Tag: artist

Artist Teaches Kids Environmental Awareness

  • Gijsbert van Frankenhuysen helps kids not only appreciate art, but nature as well. (Photo by Chris McCarus)

A children’s book illustrator is taking his art to schools around the region. Through his illustrations, he’s teaching students about respecting the environment. But they also get excited about learning in general. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chris McCarus reports:

Transcript

A children’s book illustrator is taking his art to schools
around the region. Through his illustrations, he’s teaching students
about respecting the environment. But they also get excited about
learning in general. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chris McCarus
reports:


30 children are sitting on the floor with sketch pads in their elementary school classroom. They’re watching artist Gijsbert van Frankenhuysen. He’s standing at an easel, drawing animal shapes.


(Sound of magic marker)


“So we’re gonna make an oval shape right here, with 2 ears on it. And then you can color it black and you give him 4 short black legs. Make sure you make em black. That’s what they have. Look at that. One sheep.”


The children look up at the easel, then back down at their sketch pads, then up at the easel again. They’re comparing drawings to see whose come closest to the artist’s drawing, and they want Van Frankenhuysen to show them how to add body parts to the sheep.


“What do you want me to show?”


“Tails!”


“Hooves!”


Van Frankenhuysen has spent the whole day at this school.


(Sound of applause)


He gets this kind of response everywhere he goes, and he visits about a hundred schools a year. This student, Emily has just seen, step by step, how the artist turned blank pages into the beginnings of a book. He’s already illustrated childrens favorites like Adopted by an Owl, the Legend of Sleeping Bear and 16 other books.


Child: “I learned about aminals.”


McCarus: “What about them?”


Child: “That they’re cool to make.”


McCarus: “Do you ever see any of the animals out in nature outside?”


Child: “I see horses and cows and owls at night. And I hear ’em by my house.”


(Sound of sheep)


Back at his home on a farm in central Michigan, Van Frankenhuysen’s wife Robin walks through the barnyard past the sheep and horse the artist uses for painting. She roams the property trying to call him in to the house for dinner.


(Sound of whistling)


But he doesn’t hear her. Since they bought this farm 25 years ago they planted thousands of trees and made 3 ponds. There are lots of places to hide. But it’s not like the couple is trying to get away from people and be alone in nature. They’re happy putting them into one big mix.


It wasn’t until a couple days later that we finally caught up with van Frankenhuysen. He doesn’t miss the chance to show kids the wonders of nature. He says learning about it can make classroom lessons easy.


“I have boys, young boys, that normally don’t do any journaling, because they thing it’s for girls. And then they see what I do. And I write down the stuff that happens on the land. If I find a birdnest, I make a drawing of it, I put it in my book, I write it in. A deer, a fox, anything that I see. And now those stories are kind of turning in to books that we sell. And I’ve had several kids that now they’re doing it. And I don’t know if in the back of their mind, they’re thinking maybe I can make a book out of this when I grow up. It doesn’t matter! They’re paying attention. They’re writing this stuff down. I think it’s all good stuff.”


Many states are cutting education budgets. Often art is the first program to go. But state education association spokeswoman Margaret Trimer-Hartley says parents demand art. Learning it creates interest in science, literature and even math. She says van Frankenhuysen makes children better students overall. He supplements what regular teachers might not be able to provide.


“His work has given all of us an appreciation for nature and the flora and the fauna around us. Now his lessons can give us all a greater appreciation for the issues of conservation and protection of that environment.”


The warm, playful illustrations in his books touch both children and parents. In person, van Frankenhuysen is just as disarming. He’s modest when he explains why he goes into classrooms to teach kids to draw year after year.


“It’s the only thing I know how to do. I don’t know anything else. It’s painting. It’s fun.”


It really isn’t the only thing he knows how to do. His drawings are just the beginning. The trick he’s mastered is to get kids to start thinking about themselves and their environment.


For the GLRC, I’m Chris McCarus.

