Frederick Hammersley Fund, New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund, and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts and Viewers Like You.

MOKHA LAGET’S BOLD GEOMETRIC ABSTRACTIONS CREATE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN COLOR, SPACE, AND CULTURE THAT TRANSCEND THE BOUNDARIES OF THE CANVAS.

AFTER A LIFE-CHANGING INJURY, BYRON MAY TRANSITIONS FROM GRAPHIC DESIGN TO CREATING LIGHT- REACTIVE STAINLESS-STEEL PAINTINGS.

USING EXPERIMENTAL PHOTOGRAPHY AND NATURAL ELEMENTS, HOLLY ROMANO CREATES LUMINOUS, ONE-OF-A-KIND PRINTS TO CAPTURE THE SPIRIT OF NATURE IT'S ALL AHEAD ON COLORES!

ABSTRACT RELATIONSHIPS >>Mohka: Geometric abstraction, I think has to do with relationships.

Everything is about relations and relationships, whether it's people, whether it's colors, whether it's shapes, and the works that I make address that element as well.

If you look, you can start thinking about what are these relationships about?

What do they mean to me?

What do they do to me?

North Africa was a really special place for me, and I think as children we're imprinted with the colors and the light of the place we grow up, and there was a very golden glow to that place in part because of the desert and the red sands.

So it was a strong foundation in so many ways for color, for light, for geometry, and a place that I adored.

>>Faith: Can you tell me about North Light?

What was the inspiration behind this piece?

>>Mohka: North Light was a commission for the US Embassy in Nouakchott, which is a capital of Mauritania, a country in the Northwestern part of Africa.

And I knew the city, I knew the lay of the land.

So, when the commission came, I had a very strong feeling about how I could express this as a visual piece.

When you look at the painting, you have a sense that there's an architecture there, that it could be a place, but it's unclear.

Again, it's in that ambiguous zone where they could just be shapes and colors, but they are a place, but they're not a recognizable place, and that is the geometric abstraction part of it.

Geometry historically was something that was considered closer to the divine because it had this precision and proportional perfection.

I don't use it that way.

I like to shake it up a bit because the idea that perfection is anywhere near our human reach is, or just not really in the cards.

And the fact that I can use geometric abstraction as a way to also subvert this perfection and use it to create a gentle chaos is maybe closer to the way that we as humans live with ambiguity, with shapes and colors that are not always in perfect harmony.

>>Faith: What drew you to explore music as a visual medium through your scores?

>>Mohka: I have to go back to a residence in particular that I did in Morocco, in Northern Morocco where I was staying in a town where the architecture of the place was regrouped, basically Muslim architecture, Jewish architecture, Christian architecture.

Because these peoples had been trading and living together for many centuries.

I was fascinated by the fact that there was this juxtaposition and the geometry of it.

During my time in Morocco, I painted a piece called Moroccan Capriccio, which was a painting some nine feet wide and composed of elements of architecture.

That piece ultimately became the subject of a score.

[Music] And I met the composer at another residency.

I had done Bobby Ge as a young composer who discovered my work and was interested in putting it to music, and I had heard his music as well.

It was a wonderful cross-pollination of these residencies.

[Music] It's a universal language, basically.

Geometry is and color.

They're both universal language.

They transcend culture, they transcend people.

(Music) I would say relationships are fundamental elements from the moment that we're born.

We're having to deal with navigating the world, whether it's objects or people and events.

And for me, growing up in North Africa, spending time in France, being part of the French culture and then the American culture, that was a lot of navigating of languages, of different cultures, of realizing that there's no single monolithic predictability in any of it.

So there's a kind of displacement that occurs, but it's also an opportunity to create new relationships to realize that it can be something very positive and that it's okay if it doesn't fit neatly.

I mean, this is one of the reasons my shaped canvases are for the most part, non-orthogonal.

They're not square, they're not rectangular, because life is not a straight line.

