuggets of protein-coding genes -- 
are long, dreary, horribly repetitive stretches, sometimes called "junk" 
DNA, where nothing at all seems to happen.

Plus, DNA offers only four notes or combinations of them -- cytosine, 
guanine, adenine and thymine, the rungs of its double-helix ladder -- 
which is also musically limiting.

So researchers switched focus to a more flexible bio-music source: 
proteins, the myriad, complex molecules created by genes.

By assigning specific notes to each amino acid, the building blocks of 
proteins, composers found a wider range. The problem: proteins have 20 
amino acids, amounting to a two-and-a-half octave range that can make 
for jarring, unmelodic jumps.

Writing in the latest issue of the journal Genome Biology, Rie Takahashi 
and Jeffrey Miller of the University of California, Los Angeles, believe 
they have found a way around the jumpiness.

Instead of assigning a single note, they gave each amino acid a triad, a 
three-note chord. They also bent the rules slightly, by attributing to 
seven of the amino acids slight varations on chords used in the other 
13. For rhythm, they used triplets of DNA bases, called codons, in the 
gene that made the protein.

The "musicalised" proteins "sound mellow and jazzy," the British weekly 
New Scientist said appreciatively last week.

Some of the claims made for protein music leave others cold, however.

"To the casual listener, it doesn't matter very much whether the 
composer starts with random numbers, the Earth's magnetic field, DNA, or 
what have you," Dmitri Tymoczko, assistant professor of music at 
Princeton University, told AFP.

"... Virtually any sequence of numbers, or quantitative data more 
generally, can be translated into musical form. There's a long history 
of this."

Michael Beckerman, chair of the department of music at New York 
University, agrees.

"I can make up (musical) pieces from my phone number and from any 
collection of patterns, no matter how random," he said in an email.

As to the claim that a listener would feel an emotional link to DNA, he 
said, "it also seems fairly arbitrary. Who would judge whether the music 
coming out of this is any different from random pattern-derived music?"

Gil Alterovitz, a research fellow at Harvard/MIT Divsion of Health 
Science and Technology, believes that protein music's great potential 
lies not in music, but in science education and health.

Transcribing the complex 3D structure into a musical sequence could help 
children and the blind understand genomics, said Alterovitz.

More futuristic is the hope that protein music could be used as an 
audible diagnostic tool.

A healthy individual's DNA or proteins would be harmonious; a flaw, 
suggesting a disease, would be instantly recognisable as disharmony. The 
melody would reveal the malady, so to speak.

"While a person's gene sequence is generally static, gene expression and 
protein abundance can change over time -- and across different tissues," 
Alterovitz said.

"Being able to use this information and translate it into actionable 
sound/music to guide decision-making in real time -- that would be the 
Holy Grail."

+ Samples of the protein music cited in this article, as well as 
background information, can be found on these sites:

- (http://www.molecularmusic.com/)

- (http://www.mimg.ucla.edu/faculty/miller-jh/gene2music/examples.html)

- (http://genomebiology.com/imedia/8376589061249763/supp1.mp3)

- (http://genomebiology.com/imedia/2716159601249764/supp2.mp3)

- (http://genomebiology.com/imedia/6707441912497660/supp3.mid)

- (http://genomebiology.com/imedia/2094561028124976/supp4.mid)



excerpt


Scented garden beautifies city

STAUNTON — Barbara Phillips has been digging outside the Staunton Public 
Library for two days. She planted rosemary above a stone wall and put 
lamb's ear into a newly formed incline.

Phillips was helping Staunton horticulturist, Matthew Sensabaugh, with a 
sensory garden — a field of flowers and other plants that are as 
delightful to the nose as they are to other senses. It's the first of 
its kind in Virginia.


"I'm just following orders," Phillips said. "I plant where he tells me to."

The garden, which Sensabough began working on several months ago, was 
inspired by friends of Brenda Papke who founded the Children's Art 
Network in 1993, then died of breast cancer 10 years later.

The garden will be dedicated Tuesday at 4 p.m. It will have aisles large 
enough for wheelchairs, signs in Braille and plants that can be smelled 
from afar and close-up.

excerpt nice article with descirption of Monet's house and garden
Monet's gardens a draw to Giverny and to his art
http://www.boston.com/travel/articles/2007/05/20/monets_gardens_a_draw_to_giverny_and_to_his_art/
Monet, early a rebel, became not just accepted but rich and famous, 
cultivating his garden and remaining productive into old age. He went 
nearly blind in the final years even as his artistic vision matured and 
expanded in his late water lily paintings.

excerpt
http://news.cincypost.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070521/NEWS01/705210369
Disability no bar to creativity
Ruthe Pearlman created this figure study, which is on display at the Art 
Beyond Boundaries Gallery in downtown Cincinnati.
Spare pen and ink lines and a watercolor wash of rich umber and gold 
make one of Ruthe Pearlman's nudes glow with vibrant life.
Another drawing of a young man in shirtsleeves seems ready to rise from 
his chair and step out of the frame.
The drawings speak of Pearlman's lifelong love of the human form as art. 
It was a long love affair. Pearlman died this January at age 93.
Until weeks before she died she was still teaching at the Art Academy of 
Cincinnati, still creating art in her Mount Adams studio, and still 
inspiring artists far younger than herself to find a way to express 
their passion, even when life seems to roll boulders in your path.

Pearlman's personal boulder was macular degeneration, diagnosed in 1988. 
It stole her central vision and ability to see detail and left her 
legally blind. But she continued painting and teaching and became 
involved with programs helping artists with disabilities.
Pearlman died on Jan. 31, but she's still out there encouraging fellow 
artists.
On June 1, a retrospective of her work goes on display at the Art Beyond 
Boundaries Gallery for artists with disabilities. Pearlman's family 
donated more than 50 of her drawings and paintings to start the Ruthe 
Pearlman Fund to provide small grants to help artists with disabilities 
buy materials and prepare their work for shows.
Pearlman's exhibit is called "Limitless Vision." Everything will be for 
sale, including watercolors, pen and ink drawings, and paintings. 
Subjects range from street scenes and human figures to her more abstract 
Optic Series created after her diagnosis.

excerpt
http://www.thisischeshire.co.uk/display.var.1447917.0.heads_up_for_wolves_fans.php
Heads up for Wolves fans

WOVLES may be struggling for form of late, but the match-going 
experience of blind and visually impaired fans is set to improve with 
state-of-the-art radio headsets.

The Halliwell Jones Stadium is already a flagship ground in terms of 
disabled facilities following the efforts of its designers and the 
Warrington Disability Partnership (WDP).

And now, thanks to the Vocal Eyes Project, blind and visually impaired 
supporters will be able to don special radio headsets and get running 
commentary on the game.

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