This sunny Saturday in West Tisbury, Allen Whiting is out at his easel, working at his latest landscape and simultaneously working at his answers to questions about his art.
His approach to both tasks is similar: He goes at it enthusiastically for awhile, then pauses to reconsider things, then goes back and adds another layer.
Ask, for example, why an artist who seldom shows outside his own gallery has decided to put on a retrospective of his work at Featherstone Center for the Arts, and he gives a succession of answers.
First up, he is glib.
A quick glance at the program for this year’s Hebrew Center Summer Institute speaker series is enough to show that change has happened at the institute.
It is suddenly more diverse in both subject matter and guests.
Chalk it up to the new chairman of the summer institute committee, Geraldine Alpert, and her desire to see the series broaden its appeal.
“I thought I would try to get a more diverse program that attracts people from all over the Vineyard, not just the Jewish population,” she said.
The towns of Edgartown and Tisbury this week signed agreements with the Cape and Vineyard Energy Cooperative estimated to save them a collective $9.4 million in electricity costs over the next 20 years.
And the energy will not only be cheap, but clean. The cooperative will build large solar arrays at three different locations in Edgartown, with a combined production capacity of 4.5 megawatts, and one in Tisbury with a capacity of about 1.25 megawatts.
Tisbury selectmen have given the latest site superintendent of the town’s new emergency service building two weeks to show he can rescue the trouble-plagued project or follow his two predecessors out the door.
The board’s decision, taken reluctantly on Tuesday night, was taken despite advice from the town’s project supervisor, recommended against the appointment of Dennis Mason as the permanent site superintendant.
For more than a decade, it conveyed a cryptic message to all who passed on State Road in Vineyard Haven. But now the rough plywood “Hoo Rah for Bill” sign, which declared the late Craig Kingsbury’s support for President Clinton, is trash.
It was pulled down on the orders of the town’s building and zoning inspector, Kenneth Barwick,
He’s an academic and an adventurer, an Oxford-educated expert in Sanskrit who 50 years ago traveled overland from Damascus to Baghdad, then sailed across the Arabian Sea from Bombay to Aden in an untested boat with limited charts.
