Coming up on State of the Arts, a young violinist wins accolades in a string competition, an eco artist has a studio that doubles as a lab, and tiny glass beads come to life.

Stay tuned for these stories on State of the Arts.

Hello and welcome to this week's tour of the arts around the country here on AZPM's State of the Arts.

I'm your host, Mary Paul.

To start us off, an interview with a young violinist.

Ella Tasker won the Music Guild of New Mexico's Jackie McGhee Young Artist Strings Competition in 2025.

Here, she sits down to share what it was like to be raised on the violin.

(violin music) Well, Ella, thank you for joining me on "Colores" today.

It's so great to have you here.

So you've been playing since you were three years old, right?

Yes, I've been playing since I was three years old.

So what made you want to get into violin?

My mom is a professional violinist.

My sister's a cellist.

So is my aunt.

My grandma is a violin teacher.

And so I really wanted to play an instrument and my mom thought violin would be a really good fit for me.

What was it like learning the violin?

You have to develop all these techniques and it's really hard to create the sound you want out of the horse hair, which is the bow, and metal and wood.

You have to practice to do the same thing every day and to focus on what you're doing.

And yeah.

How much do you usually practice?

I also have begun piano.

So violin and piano together, it's probably, I try to aim for two and a half hours to three hours a day, but it kind of depends how much I practice at like how the day's going and yeah.

What's your favorite music piece to play?

So I actually have two.

The first one I am currently working on, it's called "Zapateado" by Sarasate.

And it's a really fun, exciting Spanish dance.

And I really like it because I feel like I can just put myself into it, you know, and my personality.

And the second piece is called "Dance Macabre."

And it has a little bit of a Halloween tune to it.

And I think it's a really interesting piece, how the composer wrote the violin to play this music and to make it sound like there's like ghosts and skeletons and stuff like that.

So I think it's just really interesting to see how the composer does that.

And I think I remember you said you heard that first from like a Halloween decoration.

How did that happen?

We just put our Halloween decorations out.

And I think my mom got it from performing this piece in orchestra.

I don't really remember much about the story, but I think one of her friends gave her it, the decoration that played that kind of tune.

So I heard it and I thought it sounded really interesting and I wanted to play it.

And do you have like any inspirations or like other violinists that you look up to?

I look up to my sister who's a cellist and my mom.

And I also look up to the Saëns violinist called Augustin Hadelich.

And I really love how he plays.

So you performed at the Music Guild of New Mexico's Jackie McGehee Young Artist Competition, right?

And you won first place.

Yes.

Congratulations on that.

Thank you.

I was really surprised.

Yeah.

So we very much want to show our viewers your performance.

Can you tell me a little bit about that performance?

This is a performance of me playing the first movement of Mozart, Violin Concerto and D Major.

(upbeat piano music) (upbeat violin music) (upbeat violin music) (upbeat violin music) (upbeat violin music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (audience applauding) So what was it like performing there?

I was really nervous at first when I got onto the stage, but I think as I started playing, I really started to enjoy it.

I was just thinking about what's coming ahead and like just playing the piece really, and yeah.

Like what was going through your mind when you walked out on stage?

Honestly, just nervousness and kind of just reviewing the piece in my head and like what I've learned about it and what I want to do when I play it, yeah.

Why did you choose this piece in particular?

Well, this was actually the graduation piece for the method I was involved in called the Suzuki Method.

And it so happened to be that it was also on the Jackie McGehee list.

So I thought it was a perfect time to learn it and play it.

What's been your favorite memory so far?

My favorite memory of playing the violin was the Jackie McGehee competition.

And I just felt like it was probably the performance that I didn't feel the most nervous I've ever had before.

Really?

Yeah.

Why is it you didn't feel nervous?

Honestly, I think I just focused on the piece and enjoyed sharing my music with other people.

And I think that's why.

What do you love about playing the violin?

Is it that?

Yeah, I love to share my music.

I also love that you can create so many feelings and emotions and colors to your music.

And it's almost like you can paint a story.

What piece are you gonna play for us today?

This is called "Tambourine" by Gretry.

What do you like about this piece?

I can just put my excitement into it and yeah.

That's awesome.

Well, go ahead.

(violin music) (violin music) (violin music) (violin music) (violin music) (violin music) Ohio artist, Marcia Armstrong, explores the relationship between art and science.

Her studio becomes a lab where observations and discoveries are made.

We visit Armstrong's studio and hear more about her recent work.

(upbeat music) If you wanted to put me into some kind of a niche, I would be considered an "eco artist."

My work right now integrates the natural world with the fine arts.

I use a lot of horticulture and the knowledge of horticulture.

I also use geobotany in my work.

So it really is kind of an integration of science and the arts.

Primarily I use a lot of bamboo and a lot of willow.

I'm researching materials.

There's not really a playbook in what I'm doing or the visual art form that I have.

I kind of think of my studio as like a little science lab, which I love.

I observe a lot of things.

I would just like to bring to attention some of the things that are in the natural world that we cannot see.

That is how I come up with my visual expression.

They're not planned out.

