[Narrator] "Art Loft" is brought to you by [Narrator 2] Where there is freedom there is expression.

The Florida Keys and Key West.

[Narrator] And the Friends of South Florida PBS.

"Art Loft", it's the pulse of what's happening in our own backyard, as well as the taste of the arts across the United States.

In this episode, the inspiration behind the work.

Painter Gavin Jordan, tells us about his calling.

We set off into the swamps with sculptor Hugh Hayden, and artist Michele Oka Doner introduces us to her preferred habitat.

All that and more in this episode of "Art Loft."

Painter Gavin Jordan has spent the last decade rediscovering his passion for sketching and painting.

The Fort Lauderdale CPA explains how a sudden urge to draw changed everything.

It's funny, because halfway through most of these paintings I'm like, "Gavin what are you doing?

Why don't you just paint normally, right?

Why are you going through this?"

But you know, when the painting is complete, and I step back and I'm like, wow, I did that.

You know?

So it's a difficult technique to do.

What keeps me doing it and keeps me going is actually the reaction from viewers, right?

Because, you know, there's 2D, but 3D adds a different dimension to the experience of seeing the piece.

My name is Gavin Jordan.

I am the gallery owner of 24 Marie Fine Art Gallery.

I'm also an artist.

And you know, some of my work is here at the gallery as well.

And you know, Gavin is also an executive, right?

A business executive, a CPA.

So Gavin is many things.

So in 2016, I was doing an assignment in New Jersey, right, for a Jamaican-owned business.

And I was the CFO for that business.

It was a stressful experience.

And I remember I was driving by a Michael's Art Store one Saturday afternoon, and you know, I said to my wife, Tamika, "You know what?

I want to stop at Michael's, and I need to get some pencils, because I want to start sketching again."

When I think about it, I can't really tell you why it happened the way it happened.

You know, I often tell people it's like, you know, when Spider-Man just got bit by that radioactive bug, and then, you know, suddenly he has superpowers.

It kind of felt like that, right?

I was posting my sketches on Facebook and Instagram for a while, and the response was, you know, that was overwhelming, in terms of the reaction to pieces.

That passion that was reignited in 2016, you know, caused me to go through a process of significant exploration, right?

So I started with sketching with pencils, then charcoal, you know, a painting with acrylics, inks, oil paints.

And I eventually started working with mixed media.

I was doing a lot of research.

This is my mechanical brain now.

As soon as I started painting, I wanted to have a style.

I was like, boy, you know, I need my style to, I need something to show that this is me.

It's very humbling, right?

It teaches you about patience, right?

You have to be, you know, vulnerable, and then you have to figure out how you get your authentic voice to come out in your paintings.

So it took me a while to figure that out.

So I started exploring with mixed media, and after that process, I decided to merge that three dimensional element with traditional painting, you know, styles, right?

You know, so more impressionist.

Then you have the mixed media coming in.

So I decided to go the route of screws, you know.

So during my exploration with nails, you know, after, you know, the disaster of hitting my fingers a few times, I said to myself, you know, what is easier to use than actual nails?

So this is the tool of the trade.

So I have my drill, so I paint with a drill at my feet, and I also paint with brushes here, you know, with my oil paints as well.

So given this particular piece that I'm working on, so I will, after going through the process of doing the sketch, and I've worked out how I want this piece to look on screws, then I will look at the sketch and with intuition determine the depth of each screw, the positioning of each screw and so on.

So I will go through this until I'm satisfied, and then what I will typically do, is just rub my hand over the screws to just ensure that what I'm feeling is the indentation of the face, right?

And these are the cheekbones here.

The nose is also here.

There's an indentation here, and so on.

So I will go through that process until I get the perfect, you know, sculpted image on screws.

I'm not connected to a painting emotionally.

It's hard for me to complete a painting, right?

So I can't just paint random objects without any sort of emotional value to it, right?

And what I've found, creating pieces that have that kind of emotional value mixed with the three dimension, you know, unlocks a different experience for my viewers, right?

So I want people to experience what I call the other side of the story, and not focus on the single story.

When I came up with this idea for opening a space, right, one of the issues I had in my creative journey was finding spaces that were open to showing my work.

So when I opened this space, I decided that, you know what, I need to figure out how I also help those other artists to get exposure.

So we decided to set up this space in, you know, the Flagler Village.

You know, there's a lot of history, as it relates to African Americans on Sistrunk.

I mean, it was one of the largest settlements for African Americans in Fort Lauderdale.

We decided that, you know what, this upcoming area would be a great area to have a gallery that's dedicated to the African experience, right?

