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Creative LifeOur series Creative Life offers an audio tour of arts, culture, and inspiration on the Cape and Islands. Our region is rich with creative diversity, and so are the stories we tell. The series airs every other Friday at 8:30am and 5:30pm, and Sunday evening at 7.Creative Life is edited by Jay Allison. Creative Life is made possible by The Circle of Ten, ten local businesses and organizations committed to local programming on WCAI. |
Check out our CREATIVE LIFE Archives from 2011 - Explore all our stories from 2011
Whale Tale
Reported by Lori Ann Brass
May 18, 2012
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Tim Dibble at work
Photos by Lori Ann Brass
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LISTEN
In the center of Cape Cod, a whale emerged from a block of marble. It was coaxed out by sculptor Tim Dibble, a long time Brewster resident. It took 4 men and and a crane to install the finished 3 1/2 ton sculpture on Shore Road in Chatham.
Visit Tim Dibble's website.
This piece comes from production partners Atlantic Public Media, through their media training program, The Transom Story Workshop in Woods Hole.This current semester's class is holding a listening event Thursday May 24th upstairs at the Woods Hole Old Fire Station at 7pm. Seating is free but limited. Find out more.
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Photo: Meadow Dibble
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Photo: Tim Dibble
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Photo: Tim Dibble
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Photo: Meadow Dibble
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Giant Swords and Little Movies
Reported by Steve Junker
April 20, 2012
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Michael Craughwell's Rebellion Sword, from the game
Devil May Cry. |
Grinding a sword handle.
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LISTEN
Michael Crockwell is a welder. He was born in Galway, Ireland, but now lives in West Tisbury with his wife, a Martha’s Vineyard native, and their two small children. For our series Creative Life, Steve Junker paid him a visit.
The video the launched it all.
Watch more of Michael Craughwell's sword-wielding movies on YouTube.
See more pictures of making swords on Michael Craughwell's facebook page
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Michael Craughwell with the Rebellion Sword.
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Layout for a sword.
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--PREVIOUSLY ON CREATIVE LIFE--
So Much Joy and Spirit
Reported by Katie Klocksin
April 6, 2012
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Tara Murphy, joy and spirit.
Photo by Celeste Evans
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LISTEN
Tara Murphy has studied and performed just about every type of dance - from ballet to flamenco to Indian. For the past 20 years, Tara has focused on African dance. She says it helps her feel connected to her roots and she's sharing it with the community here on the Cape. For our Creative Life series, Katie Klocksin brought back this portrait from her class in Brewster.
Visit Cape Cod African Dance & Drum's website.
This piece comes from production partners Atlantic Public Media, through their media training program, The Transom Story Workshop in Woods Hole. Find out more.
From the Ashes
Reported by Sarah Reynolds
March 23, 2012
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Mackerel ash in the mortar and pestel.
(Sarah Reynolds/WCAI) |
King painting the mackerel he burned, with its ashes.
(Sarah Reynolds/WCAI) |
LISTEN
Kevin King is an artist, and he’s been painting for a long time in his North Falmouth studio. He paints all kinds of things with different styles and techniques, but he uses an unlikely medium.
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King in his studio with his crow painting, painted with crow ashes. (Sarah Reynold/WCAI)
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Visit Kevin King's website.
Arlen Roth Keeps on Playing
Reported by Steve Junker
February 24, 2012
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Arlen Roth at WCAI
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LISTEN
If it has anything to do with the guitar, Arlen Roth has embraced it. As a solo artist, as a sideman to legendary rock and folk performers, as a guitar designer, as a magazine columnist and teacher, Arlen has left his impact on more than one generation of guitar players. On his way to his home on Martha's Vineyard, Arlen stopped by our studio and spoke with Steve Junker.
Arlen Roth writes a regular blog on guitar playing. He’s at work on an autobiography, and a children’s book in collaboration with Martha’s Vineyard illustrator Lane Gregory.
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Up in the Air
Reported by Whitney Jones
February 3, 2012
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Al Moniz passing clubs. (Whitney Jones)
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LISTEN
Snappy, Stretcho, and Criss-Cross are jugglers from Falmouth. They formed "The Suspenders Juggling Troupe" back in 1984 and have been performing ever since.
Visit Suspenders Juggling Troupe's website.
This piece comes from production partners Atlantic Public Media, through their media training program, The Transom Story Workshop in Woods Hole. Find out more.
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Bob Pettengill and Al Moniz juggling.
(Whitney Jones) |
Blacksmith
Reported by J.P. Davidson
January 20, 2012
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Bob Jordan and his anvil (J.P. Davidson)
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LISTEN
Bob Jordan has a 3000-degree forge in his garage. He’s a blacksmith with over 40 years of experience – including work with German, Italian and North American Masters. J.P. Davidson visited Bob’s workshop in Orleans for our Creative Life series.
