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Artists Lend a Hand,Or a Realistic Foot, To Iraq Amputees

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  • Artists Lend a Hand,Or a Realistic Foot, To Iraq Amputees

    http://online.wsj.com/article_email/...baaAm4,00.html

    Artists Lend a Hand,Or a Realistic Foot, To Iraq Amputees

    With Prosthetics Skills Honed In Hollywood, Mr. O'Brien Helps Out U.S. Soldiers
    By GREG JAFFE
    Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
    May 11, 2005; Page A1

    WASHINGTON -- Two years ago, Chuck O'Brien was in Hollywood making cadavers for "CSI: Miami." His masterpieces included a partially digested torso that spilled from a shark and a finger that oozed sweat.

    But he says he got "sick of making dead bodies" for demanding directors. He also worried that computer animation, cheaper and faster than building fake body parts, was rendering his skill obsolete in the movie business.

    So on a rainy spring morning last month, he found himself hunched over a Marine's foot at Walter Reed Army Medical Center here. Cpl. Corey Webb had lost his left leg in Fallujah last June when his Humvee, rushing to a firefight, collided with a U.S. tank. Now, Mr. O'Brien was painting a silicone replica of the missing appendage as the 23-year-old corporal posed, showing off his remaining foot under bright hot lights.

    "This guy is my foot artist," Cpl. Webb announced to a group of Marines on a goodwill tour who were passing out T-shirts to the wounded. Eyeing the eerily real-looking work in progress, he announced: "It's going to look great in a flip-flop."

    Since November 2003, when he left Hollywood, Mr. O'Brien has been working for Alternative Prosthetic Services, a nine-person company in Southport, Conn., that makes arms, legs and the occasional finger or ear for accident victims and the war wounded. Every Thursday and Friday, Mr. O'Brien, Michael Curtain, who founded the business, and a third artist, Robert Rubino, go to Walter Reed to work on prostheses. On this morning, they were making the foot for Cpl. Webb and a hand for an Army soldier whose arm had been blown off when a suicidal insurgent slammed a truck bomb into his armored vehicle in northern Iraq.

    For years there was limited demand for high-end prostheses, which cost thousands of dollars and are too expensive for most patients. But the Iraq war has generated a large number of amputees for the first time since the Vietnam War. New body armor, which covers only vital organs, has meant that more soldiers are surviving attacks but losing limbs than in previous conflicts. The Pentagon has promised to spare no expense for war amputees.

    The net result for Mr. Curtain is a boom in business. Before the war, the 49-year-old former sculptor says he could look at a hand that he had made five or even 10 years ago and know immediately for whom he had made it. Now that isn't possible. "We've had so many patients in the last three years that I haven't been able to be involved in every aspect of every job," he says.

    He has had to hire three additional artists, including Mr. O'Brien. To keep up with demand, he says, he should probably hire two more. "Everyone is maxed out right now," he says. But he doesn't plan any hiring, because if the war improves in the next few months and the military work slows, he would then have to lay off people.

    Making just one hand or foot typically takes one of Mr. Curtain's artists about three weeks. They start by fabricating a mold of the patient's good limb. Using the mold as a guide, they sculpt mirror-image palm and fingers so that a left hand, say, is transformed into a right one.

    They then make a mold of the sculpted limb and coat the inside of the mold with a thin layer of silicone. The artists peel the silicone coating from the mold, creating what looks like a translucent silicone glove. The artists match the patient's skin tone, adding freckles, moles and veins and then sprinkling in actual hair. During the four-to-eight-hour painting process, the soldiers pose for the artists, flexing their hands or feet periodically so that blood doesn't collect in the real appendage and change the skin tone. Finally, the artists fill the painted silicone coating with rubber.

    At around 10 a.m., the three artists began work with Cpl. Webb and Cpl. Michael Oreskovic, the Army soldier who lost his arm to the truck bomb. Mr. Curtain pulled out a photo album of some of his patients posing with and without their prostheses.

    "What happened to that chick?" Cpl. Webb asked, pointing to a woman missing part of her foot.

    "Frostbite," Mr. Curtain replied.

    Cpl. Webb flipped the page over and glanced at a bearded man who had lost his arm in an industrial accident. "Nice job," he said, admiring the work.

    After they were finished with the catalog, the three artists and two servicemen all huddled in a tiny room under five hot, white lamps. A small fan whirred in the background. A few patients wandered into the makeshift studio to take a look at a finished arm with a heart tattoo that Mr. Curtain had brought down as a demonstration model. Mr. O'Brien, the company's "tattoo guy," painted the heart -- the company's first effort at a tattoo -- when some soldiers began asking whether their missing body art could be reproduced on their prosthetic limbs. He is currently working on his first two real tattoos -- a Celtic cross for an Army sergeant and the name "Emmanuelle" for another soldier.

    The finished limbs look so real that when they are sitting in the open, unattached, passersby are startled. Last summer, Mr. Curtain says he was passing through the Houston airport with a bag full of finished prostheses when one of the security personnel pulled him aside to search his bag. Before he could tell her what was inside, she had begun to rummage through the duffel.

    The woman let out a gasp and her colleagues all came running over to see what was wrong. "She was really pale. She kept saying, " 'You can't do that,' " Mr. Curtain recalls.

    As his two artists painted, Mr. Curtain worked on the fingernails and toenails, chatted with the doctors and former patients and checked up on his colleague's work. "You need some more reds and oranges around his toe," Mr. Curtain told Mr. O'Brien.

    Cpl. Webb, the Marine, dozed off. A few feet away, Cpl. Oreskovic, who was having his hand made, talked with his father about his plans. The 23-year-old soldier said he intended to go to college.

    "Why not stay in the Army?" his father suggested. "You could go into military intelligence."

    Cpl. Oreskovic shook his head. "If they won't let me go back to my scout platoon, I want to get out," he said.

    Mr. Rubino, the artist, was busy painting Cpl. Oreskovic's pale, white skin and freckles. Freckles are a bear, Mr. Rubino said. But the toughest skin tone to match is Hispanic skin, which has a deep reddish brown tint that is distorted by the silicone's slight grayish hue, he said as he worked.

    As he painted, another group of Marines popped their heads into the studio to see what was happening. "Do you do real artists' work, like painting pictures and stuff?" one of the visiting Marines asked.

    Mr. Rubino, who is also a soldier in the Connecticut National Guard, said he did abstract oil paintings in his spare time. Mr. Curtain said that back when he was a sculptor, "My goal was to get into a gallery in Manhattan and become a fine artist."

    Shortly after he arrived in New York, he got into the prosthetics business to help pay the bills while he tried to find galleries that would showcase his work. Eventually, though, he gave up on his art and started his own prosthesis business. It has been eight years since he did any sculpting outside of work, he says.

    The prosthetic artists' work incorporates all the principles of fine art, such as balance and harmony. "But it's really more of a technical art," says Mr. Rubino, the painter. "Lots of the creativity has been taken out because you are searching for that realism."

    Mr. Rubino paused from putting the finishing touches on his hand. "The patients are the best part," he said. "The resiliency of these guys is incredible."
    "So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand." Thucydides 1.20.3

  • #2
    Good news...
    No man is free until all men are free - John Hossack
    I agree completely with this Administration’s goal of a regime change in Iraq-John Kerry
    even if that enforcement is mostly at the hands of the United States, a right we retain even if the Security Council fails to act-John Kerry
    He may even miscalculate and slide these weapons off to terrorist groups to invite them to be a surrogate to use them against the United States. It’s the miscalculation that poses the greatest threat-John Kerry

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