You know, because our culture is, there's a thread that ties us all together, but our experiences are just so different.

So this guy's walking, having done a day's work, I mean, does he feel fulfilled?

Has he lived a life that he's comfortable with?

And you know, I decided to name this one Old Life.

So it was kind of me asking myself that question as well.

You know, have I done what I wanted to do?

So one of the responses to that question was actually for me to pursue my creative journey.

[Narrator] Our partners at the ICA Miami, a museum known for continuous experimentation and contemporary art, introduce us to sculptor Hugh Hayden, as he takes us to where his work begins.

Doing the show that was originating at the ICA Miami, I wanted to work with a wood that had a local cultural significance.

The museum is in Miami, it's in Florida, it's in the Southeastern United States.

It's a Gulf state.

The wood that I honed in on was bald cypress, which is a tree that grows in many parts of the Southern and Southeastern United States.

As a gardener growing up, I was aware of it in Texas, where I'm from, but also my mother is from Northern Louisiana, and it grows there.

It's often a tree associated with growing in swamps, and having these sort of buttressing trunks and these leak knees that come out of the water.

Something that was very particular to it as an American tree.

So it always, to me had some sort of lore.

Cut it so we get one piece out of this.

I've been working with wood in this way with different types of trees all over the world now.

Each tree I've chosen to work with has some like cultural, local specificity, or environmental or material property that I feel enhances the work, whether it's like just it's an better exterior grade wood, or it has some traditional other material history.

Once this gets back to the wood shop, we'll take it on the bandsaw, cut off the bark.

Then when it gets the final pieces, I use a cut saw grinding disc, it's to blend the transition of the base of the branch into the board.

And I'm essentially gonna reassemble it to look like a new tree.

In the final sculpture, the average viewer won't know what type of tree it is.

They won't know the gender or the race of the skeleton.

And so I like all those things that sort of, there are broad gestures that provide specificity, but at the same time, abstraction, and sort of like this could be anyone.

While there is like a very specific reason and choice and difficulty evolved with using bald cypress, a tree growing in the middle of the swamp, there is a level of specificity that I like about that, those connections and those roots, and like sort of family tree, or even thinking about the legacy of, you know, some people said of lynching, you know, all that sort of Southern history is there, but at the same time it's not there, it could just be extract and cause someone oblivious.

[Narrator] Commissioner, the nonprofit building community by connecting those new to collecting directly with artists, introduces us to Michele Oka Doner.

Her five-decade career is fueled by a lifelong study and appreciation of the natural world.

This is what's called wearing your heart on your sleeve.

Look how beautiful that is and how you can see life, but you see age.

But it's still beating.

You can just feel its energy, its pulse.

This is a grand allee.

This is the extended neighborhood I grew up in, and these are the homes of my classmates where you would go and walk after school.

And Fair Green Drive where I grew up is the poster street for Miami Urban Canopy.

I happily find myself at this age, guardian of the great Miami Beach banyan tree.

This tree was planted in 1926 or '27 by the Pancoast family, who received the seed from Java, from David Fairchild.

The banyan tree and I grew up together.

When the mayor made me guardian, he said, "Michele, may I refer to this tree as your sister?"

The Miami I grew up in was still a small town.

The sun was shining, the sky was blue, the clouds were few and were blown away all by the tropical breezes.

And there was a sense of joy and purpose.

A walk on the beach was a wonderful opportunity for me to throw a bouquet back to a city that I loved, and a city and place that had given me a language that I have been working with now from many years.

There's almost 9,000 individual bronzes that were put in over a 25year period.

So I had a lot of assistance on this project.

I also wanted people, when they landed here, to understand that this wasn't any place, in that the Humboldt Current comes through and they deposited seeds and beautiful things on the beach.

Even far away from the Amazon waves came bearing gifts.

I think it's important to counter the effect that billionaires collect art, and everybody else kind of feels left out.

Commissioner, with its mission statement, is bringing art back to where it began, to the intention of having the world around us transformed and translated by people who understand and have the tools to make that happen, make that occur.

[Narrator] Next, we head to New York City to meet an up and coming instrumentalist.

WNAT's NYCARTS introduces us to Bokyung Byun, a classical guitarist interpreting music in a way that's very much her own.

So what drew me to the guitar is actually very coincidental.

I started with piano, but it didn't quite click with me, and my parents always wanted me to have some kind of music education, because they couldn't have it when they were younger.

So we were just watching TV one day while folding laundry and just a guitarist popped up on the TV and I said, "I want to do just that."

And it was just all a coincidence after that that I started with the guitar.