Visit Bob Jordan's website.
This piece comes from production partners Atlantic Public Media, through their media training program, The Transom Story Workshop in Woods Hole. Find out more.
Creative Invention
Reported by Steve Junker
January 6, 2012
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The OPFLEX indicator (Steve Junker/WCAI)
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LISTEN
A conversation with inventor Scott Smith, of Osterville. Since 2001, Mr. Smith has owned a company that produces cellular foam products -- things like padding for football helmets, and packaging inserts. Two disasters, four years apart, gave Mr. Smith first the creative inspiration for an invention, and then an opportunity to test it on a world stage.
webscript:
Scott Smith’s business headquarters is in Hyannis, but his production facility is in St. Johnsonville, New York. In 2006 the town experienced a devastating flood. His factory there was filled with oil-contaminated water – as high as 15 feet. It looked like the end of everything he had invested in. But in trying to clean up, he made a discovery.
"We just had some open-celled material," Smith said. "We knew it was supposed to attract oil, and we threw it in the water, and it attracted oil and repelled the water and helped us with the clean up."
"And you didn’t just think – ‘Oh, that’s neat,’ and go along your way?" I asked.
"No," Smith said. "I said, ‘Well this really is an unmet need, I think.’ In the middle of our own disaster, that wiped us out—we thought we stumbled onto something that was quite novel."
Now, this is a big problem around the world – cleaning oil from water. And what Smith came up with was so straightforward – basically it’s a sponge. But a sponge that, because of its chemical properties, only soaks up oil, not water.
"We thought it was so simple," he said, "and we realized that no one was really doing it."
No one was doing it, perhaps, because it needed a lot of development. For one thing, the material Smith started with kept falling to pieces. He had to adjust the recipe. I asked him how he went about looking for the right ingredient.
"Oh, I was researching specification sheets from my raw material suppliers, and I stumbled upon... ethylene methylacrolyte. And I became obsessed with foaming this. I was told it would never foam. So we spent over 5 million dollars in research and development, figuring out how to expand it, in making it have the tensile strength and the ability to attract the oil."
"How long did that process take," I asked. "Trying to figure how to create this out of the material you were pretty sure would be the right stuff?"
"Around 4 years," Smith said. "We had just commercialized it at the time of the BP Gulf oil disaster."
And that’s the second disaster that helped launch his invention. We’ll get to that in moment. First, about the stuff itself. Smith called his invention Opflex. It’s a green spongy foam. It comes in many configurations: sheets about a quarter-inch thick, cubes bundled into long net tubes called “booms”, even mitts. And then a shape they call the indicator. Smith describes it this way: "Picture a daddylong leg with about 64 sets of legs."
"I brought along just a little jar full of some of my old two-stroke engine oil," I said. "And I found this plastic tub around the station to hold water. Can we set up an experiment, you can show me how this works?"
"Absolutely, absolutely."
SOUND: Water pouring into plastic tub.
"And I confess I did also put in some chainsaw oil while I was at it. I was just in my garage figuring I would mix and match –"
"Well that’s the beauty of OPFLEX being an open-celled elastomer," Smith said. "All kinds of oils, even the lighter refined oils and sheens, this absorbs in ways that other conventional materials do not.
We poured the oil in...
I said: "So, looking at the little tub of water that we have here, you can see that a lot of the oil has come up to the surface – it’s two-stroke engine oil, so it’s tinted blue, it’s easy to see — but then some little bit has settled onto the bottom, too — some heavier oil maybe."
"See that – it just broke off and came up." Smith was pleased. "You just saw a big globule come right up. So you’re actually mimicking, not only everyday oil spills in the port of New Bedford, but what’s still going on at the Gulf of Mexico.... So, I've torn off a piece of Opflex that fits into the plastic container and we're now putting it into the oil. – So you can see right here, the water is beading up on it. And this is after what – 20, 30 seconds?"
"All right now, I have to tell you," I said, "that everything you’ve described to me about this has not really prepared me for this, what you’ve just shown me."
He laughed. "It’s pretty dramatic when you actually see it. And it’s simple!"
"The Opflex," I said. "it’s as if it’s grabbed up the oil...."
"That’s correct!"
"And I can just pick up this sheet of green foam, and it’s holding the oil and it’s not even dripping much water back..."
"No, it’s not. And if you want, you can hand-wring it back into your container here and put it back in the water and absorb it all over again!"
Helping to clean up the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico launched Opflex. It was the first commercial deployment. They used more than 2 million square feet. Now the company’s business is expanding rapidly. In the port of New Beford, he’s been demonstrating the presence of oil-contamination and PCBs. Stormwater run-off poses another ecological challenge he’s thinks Opflex could address. And big oil spill in China generated a million-dollar order.
"Do you think of yourself as an inventor?" I asked.
