[accessibleimage] articles- movies, artists, exhibitions

Hi,
Sending a few articles forwarded from the BlindNews list.
Regards,
Lisa

links
Oberlander artists' website www.droolingcat.com
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/states/california/counties/santa_clara/cupertino/11568796.htm
 


http://www.collegian.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2005/04/28/427095ad0fd90

Rocky Mountain Collegian, Colorado
Thursday, May 05, 2005

'A Touch of Art' A Success

By Julie Abiecunas

The "A Touch of Art" mask exhibit put on by a CSU art professor and his 
class allowed members of the blind community the rare opportunity to 
have a hands-on art experience.

On Tuesday the professor, Peter Jacobs, and his Foundations of Sculpture 
class opened the exhibit in the art department.

Members of the blind community were led through the exhibit by the 
artists themselves and were allowed to touch the masks, along with being 
given verbal explanations of what they were feeling.

Karen Norton, a blind woman who was led through the exhibit, enjoyed her 
visit and experience at the gallery.

"I like this very much. The wood is very tactile; it makes a great 
medium for this sort of thing," Norton said.

Norton was referring to the various types and wood textures students 
used to create their masks. The woods included everything from cherry to 
pine, and textures were anywhere from unfinished and rough to smooth and 
laminated.

Jacobs allowed his class free range over the project, and it was up to 
individual students to choose which type of wood they used, how big 
their piece was and how exactly that piece was finished. Jacobs said his 
students had been laboring away at their masks six weeks prior to the 
exhibit.

Inspiration for the masks ranged from light-hearted to more serious. One 
of the masks was a pig-looking mask that Jacobs said a student described 
as "what it would look like if pigs could fly." Another was second 
degree art major Dean Thompson's mask, which was inspired by the thought 
of what a headdress might look like blowing in the wind.

After feeling all of the students' hard work, Norton said that it would 
be a class she would enjoy taking. Norton has taken a painting class in 
the past and would like to get more involved in creating her own artwork.

Junior graphic design major Matt Fuehrer, who led Norton through the 
gallery, was glad to have participated in the exhibit.

"It's a really good project. It's a really great chance for students and 
the blind community to see what the sculpture school does," Fuehrer said.








Mercury News, California
Thursday, May 05, 2005

Art's challenge

By Michael Cronk, Mercury News

VISUALLY IMPAIRED WOMAN MAKES HER WAY BY PAINTING

Santa Clara resident Ketra Oberlander began losing her eyesight four 
years ago. By her 40th birthday, she was legally blind: severely myopic, 
with no depth perception or the ability to filter light. And, 
colorblind, too.

So, she picked up a paint brush.

``Part of my artistic vision is a lack of vision,'' said Oberlander, 42. 
``I started painting as a way to express what I see and communicating 
how I perceive beauty and reality.''

Oberlander paints in a dimly lit studio she's set up in the garage of 
the house she shares with her fiance, Simeon Leifer, and their cat, 
Patches.

Working in oils and acrylics, Oberlander's paintings focus primarily on 
floral portraits and cubistic interpretations of space. She works from 
enlarged photographs or sketches and paints with her eyes just three to 
six inches from the canvas. ``I'm forever getting paint on my face,'' 
she said.

Oberlander uses large labels on her paint tubes so she knows what colors 
she's mixing. Still, on occasion, someone might comment on her use of an 
olive shade in a painting when she thought she was working in a 
blue-gray tone, Oberlander said.

Despite the visual challenges, Oberlander's paintings are receiving 
recognition. Her work will be shown June 4-5 at the Santa Clara Art 
Association booth at the Alliance of Visual Artists' ArtFest, where 
exhibited paintings are selected by a jury. She is also submitting four 
paintings for the association's annual members art show from May 28 
through June 26. Both events are scheduled at the Triton Museum of Art 
in Santa Clara.

Last month, Oberlander's acrylic painting ``Dance! Dance!'' received a 
second place award in the general category at the Santa Clara Art 
Association's monthly members' competition. Paintings are voted on by 
number; the artists are anonymous.