They are just what they are as they grow into a form.

Each of the bird nests hold an infrared sensor and a sound board.

As you walk and approach each one, there will be music that's activated.

What I have done is I have taken the sound of five birds that actually do inhabit and make use of the willow grove.

And from that point on, what happens is that I have sent this to a musician to translate that music into bird songs.

So the flautist has gone ahead and she has listened to each of the bird songs and then done her own interpretation of those bird songs with the flute.

(flute music) When you pass by all five of them, there will be this hopefully cacophony, which I can never say, of music.

(flute music) I am not one that can plan out pieces.

I have to do them spontaneously.

And so much of it has to do with finding out what the materials can do and where does that leave me.

And I feel like if there's an answer, an articulation for where the inspiration is, after I start a piece, it almost becomes a conversation within itself where I'll say, this is a good starting point.

Where does it go from here?

And I think that motivates me to find out how to put that piece together.

I have always, always thought there was more than just what we see.

You know, it's under the ground.

Mikelle Hickman-Romine is an artist whose palette is made up of tiny glass beads.

With painstaking detail, she recreates some of Mother Nature's most overlooked creatures.

Here we pay a visit to her home studio, where she talks about her process and her inspiration.

I'm a bead weaver.

So that means I sew little tiny seed beads together with a needle and thread, one bead at a time, to make beaded glass fabric.

And then I make jewelry out of those pieces of fabric.

When I was a little girl, I played with all my dressy, great-grandmothers, like mid-century costume jewelry, and loved it, fell in love for life.

And as I got older and I loved jewelry, I'm very working class, as was my great-grandmother.

So I learned how to make it.

And so I was making earrings, making jewelry, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and started reading some craft magazines.

One of them is called, the Lapidary Journal was very popular then.

And they did a feature on a woman who uses the technique that I'm using now to make hats, handbags, and these huge beaded sphere necklaces, and they were crazy.

And I was like, this is very interesting.

So she had a tutorial in the back of the magazine for how to make a flat-weave flake.

And so I picked it up and tried it.

And immediately I was like, oh, yes, but yes.

So I got really fascinated with this technique and then eventually learned to make some components that are reverse engineered from some antique components and started developing my own line of jewelry.

And then as time goes on, I start pushing it to see how far it can go, making flowers, making floral jewelry, making some stuff like that, dimensional, and then eventually it becomes the problem of how do you make jewelry that doesn't spend most of its life in a box or a drawer?

And that means that it would have to be a successful object as well as a successful piece of jewelry.

And how do you harmonize those things?

There's a component of meaning to it that's necessary.

There's a narrative and a story that's important.

And so I started considering I'm a native Ohio girl.

I wanted to do something that was about my home.

And so I started looking at the native moths and butterflies in Ohio and how I could depict them and their habitat and make these very cool, wearable, life-size, giant silk moths and stuff.

One of the things that's very interesting about trying to get these done, I get these little eye patterns down or whatever, and then trying to figure out how to do this without getting too, too literal.

Because too literal, it looks geometric, it doesn't look natural.

So when to back off and become more painterly, more impressionistic about how to get a good rendering, but also try to hit that uncanny valley thing so that while you were wearing it, somebody might have that moment of, "Do you have a bug on you?"

(laughs) What I'm usually doing is reference photographs of these moths and butterflies.

And I will usually choose one, particularly for the specific markings, because there are wide variations in markings in nature.

And I'm like, "Oh, I'm gonna do this one's markings."

And then another one, it's usually for the position.

So it's like, "Oh, his wings are spread just so, but it's just enough that you can see his underwing."

And then I make a drawing that is measured to scale.

And then I am roughly drawing the markings and stuff.

And then I start making a pattern.

And the first one is usually awful.

But it gives me a place to start.

So I will go over and over again until I have it refined to something that I was like, "Okay, this marking is right."

The ones that have protective eye marking shapes or whatever, they have to kind of look like they're looking at you.

(laughs) Trying to get that right.

And sometimes I'll have to do little tiny studies of just that section until it's pretty correct.

And then once I get an upper wing pattern, I replicate it real quick.

So I have both wings, and then I usually have to do the lower wing pattern.

That black witch moth of mine, I think I made 19 different iterations before I figured out how to get it done.

(soft music) This one, the finishes are what makes it very blingy, right?

But the color, if you let the finish speak for itself, and it's very hyper real.

But once you are just looking at this kind of orange blush mauve beige color scheme, that is actually what the moth looks like.

(soft music) So, you know, and then also when you hold these things up to the light and the light comes through them, that changes a lot.

This is one of the pleasures of working with glass, is that it is a living material that takes a lot of different aspects of the light and uses them.

I get to have a lot of conversations with people about the wonder of the place we are.

You don't have to travel the whole world to see wonders.

Like they're right underneath our feet.

And then it becomes a conversation about leave the leaves, plant some native plants, like figure out how to cultivate even in our human spaces, a place where we get to share our world with these things that belong here and are awesome.

And that wraps it up for this week's edition of State of the Arts.

I'm Mary Paul.

Thanks for watching.