"I never really thought of myself as an inventor," he said. "I just thought of myself as, ah, trying to help solve a problem."
Scott Smith’s hope is that his creative solution can contribute to cleaning-up environmental disasters around the world.
Find out more about Hyannis-based OPFLEX, and watch youtube videos of it at work.
Mutual Muses
Reported by Brian Morris
December 23, 2011
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WITHOUT A LOVER by Barry Hellman (in response to "Something Blue" by Jackie Reeves) She removes her shawl, and what's underneath melts down in a row of loose fringe. Who knows why one color bleeds into another? Maybe she's alone, watching a 1940 film where half-way through Jean Pierre Aumont looks at his wife and says: "Without a lover marriage is unbearable." Someone else might let go of an affair- but for her memories swirl in the background. Darkness around her eyes reminds me of a young woman named Marie, or maybe it was Judith, a girl in accordion pleats who met me in Weeqauahic Park one afternoon to tell me we were through, that nothing could change her mind. It might have been 1950. Spring had arrived early but there no were bluebells in the ground, no use getting down on my knees. |
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"Something Blue" painting by Jackie Reeves
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LISTEN
Each year, about 100 poets and visual artists on Cape Cod come together to collaborate in a program called Mutual Muses. It’s a project where poems trigger new paintings, and paintings inspire new poetry. Brian Morris attended the opening event.
webscript:
At the Cape Cod Cultural Center, painters, sculptors, poets and photographers got together over a pot luck supper. They were there by choice, even though they knew they were about to be pushed beyond their comfort zones. Mutual Muses was started 5 years ago by Lauren Wolk, the Cultural Center’s Associate Director, and some of her colleagues. That first year they had 8 poets and 8 artists. This year there are 46 of each.
Lauren Wolk: Every writer will get one envelope with one image in it. And every painter, photographer, sculptor, whatever, will get a poem. And they go away for a few months and they create something that they’ve been inspired to create by this piece that they’ve been given. And then we put all the results on the walls a few months later, in March.
The new works are not meant to be literal interpretations of what’s in the envelopes. The idea is for the poets and painters to go out on a limb and try fresh artistic approaches. Poet Susan Berlin lives in Yarmouthport.
Susan Berlin: The piece I got last year was a painting, and it was a very still body of water, and I tried and tried and tried and I just could not react to it, I think, because my best friend had just died from drowning. And it made me numb. And that was the poem I wrote - it was entitled “Numb.”
Lauren Wolk addressed the crowd after dinner. She’s like a teacher at the head of a class handing out 3-month homework assignments. It’s all tongue-in-cheek, but she takes a fairly hard line.
Lauren Wolk: You will get what you will get, and you will like it. So just stick with it, suck it up and do it...
The painters and poets converged on a table in front of the room to pick up their assignments. Some took their envelopes back to the tables, but others couldn’t resist the urge to tear them open for a first look. Carole Stasiowski of Cotuit will be writing a poem in response to a photograph.
Carole Stasiowski: I don’t wanna put too many assumptions on it right now, but it’s a wonderful photograph of a church door. And it’s partially open, so I can think of a lot of ways, a lot of directions that could go. I’m looking forward to living with it for a couple of months and seeing where it takes me.
Marstons Mills Painter Chris Reverdy said not everyone connects with their assignments right away.
Chris Reverdy: Lauren said it best tonight. She said, “Don’t judge it. Whether you like it or not, sit with it, keep it, because it’s a challenge. The challenge isn’t really to illustrate exactly what the poet meant as much as it is to just respond very genuinely in some visual way.
How and when to respond is one of the biggest challenges for these creative folks. Procrastination almost always figures into the equation, said poet Greg Hischeck.
Gregory Hischeck: I always hate what I pick. And I don’t worry about it. My only skill is that I don’t panic. And I look at it, and absorb it, and then I avert my eyes, sob a little bit, and then look at it tomorrow and then look at it in about a week, and then there’s a poem. You’ll see me sweating just about a week before the deadline, but still - I didn’t panic until that point.
Painter Karen North-Wells of Brewster takes a slightly different approach.
Karen North-Wells: It has to really be thought about for many weeks. And then I’m kind of a procrastinator. And all of a sudden, energy for that painting comes in view for me to paint - and I hope this will happen quickly.
This year’s Mutual Muses will finish up with a Cultural Center reception in March of next year. Each painting will be hung side by side with the poem that inspired it, and vice-versa. The poets and artists will get to see for the first time how someone else has interpreted their work. Wellfleet multi-media artist Richard Neal says it can take some getting used to.
Richard Neal: I am a slow reader of poetry, and so it takes me a while to sort of understand it sometimes, and I go, “Wow, what’s that mean?” And a long time later I go, “Oh yeah, that’s exactly it.”
CREATIVE LIFE Archives from 2011 - Explore all our stories from 2011