A Snow Sculpting Pilgrimage

  • Gary Tessier of Team Manitoba works on the team's 16-foot-high snow sculpture in Gatineau, Quebec. (Photo by Karen Kelly)

Every year, snow sculptors from the U.S. and Canada travel
to northern cities to carve huge works of art. They often depict things such as legends of sea monsters and native spirits. As the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Karen Kelly reports, these artists are driven by a shared passion for the outdoors:

Transcript

Every year, snow sculptors from the US and Canada travel to northern cities to carve huge works of art. They often depict things such as legends of sea monsters and native spirits. As the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Karen Kelly reports, these artists are driven by a shared passion for the outdoors:


(sound of chipping and scraping)


Gary Tessier is jabbing a spade into the side of a towering block of snow. He and his team are here to compete in a snow sculpture competition in Gatineau, Quebec. It’s just across the Ottawa River from Ottawa, Canada’s capital. The team has 50 hours to transform this 16 foot high block of snow into a work of art. They work from 8:30 in the morning until 10:30 at night – shoveling, scraping and sawing.


“Basically, fundamentally, you use a good sharp spade and these homemade sander kind of things. A whole variety of tools and uh, it doesn’t take much.”


The team is creating a sculpture based on a legend of a fiddler from their hometown of Winnipeg, Manitoba. The fiddler drowned in the Winnepeg River and the legend has it that people can still hear his music in the rapids. Gary uses the spade to follow the outline of a fiddle drawn in black magic marker on the snow.


“I’m working on one of the what do you call that? La manche… du violin… comment t’appelle ca? The fiddlehead! The fiddlehead. When we’re finished, hopefully it’ll be two fiddleheads and the fiddler surrounded by the water that well, he lost his life in, but went on to forever playing music.”


Gary and his sculpting partner Real Berard have been going to snow sculpting competitions for 25 years. They both work in the arts, Gary as an administrator and Real as an artist. Gary says they spend most of their time indoors, hunched over, working at a desk. Which is why he looks forward to a week outside, even if it’s 30 below.


“This is like a pilgrimage, literally, it clears my mind and clears the body, too, of all kinds of awful things. It’s just a reawakening, like a rebirth every time, it’s beautiful, it really is.”


And on the best days, Gary and Real say, the sculpture takes over.


Tessier: “You’re sort of going with the flow, going with the line and going where it’s going.”


Berard: “Yeah, and you see quite often, like we follow the lines. It seems like a snake. It wants to go someplace and there’s no way that you could… it’s stronger than your mind.”


Tessier: “Sometimes you try and fight it and don’t listen – this is really where this thing has got to go – and then ultimately it doesn’t work.”


Kelly: “That’s when you make a mistake?”


Tessier: “Yup, and it shows.”


Not that they’re that concerned about making mistakes. Of course they want the sculpture to look good, but they say they don’t care about winning, which was tough for Denis Vrignon-Tessier, Gary’s son, to accept. He’s 22 and has been with the team for 4 years.


Vrignon-Tessier: “Like at first, in a competition, I’d be like, ‘Oh, I’m going to be real disappointed if we lose,’ and stuff and then just being with them every year, they’ve just showed me that really, it’s not important.”


Kelly: “So what is it about?”


Vrignon-Tessier: “It’s about being here and spending time with them, just joking around, hearing what they have to say. Yeah.”


In the end, the sculpture has two giant violins. There’s a fiddler kneeling in front of them, playing in a swirl of water.


It doesn’t win.


The judges seem to like the sculptures with lots of details carved on them. But Gary and Real like bold, smooth shapes that will last for a while. And sure enough, after a couple days of freezing rain and warm temperatures, a lot of the detailed work on other sculptures is worn away. But the fiddler and the violins stay strong – ready to play into the spring.


For the GLRC, I’m Karen Kelly.

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City Cooks Up New Compost Recipes

  • A pile of food waste awaits processing at a Duluth, Minnesota composting site. A wide variety of materials arrive each day - anything from unused frozen dinners to sheet rock to bird droppings from a nearby zoo. Photo by Stephanie Hemphill.