Oberlander joined the art association in February.

``What first struck me was the notion that she was blind. I was amazed 
that she could paint anything at all,'' said Ruth Priest, association 
secretary. ``There's nothing in her paintings to indicate that she can't 
see. Her colors are logical, sometimes with subtle shading and, at other 
times, with colors that are bold, intense and with vivid contrasts.

``She handles the soft focus, blurred edges and crisp, hard edges with 
equal skill. Her California poppy is one of her hard-edged, 
high-contrast paintings.''

Oberlander is also submitting an entry to the San Francisco Lighthouse 
for the Blind's 16th annual ``Insights'' show, an exhibit of 
photography, painting, sculpture and drawings by visually impaired 
artists from around the United States. The juried show will be held Aug. 
31 to Oct. 28 at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery at City Hall.

``The show is a great opportunity to remind people that art making and 
art viewing is done with more than just one sense,'' said Kari Orvik, 
the Lighthouse for the Blind's program, marketing, and outreach 
coordinator.

There are approximately 13 million severely visually impaired people in 
the United States. About 2 million of them have no functional or usable 
vision at all, according to Kenneth Frasse, executive director of the 
Santa Clara Valley Blind Center. The rest have some sight.

Oberlander's dystrophic condition is genetic. Her sister has it, too.

``To understand how I see, try staring into the sun with shortening 
smeared on your glasses,'' said Oberlander, who always carries with her 
welding goggles and two pair of sunglasses, magnifiers, and a telescope 
so she can see traffic lights.

Oberlander is currently living off her savings. After more than 10 years 
of writing, editing and project management experience, she is 
concentrating on selling her artwork. ``Art is a much easier sell than 
freelance writing,'' she said.

Oberlander, who offers her work on her Web site www.droolingcat.com, has 
sold several reproductions of her paintings.

``So much of my time now is focused at home so my work is scaled in a 
way that is nice for homes, offices and other smaller spaces,'' she said.

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/states/california/counties/santa_clara/cu
 



http://www.collegian.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2005/05/05/4279c7a56ac22




Quad Cities Times, Iowa
Sunday, April 24, 2005

Blind get better access to movies

By Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) - On about 2,000 copies of the "Ray" DVD, a narrator's 
deep voice is heard as the movie opens.

"A brilliant sun shines through brightly colored bottles as they dangle 
from a tree's leafless branches," the voice says. " A white sheet on a 
clothesline flaps across our view revealing a short-haired 
African-American woman pinning up laundry. She stares defiantly at us."

This is descriptive video, or DVS, and it has revolutionized the way the 
visually impaired enjoy movies.

Between natural pauses in dialogue, a narrator details the scenery, 
facial expressions and costumes. "Ray" is not the first movie to get a 
DVS edition, but for obvious reasons, it is one of the most important.

"Ray Charles, even though he was blind, didn't really use a lot of 
blindness skills," says Bob Burns, a lawyer in Omaha, Neb., who is 
blind. "He didn't use a cane or a dog. He didn't really fit the mold 
because he was a superstar and he was able through the use of entourages 
and that kind of thing, to do things that a regular blind person 
wouldn't be able to do."

But "Ray" was still a seminal film for the blind community. Burns, also 
the president of the Omaha chapter of the National Federation of the 
Blind, led his group to a screening at the Omaha AMC theater. Years 
earlier, Burns had raised half the money (with AMC matching the other 
half) for the theater to be outfitted for DVS.

In movie theaters, DVS works with the captioning technology produced for 
the hearing impaired. A moviegoer is given a headset that plays the 
audio of the movie with a described narrative. Others in the audience 
might not even notice if it was being used.

"Ordinarily, when a blind person goes to a movie, they generally have a 
person with them who gives them a running description of things that are 
visual and not dialogue," Burns says. "It makes the viewer experience of 
the side-person a labor intensive thing. For the blind person, you get 
some description, but it's made up on the fly and doesn't contain a lot 
of detail."

