Blind School Update

I thought it might be time for a little update on my work with the Ohio State School for the Blind. Thanks to a TeachArts Ohio grant from the Ohio Arts Council, I’m at the school once a week, working on creating a timeline of the school’s history depicted on a series of banners.

These first couple months have been about deciding what events to choose, finding imagery to go along with them, making a banner mockup, and working with students on image transfer experiments so that we can decide what method to use for the final project. While it would be easy to just use an inkjet iron-on transfer, we wanted to get a little more creative, so we’re using gel medium (basically glue) to transfer a color copy to fabric, letting it dry, then wetting the back of the paper and peeling it off. The color copy pigments are embedded in the dried glue, leaving the image intact, but with a lovely, not-so-perfect end result. For their own personal projects using this technique, students can then embellish the image however they want using pastel, marker, crayon— anything really. (see Jana’s beach image overlaid with pastel above)

Peeling off the paper…

Getting creative…

What’s been interesting is that everyone wants a perfectly transferred photo and that never happens. It amazes me how quickly some students “give up” when they don’t like what they first see.

Jaden’s photo of a clay bowl he made didn’t turn out like he thought it would. Somehow most of the image peeled away and you couldn’t tell what it was anymore. He seemed thoroughly discouraged. But I said, hey wait a minute, forget this was ever supposed to be a bowl. Just use it as a starting place for an abstract piece— it doesn’t have to BE anything. Didn’t you guys just finish a unit on abstract expressionism? He added color, glued on some string he took from the frayed edges of his canvas, and voila! (He has titled it Not a Bowl, lol.)

Jaden’s abstract

Maya didn’t like that the image of her dog didn’t look “real,” so she just started coloring over the whole thing and painting a big purple border— she likes how it looks more like a cartoon now.

Maya’s dog

It’s so hard to let go of expectations! Good grief, I can certainly relate, but what I’d forgotten is how early in life this starts, the thinking that we’ve failed at something because we don’t like how it’s turned out after the first try. I think of my own work, how “stuck” I feel not knowing how I want to print photographs anymore. I don’t even give myself the chance to play around with ideas. Maybe I need to be a student in my own class :-P

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** The question I am asked most about my work at OSSB is “How do blind kids make art?” and the first part of my answer is that the students there have a wide range of visual ability. Some have blurred vision while others can see shapes or colors or varying degrees of brightness. Fully blind students might need a little extra guidance or a different way of showing them how to do something, but everyone has a good time in art class (and, yes, they all have Instagram accounts).

Snow Days

Snow always reminds me of winters growing up in New England. Being glued to the radio waiting to find out if school had been cancelled, hoping for a day of sledding and Mom's homemade hot chocolate. Building snow forts and ice skating on the pond down the road. Every now and then, a magical night when it just kept snowing and snowing, before cars made tracks on our dead-end street, before the plows woke up. Mom and Dad would pull my brother and me on our sleds for a walk down the road, followed by our black Labrador and occasionally even our cat. Snowy nights like this always felt a little like Christmas Eve, somehow special, little elves working their magic while you sleep and then you wake up to morning wonderland.

John introduced me to cross country skiing when we first met and I've been hooked ever since, although sadly there haven't been many consistently snowy winters in Columbus lately. Just this week we were supposed to get a storm that turned out to be a bunch of rain. It's been a pretty mild winter, and I'm so grateful for the snow we did get this month. John and I explored the canal path in Hebron which I'd seen from route 70 and always wondered about— it goes through a covered bridge!— and hit our close-to-home favorite trail at Glacier Ridge Metro Park.

Tracks on the trail

The Glacier Ridge woods

Covered foot bridge in Hebron

Snow day for Pippin

Totally on my bucket list though?— riding Pippin in the snow. It gave me a glimpse of what winter life might be like when we move to Vermont in a few years, and I loved it.

(Photos of me & Pip courtesy of Maddy Hayes)

Standby Vacations

Every now and then John has what’s called a long overnight. He’ll fly the last flight to some city, spend the entire next day there, and then fly out again super early the next morning. I try to go with him when I can— it’s an airline employee perk that I love because these trips feel like little weekend getaways we probably wouldn’t otherwise schedule, to places we might not otherwise plan to visit. 2021 brought us to Hartford (three times!), Jacksonville, Savannah, Greenville South Carolina, and Panama City.

Greenville, South Carolina

I love that we have favorite restaurants in cities that aren’t home. The biggest slice of cake you could imagine at the Boll Weevil in Augusta. Oooo the spaghetti carbonara at Bruno’s in Little Rock!— and zabagliones made and hand-delivered by Bruno himself when we told him John tries to get Little Rock flights just so we can go to his restaurant. Last year we discovered Sorella in Hartford, Connecticut, where I had what I think might be my favorite chocolate dessert ever: their semi-freddo. I haven’t had one anywhere else that’s as good!

Hiking at the UNF nature trails, Jacksonville

The day of a trip, I fill up cat food bowls, sequester the bird, pack light, and head to the airport where I’ll catch up with John in Atlanta. People ask me how I get a seat and if I get to reserve one. The answer is no. You’re flying standby, so you only get a seat if there any empty ones, and these are assigned in order of company seniority, so employees who’ve been with Delta the longest get first dibs. There’s a back-end system to see how many seats are available on a flight and how many folks are waiting for them; this way you can decide which flight you have the best chance on, but there’s always the possibility you could wind up in a pickle.

Connecticut river path in December, Hartford

I’ve been pretty fortunate. Sometimes I’ve made it onto a flight only because a paid passenger didn’t show up; one time I got the very last seat but then was asked to give it up for a passenger who was running down the hallway; and there’s only been one time that I was actually stranded. John was piloting a 5:30 am flight and I didn’t get a seat. I stood at the plate glass window, waving at John as the Tug pushed his plane back from the gate, then spent ALL DAY trying to get any combination of flights back home with no luck whatsoever. At 10pm I finally treated myself to a nice hotel and a good dinner and made it home the next morning.

Panama City Beach, Florida

New places are always fun to explore, and places we’ve already been feel like coming “home” but still give us new things to do. John goes for a run, we find a spot for breakfast, pack a knapsack, and walk and walk and walk. At some point we figure out where we want to go for dinner. And although getting up insanely early the next morning is no fun, it is so worth it for all these little adventures we have.

Hugging a mushroom, Panama City.