[Art_beyond_sight_theory_and_research] scrimshaw, book review, film director

[Lisa Yayla]

Hi,

I send every now and then bits and pieces from articles because they seem to be sort of related to the list and subject.
Enclosed article about srimshaw artist, book review and a couple of bits and pieces.

Regards,
Lisa

9News.com, Colorado
Sunday, June 11, 2006

Artist (Jim Stevens) continues creating art after going blind 

written by:  Cheryl Preheim  9NEWS Reporter 
posted by:  Sara Gandy  Web Producer 

An artist in Wheat Ridge says people are always surprised by his work and more surprised that he is the one who creates it, especially since he is blind. 9NEWS at 5 p.m. June 11, 2006.  

(KUSA) - Jim Stevens will tell you that his art speaks to him.   He sits in his studio crouching over a desk. 
 
He works with tiny tools that make thousands of tiny holes in prehistoric ivory.  He said, "I can actually feel the outline with my fingertips."   That is how he keeps in touch with the process.

It is a process that he can't see.

Jim Stevens joined the army when he was seventeen. He was shot in the head in Vietnam.  Stevens said, "It resulted in bullet fragments that are still in my head and migraines. About twenty-four years after I was shot I had a bad migraine that caused a stroke in my cerebral cortex."  That stroke caused Jim Stevens to lose nearly all of his eyesight in about thirty minutes."

He never thought he'd be able to do his art again, but Jim Stevens wouldn't give up.  He said, "I guess the Army doesn't train a quitter."

Now with the two degrees of vision that he has left, a lot of practice, and the help of five different special lenses that he wears, he's back in the studio doing what he loves. 

It takes as long as 900 hours to finish one piece of this special art.   It's called scrimshaw.  Stevens said, "There are only a handful of art forms native to North America, and scrimshaw is one of them.  It is the oldest."

Jim Stevens says while the art form stirs a lot of questions in people, the artist brings even more questions.  He said, "I'll be standing there with my cane and people will look at me and then look at the art and say, 'who did this'?"

He says he is grateful that he can answer them boldly that war took his eyesight but it couldn't take his passion for art or for appreciating even the smallest things in life.  He said, "This is perfect for me...the dots are little...and little is all I can see.  Everyone is creative...this was my way to be creative.  I lost it and I got it back."

LINK: Video Clip (Windows Media Format)

http://wm.kusa.gannett.edgestreams.net/news/1150071872280-06-11-06-BlindArtist-5p.wmv 


http://wm.kusa.gannett.edgestreams.net/news/1150071872280-06-11-06-BlindArtist-5p.wmv





Film Director and color blindness excerpt

Yes, very much. Saying what are we doing? Where were you yesterday? Where are you now? Then very quickly me and the actors stop talking about the characters because they are [already] so in them – they have to be as that's the only way they can act them truthfully – so they know the motivations and just react on them. It becomes very relaxed, but also a little bit edgy because again: how's this going to turn out? We don't know. You know, I'm colour blind, I'm learning disabled. I can't read or write really. I have a secretary to rewrite everything I do. And I was very embarrassed for many years and it gave me a lot of problems. I'm very much dependent on other people. That's why my films are always very dominated by red. It's a colour I very much like to look at. It's a human colour and it makes people look good. It has this warm glow that always looks great. And it's a very emotional colour.

http://www.timeout.com/film/news/1194.html



article excerpt about critic Ozick's writing

The issue was the criticism of how Keller's writing conveyed sense impressions that she -- deaf, blind, mute -- could not possibly have experienced. Ozick's powerful case for the defence ends: "She fought the tin ears who took imagining to be mendacity. Her legacy, after all, is an epistemological marker of sorts: proof of the real existence of the mind's eye."

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20060610.BKLEVI10/TPStory/SpecialEvents/columnists



a bit off subject but thought book sounds really good
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/06/04/RVGUEJ2MM11.DTL&type=books

A BLIND MAN SEES THE WORLD 
In the 1800s, illness robbed James Holman of his sight but that didn't stop him from traveling -- or writing
Reviewed by Jeff Greenwald

Sunday, June 4, 2006

 
 A Sense of the World 

How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveler 

By Jason Roberts 

HARPERCOLLINS; 382 PAGES; $26.95 



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On July 19, 1822, 36-year-old James Holman, a former lieutenant in the Royal Navy, set off to do what no casual traveler had attempted before: circumambulation of the world. 
Leaving from England, Holman would cross the 5,000 miles of tsarist Russia and enter the frozen wastes of Siberia. From Kamchatka, he would try to hitch a ride on a whaling boat, hoping to reach first the Sandwich Islands (now known as Hawaii) and, eventually, the wild North American continent. 