So very early on I started with this really renowned pedagogue in Korea, his name's Tesu Kim.

Again, there was a coincidence, because after having learned guitar for a year or so, my parents had to move.

So we had to find a new teacher and we were recommended to go find this teacher to study with.

And this was when we weren't even considering having guitar as a, you know, a serious career.

So we just went to his, just walked into his guitar academy, and it was just from then on I really studied with him for a long time.

Then I moved to China when I was 12, by myself, to study with this, again, another renowned Chinese professor.

And he invited me to come study with him.

So what happened was, after having studied in China, I went back to Korea for a little bit just to kinda settle and see what I wanted to do next.

And my parents, they're not musicians, so they didn't really know how to go about finding teachers and things like that, et cetera.

So what they did was they emailed everyone that they could find online with the videos that were on YouTube.

William Kanengiser of Los Angeles Guitar Quartet took up on this email and he said, "Great, come study with me."

So there I was packing again and moved all the way to Los Angeles by myself.

You know, guitar in general, it's really popular in any country.

I think guitar was featured more often in the film music industry in Korea, so I was very familiar with the sound, and my mom would always listen to pop songs that would have acoustic guitar in it.

I performed "Mazurka Apasionada" by Augustine Barrios, who's regarded as the Paganini of the guitar from the jungles of Paraguay.

And the piece is actually also titled as "The Soul of Maria Esther."

So when I perform the piece, I try to kind of bring out the romantic quality of it, the sensual quality of the piece, as much as possible.

Having won the Avery Fisher Grant, it will really allow me to follow the footsteps of all these great masters of the guitar and keep expanding the repertoire for the instrument.

And it will really allow me to commission and continue to work with composers.

[Narrator] From a classical guitarist to a Keys spin on flamenco and bluegrass.

We head to the "Art Loft" archives to meet Dave Feder, an artist still performing across the Florida Keys.

I was born in Niagara Falls and my dad was military, so we were all over the place.

And then came down here to visit my grandmother in the early eighties after school, and she said, "You should go check out the Keys."

I said, "Okay," and I never left.

I play mostly guitar, but when I was growing up, I played piano.

When guitar decided it was gonna be my instrument, I started, I got a job in a rock and roll band, played rock and roll, and that was kind of fun.

And then I had a blues band for years, and that was also kinda fun.

I started exploring the gypsy music and Brazilian, and there's been a lot of approximations over the years.

I'm the director of an organization called Islamorada Community Entertainment.

We built an amphitheater for the town, and we bring in the Bluegrass Fest and the Day Jam and Shakespeare.

And what we try to do is make a safe space for people to come, bring their kids, and experience this stuff.

And what's great about bluegrass is little teeny kids can participate and old people in wheelchairs can participate.

You play an instrument, we're gonna stick you up on stage.

And people love that.

And I think it's very warm and fuzzy.

I went to school for a while for engineering, to RIT.

The thing about engineering for me about, 'cause I design amplifiers, and when I first moved to the Keys, I was helping Audubon design little radios for the birds before satellites became cheap.

And I love that kind of stuff.

And to me, it's another kind of, it's like painting.

We were in a restaurant 20 years ago and the guy said, "I want a jazz band."

I said, "Okay, I'd put together this great jazz band," and the guy said, "No, you know, jazz like the Gypsy Kings."

And I said, "Oh, that kind of jazz."

And so immediately we wrote a song, which was this song.

It goes...

So the whole band is doing this.

The drummer's playing with his hands on the drum set.

And it became this song, "SalAgua", which became the name of the band that I started called Salagua-Azul.

And then I explored the flamenco stuff.

I had a friend named Pedro who I would trade him blues lessons for flamenco lessons.

So he showed me this, which is called an abanico rasgueado.

That was really cool.

Argentinian tango music I'm really into now.

Then there's the bluegrass stuff, which I really also love.

And of course there's the blues.

Oh, classical music.

That kind of stuff is very pretty for me.

I've never played a song twice the same way.

And every time it sounds like a different song.

It's just a different expression.

And when I play a show, I always tell people, they say, "Well, what are you gonna play?

What's your song list?"

I say, "I don't know."

It's art.

I'm gonna get there, and whatever is inspiring, I'm heading towards beauty.

[Narrator] "Art Loft" is on Instagram at artloftsfl.

Tag us on your art adventures.

Find full episodes, segments and more at artloftsfl.org, and on YouTube at South Florida PBS.

"Art Loft" is brought to you by [Narrator 2] Where there is freedom, there is expression.

The Florida Keys and Key West.

[Narrator] and the Friends of South Florida PBS.