Lots of people have a compost pile in the backyard. They throw their grass clippings and kitchen scraps in a pile and let it sit. Eventually it turns into rich black stuff that can be spread on the garden. Many cities around the Great Lakes collect residents’ yard waste and turn it into compost on a bigger scale. In Duluth, Minnesota, they’ve taken it a step further. An industrial-sized compost operation uses some surprising ingredients. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Stephanie Hemphill reports:

Transcript

Lots of people have a compost pile in the back yard. They throw their grass clippings and
kitchen scraps in a pile and let it sit. Eventually it turns into rich black stuff that can be spread
on the garden. Many cities around the Great Lakes collect residents’ yard waste and turn it into
compost on a bigger scale. In Duluth Minnesota, they’ve taken it a step further. An industrial-
sized compost operation uses some surprising ingredients. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Stephanie Hemphill reports:

There’s a steady stream of cars and pickups as people drop off leaves and branches. They’re
piling up their yard waste at the compost site of the Western Lake Superior Sanitary District in
Duluth, Minnesota. The Sanitary District takes care of the trash for Duluth and nearby towns.

At the back, four rows of future compost are cooking in the sun. They’re about 6 feet tall and
half a block long. They were mixed by a master chef of compost, Charlie Hitchcock. He’s about
to cook up a new batch. Today’s mix starts with biodegradable bags of kitchen scraps from
several restaurants.

“It’s a small load today, but it’s food waste and there’s animal hair that’s thrown in from some of
the pet grooming places. A lot of protein and nitrogen in that, I guess.”

Hitchcock consults a laptop computer to create his recipe. He plugs in the weight of the food
waste. The computer program tells him the right proportions of wood chips and leaves to mix in.
It’s aiming for the ideal combination of carbon and nitrogen. Most loads are about half wood
chips.

“Because it aerates it pretty good. And then I just keep punching a number in on the leaves until
I get between a 25-to-1 to a 35-to-1 on a C-N-N ratio, carbon to nitrogen.”

(tractor starts)

The key ingredient that’s loaded in Hitchcock’s mixture is different every day. That’s because the
sanitary district is always trying to divert stuff that would normally go to the landfill. Lately
they’ve been going after some of the garbage itself, not just yard waste. And sometimes that
garbage comes from some exotic places.

(bird sounds from zoo)

Dave Homstad takes care of the birds at the Lake Superior Zoo. He’s giving the parrots some
fresh water.

(parrot chit-chat)

He slides out the bottom of the cage and whisks sawdust and bird droppings into a black plastic
bag.

“The composting stuff goes into a black bag, so that we can keep them separate. And then
anything that can be composted goes in here and then eventually into a dumpster for that
purpose.”

The dumpster gets filled with uneaten food, animal bedding, like straw and sawdust, and animal
dung. At the composting site, the dumpster-load from the zoo might be mixed with scraps from a
coffee shop. A commercial fishing operation brings fish guts. Even sheetrock is ground up to
become compost. The latest addition is waste grain from the elevators on Duluth’s lakefront.

(train sound at elevator)

The Cargill elevator handles 50 million bushels of grain every year.

Roger Juhl manages the operation. He says there’s some spillage when railroad cars have to be
changed from one type of grain to another.

“So we have to clean them out and dump them onto the tracks, and then pick them up and put
them in the dumpster. And that’s where they’ll go to this recycling center.”

Juhl says he’ll probably save some money. He’ll still have to pay the hauler to take the grain
away, but he won’t have to pay for dumping it in the landfill. What’s even better, Juhl says he’ll
be doing something good for the environment.

“Hopefully it’ll be useful for something.”

It’s put to use, all right, in Charlie Hitchcock’s compost mixer.

(compost sound back up)

The mixer’s been turning for 15 or 20 minutes. Hitchcock peers into the barrel. The ingredients
look like chunky dirt, and smell like day-old garbage. He reaches in for a handful.

“I do the squeeze test on it. If you get it packed tight without moisture coming from it, it’s within
the 50% range, which is good.”

Hitchcock is learning how to turn an amazing variety of stuff into compost. Some days he gets a
load of spoiled vegetables from a grocery store. Other times it’ll be outdated frozen dinners.

“When I get a lot of wet pasta, I use some sheetrock and mostly grindings. That’s shredded up
tree branches and limbs that we have. I don’t put leaves in it because the pasta’s so wet, it gets
real gumbo-y.”

After six months in a pile, the compost is ready for customers, like Suzanna Didier.

“I mean, I’m glad they’ve figured out a way for us to decrease the amount of garbage that goes
into the stream, into the waste stream, because obviously that needs to be slowed down a bit. So,
it’s great.”