"The path would be chosen by circumstance, the means improvised, the particulars discovered only in the doing," writes Jason Roberts in "A Sense of the World." "It was less an expedition than an act of self-abandonment, to faith and fate." 

Even today, with airplanes and antibiotics, Holman's proposed journey seems torturous. To the former naval officer, it was a gleeful prospect -- despite the fact that he was totally blind. 

It's easy to see why Roberts (who chanced upon Holman's story in a book called "Eccentric Travelers" while browsing in a library) became obsessed with the "celebrated blind traveler." Holman was one of those people whose moxie, and accumulated mileage, seem incredible even by today's standards. 

Holman was 25 when he lost his sight to an unknown illness. He quickly shook off self-pity and set about breaking every convention and bias associated with his disability. He put himself through medical school, became a Naval Knight of Windsor and embarked on a series of travels so exhaustive that a bare list of his stops would easily consume the 800 words of this review. Using a device called a Noctograph, developed for writing in the dark (Braille was not invented until 1821), Holman recorded his adventures and impressions in three published books and a huge, unpublished (and lost) manuscript. 

By the middle of the 19th century, Holman had become the most accomplished traveler in history -- racking up at least 250,000 miles by ship, carriage, foot, wagon and even on horseback (he taught himself to ride in Africa and journeyed briefly into the continent's interior). Marco Polo, in contrast, covered some 14,000 miles. Ultimately, Holman visited every inhabited continent, and hundreds of distinct cultures. 

"To properly trace his route," writes Roberts of one voyage, "one must take a map of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, and reduce it to a mass of scribbles." Holman was not remotely a figure of pity. By the time he reached Tasmania, he was such a celebrity that local children imitated his beard by tying opossum tails to their chins. By middle age, Holman was so self-assured that his ailment was easily overlooked. On a ship bound for South Africa, he reports that the members of the crew forgot he was blind and began shouting at him, "as if I were hard of hearing." 

Roberts, too, faced the challenge of flying blind. Holman's published work covers only 14 of his 70 years. And despite his passion for writing, the Blind Traveler was not an especially good writer, nor a self-revealing one. Accounts of Holman's early life, in England and the Royal Navy, were cobbled together from secondhand accounts. Even in his journals Holman was discreet, says Roberts, "to a fault, obscuring most of the identities of people he encounters during his adventures -- especially those of women." 

Yet the detail in "A Sense of the World" is so palpable, one gets the feeling that Roberts actually began to channel Holman. This impression is reinforced by the book's neo-Victorian voice: a risky style sustained by Roberts' absolute command of language and rhythm. At times it seemed I was reading not a modern account of Holman but a series of lectures delivered by his closest friend. 

One of the few unsettling things about this biography, in fact, is the chemistry between author and subject. Roberts is openly in awe of Holman; he becomes, at times, almost deferential. 

Holman was a great man, sometimes even heroic, but he wasn't beyond reproach. He was capable of using people (especially the hapless Knights of Windsor, which he fleeced for decades) and clearly knew how to be cagey, or pushy, when it suited him. But Roberts takes pains to defend even the smallest transgressions. One gets the feeling that if you uttered a bad word about Holman in front of Roberts, he'd slap you. 

A few sections of the book, like Holman's maritime career, could have stood a little less naval-gazing. But with the onset of Holman's disease, we enter fascinating territory. Roberts writes about the reality of blindness with exceptional clarity, explaining how touch-based (or haptic) understanding differs from visual perception: "An object yields up its qualities not all at once, at the speed of light, but successively over time." For the first time I actually grasped what blindness might be like, and how radically that state differs from my preconceptions and fears. 

Once Holman's travels begin, the pace accelerates, and we meet a well-stocked menagerie of fellow travelers, literary rivals and kindred spirits. (My favorite was naturalist François Huber, who, also blind, had become the world's greatest expert on bees.) Holman himself is, of course, the ultimate eccentric -- a blind man who insists on climbing live volcanoes and keeps fit by running alongside his horse-drawn carriage, holding the end of a string. 

"A Sense of the World" is a vastly entertaining, always informative and often astonishing account. Roberts offers a portrait not just of a brilliant traveler but also of his age: an era when the globe was still rife with mysteries, and wit and will more desirable than upgrades. 

Was Holman indeed history's greatest traveler? It's an absurdly subjective accolade, but you might find yourself convinced. Even if he fell short of completing his around-the-world circuit (foiled, alas, by the czar), the blind traveler's life journey offers unrivaled inspiration -- and a cordial challenge -- to anyone touched by wanderlust. 

Jeff Greenwald is the author, most recently, of "Scratching the Surface: Impressions of Planet Earth From Hollywood to Shiraz."