There are currently about 170 theaters in North America outfitted for 
DVS, says Mary Watkins, the outreach director for the Media Access 
Group, a nonprofit organization that is a joint effort of the 
Corporation for Public Broadcasting and WGBH, Boston's public broadcast 
station.

The Media Access Group at WGBH was the world's first captioning agency - 
and while closed captioning has become so widespread that it's now taken 
for granted, it is a relatively new service for the hearing impaired.

The first closed captioned TV program was Julia Child's PBS cooking show 
in 1972. In 1996, the Telecom Act established that by 2006 nearly 100% 
of TV will have the CC option. Now, the hope is that DVS will become 
just as prevalent.

The same act declared that the networks and major cable networks had to 
broadcast four hours of description a week, but the Motion Picture 
Association of America took the Federal Communications Commission to 
court claiming the FCC didn't have jurisdiction. The MPAA won, but 
recently the Video Description Restoration Act has been introduced by 
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) to re-establish 
those regulations.

Currently, there are only a few TV programs described. ABC offers 
description for the new "Blind Justice," a drama about a blind police 
detective, and CBS does "CSI," "Jag" and several children's programs. 
Fox makes description available for "The Simpsons," which Watkins says 
"is quite an interesting experience."

WGBH began developing description in the late 1980s after getting the 
idea from a blind woman who did a similar service for a Washington D.C. 
play called "The Washington Ear." By 1990, PBS was broadcasting episodes 
of its American Playhouse series with description on a secondary audio 
programming (SAP) channel that is off unless switched on.

As TV began to use DVS, movies were the next logical step.

"Like you or me, people who have disabilities are also exposed to all 
the same advertising campaigns that come out of the studios," Watkins 
says. "I mean, they're everywhere. So people want to go with their 
family and friends when the movies open."

Right now, over 80 movies are captioned a year, and of those, about 50 
are described. Recently two studios - Universal (which produced "Ray") 
and 20th Century Fox - announced that they will create descriptions for 
all of their wide releases.

Though describing movies costs relatively little compared to the budgets 
of Hollywood productions (usually around $12,000), few of those movies 
that have a theatrical run with description make the transfer to DVD.

"It's kind of like the doughnut budget, I would think," says Watkins.

"We push for captioning to be a standard part of the post-production 
process ... and now we're pushing on the description," Watkins says. 
"It's a smaller audience, you're talking maybe 12 million people who are 
blind or have low vision verses an excess of 28 million who are deaf or 
hard of hearing."

Universal produced approximately 2,000 DVS DVDs of "Ray," 800 of which 
have been sold to consumers. The studio worked closely with the American 
Council of the Blind in creating it.

"The challenge is how you distribute the product," says Ken Graffeo, 
executive vice president of marketing for Universal's home entertainment 
department. "It's in limited places that a blind person can get these."

"Ray" has been available at both Wal-Mart and Amazon.com, but 
distribution relies mainly on WGBH and the ACB to lead people to the 
movies.

The description tracks are typically produced by groups like WGBH with 
studio money. Using software that tells describers how much time is in 
between each bit of dialogue, the writers try to insert as much 
information as possible without making judgments or drawing conclusions.

"There are so many details that you want to put in and there's just not 
enough time," says Carrie Canning, who has been describing for the five 
years since she graduated college. "In a period piece like 'Ray' set in 
the fifties, you want to get the sets and costumes in."

Other hurdles include 15-minute dance sequences as in "Hello Dolly" or 
the pacing of an animated movie like "Robots."

"There's so much visual comedy," Canning says, "but Robin Williams is 
talking the whole time!"

On the Net:

http://ncam.wgbh.org

http://www.mopix.org

http://www.acb.org
http://www.qctimes.com/internal.php?story_id=1049779&t=Arts+%26+Leisure&c=8,1049779

Other related posts:

  • » [accessibleimage] articles- movies, artists, exhibitions