It’s an expensive operation that doesn’t pay for itself. Officials hope to recoup half their costs by
selling compost. As they get more raw materials, it’ll become more cost effective. Someday,
they hope everyone in Duluth will send their kitchen waste for composting.

For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.

Dancers Mimic Nature’s Form

  • Dancer Anna Beard performing in Dragontree Waterfall Tea at the Matthaei Botanical Gardens in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Photo by Beth Wielinski.

The arts have long been used to draw people’s attention to things… a woman’s mysterious smile, social injustice, or details in the world around us. As the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tamar Charney reports…one choreographer is using dance to encourage people to become more aware of nature:

Transcript

The arts have long been used to draw people’s attention to things – a woman’s mysterious smile,
social injustice, or details in the world around us. As the Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Tamar Charney reports…one choreographer is using dance to
encourage people to become more aware of nature:


(water trickle)


It’s really cold and gray outside. But the tropical conservatory at the Matthaei Botanical Gardens in
Ann Arbor is green and lush. The air is thick with humidity, warmth, and sweet-scented pollen.
The horticulturalists are sweeping up dead leaves, replacing plants, and removing wilted
blossoms. But occasionally the workers lift their heads from what they’re doing to take in an unusual
sight.


There’s a group of dancers, ranging in age from 7 to 70, rehearsing a performance among the
garden’s plants, waterfalls and walkways.


(sound of rehearsal)


They lean against vine-covered walls, prance down paths, and splash water from a fish pond.
Occasionally a dancer’s arm brushes against a branch setting the leaves of a bamboo, papyrus, or
orchid plant in motion. Shirley Axon is an environmental activist and one of the dancers. She
says it’s quite an experience dancing in a lush conservatory instead of a barren stage.


“It’s thrilling…the humidity, the green, the shapes of the plants…
the light, and then to think that we can climb the trees and the walls.”


The dance piece is called Dragontree Waterfall Tea and its creator is Jessica Fogel, a professor
of Dance at the University of Michigan. After choreographing a dance piece for a celebration at
an arboretum over the summer, she realized she just couldn’t imagine going back inside.


“At first I was going to do a snow dance, and then that seemed very unrealistic.”


Eventually she decided an indoor conservatory would be more practical and more comfortable for
both the dancers and the audience. She created this piece by absorbing the shapes, colors, smells,
and stories behind the plants in the garden. Movements the dancers make often mirror the
curves of a plant’s leaves. The dancers also use gesture, props, and pantomime to call attention to
how we use a plant.


“That the papyrus plants can become scrolls upon which messages are written, and that tea comes from these
camellia bushes and can be drunk, and that coffee does come from these beans and chocolate from the trees. So we do play with
those ideas as well, the function of the plants.”


Fogel says we often forget that we depend on plants and
nature for food, medicine, and even paper.
And she hopes this performance will remind people of
our reliance on the natural world. But some parts of the
dance just play with nature.


At one point in the performance, dancer Anna Beard climbs over a wall and down into a waterfall
in the conservatory.


“I step into it and bit by bit I work myself into the water until finally I’m completely immersed in the waterfall.”


She says it’s supposed to be a bit surreal and a bit surprising. She dances soaking wet with the
waterfall splattering down on her body.


“It’s more about existing with the setting and interacting with it instead of just placing some
movement in front of it as a backdrop.”


And unlike a performance in a theater, changes in the garden can affect what the dancers do or
don’t do. During rehearsals, a branch a dancer was supposed to lean against died and was cut off,
another plant grew to be in the way of a dancer’s arm, and some ground cover the dancers were
told they could walk on turned into a path of slippery mud.


Dancer Raphael Griffin says as she performs in the conservatory, she has to be very cautious of
the impact her movements make. The rock ledges are uneven and the plants fragile. And she
says that sense of the dancers treading lightly on the environment is something she hopes the
audience picks up on.


“Just a better awareness of nature and how the human body can interact with nature and yet not
ruin it either.”


Most of us will never get a chance to frolic in a conservatory like Raphael Griffin and the other
dancers in Dragontree Waterfall Tea , but as one dancer pointed out there’s nothing stopping us
from going out into our own backyards to enjoy and appreciate the line, movement, and form in
the natural world around us.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Tamar Charney.