And these diagonals are about shooting off into the architecture, into the unknown.

And the diagonal is interesting also because it's historically considered to be a line that is on the verge of falling.

So, you're always a little bit on that edge.

Life is not perfectly balanced.

It's not a straight line.

There are a lot of zigzags, and it's something to be celebrated to relish the unpredictability and the enrichment that that can bring.

And so the relationships are always new, are always different, and they're not always pleasant, but they're interesting.

It's something that gives you a lot of wonder in life.

FINDING THE LIGHT (Music) My art is a combination of graphic design and colors.

I was in the printing business for so long, I became a good graphic designer.

When I started painting, I use those skills to develop art.

I had art pop into my head.

I see shapes and colors.

And that's what I put on my canvas, which is stainless steel.

There are certain things that I do to the stainless steel.

And it is actually a brushed stainless steel.

It is just like the front of a refrigerator door.

It is what I buy in cut sizes.

What makes me unique in the art world is doing work on stainless steel, and the benefits you can get from it are incredible because of the light reflection that happened from my work.

When the light hits my work, it changes it all day long.

The more light you apply to my work, the better, the more vivid they become, the more translucent they become.

It is kind of like looking at the difference in looking at a printed piece and looking at the same piece on your computer monitor.

I experiment with a lot of different colors.

But mainly my colors are primary colors.

I like the bold, the big and bold pieces that I've done probably more than softer pieces and the paint I am using is a proprietary paint that I helped develop with a chemist in Dallas.

I've had pieces that have been out in the community now for 12 to 14 years that are doing just fine.

All I use is a palette knife.

I don't use a paintbrush on my art.

Basically how hard I press that palette knife into that metal makes the paint thinner or denser.

The thinner I'm make the paint, the more translucent it becomes, the more light reflects, and the more crazy things happen to it.

It takes practice and I’ve got quite a few years of practice.

My pain is extremely dense.

It's like a heavy maple syrup.

It is not loke an acrylic or even an oil.

I can work it and work it and work it and there's things that it does that separates this paint from the rest of the paints out there.

Colors don't mix unless I forced them to mix.

In other words, I can take reds, yellows, blues, put them down on a sheet of stainless steel, covered them up with a dark blue and then open them up with a palette knife and the color underneath remain perfectly true, true, to color.

It's really an amazing thing to see.

I don't have to build texture with my art.

I basically just have to apply the right paint.

So, we got it to the point where I could get a color let's say red.

I could get a red and smooth or I could get a red that wrinkles, same color.

It looks exactly the same when you put it down on a piece of stainless steel or even around a canvas but as it dries it displays perfectly smooth or it ripples.

I can dictate where texture goes without having to build texture which is something most artists have to do.

If they want texture, they have to create texture.

Mine happens through the drying process.

When I want to blend colors, I create an under painting and that’s the first thing that goes down.

A lot of my art is a three, four or five step process.

I'll create the underpainting which is just like background noise.

And then I'll put color on top of that after that stride.

when I use that technique, and my paint has many different techniques, some that I haven't even discovered yet.

The paint is a lot thinner because I'm using varnish to dilute the color.

And the colors actually do start mixing together.

But they stay so translucent, that you can see straight through to the underpainting on the finished pieces.

And, it is one of my favorite techniques of painting with this paint.

I'm not sure that it's necessarily the customer's favorite technique, they seem to like the bold colors of primary colors more so than I think the softer colors, but I enjoyed doing the other technique as well.

And I've used it quite a bit on pieces and sold pieces like that, too.

I had art classes in high school and my art class teacher is pretty proud of me from the sixth grade.

And then again in the 11th and 12th grade.

I actually did some pieces for our business before all this.

I did some pieces for behind my desk in my offices.

And I did some pieces for the front foyer.

Two of them are up there now.

Other than that, the graphic design is really the closest that I got to art.

My art is so different in person.

I've sold some pieces online, but it's not nearly as good as somebody seeing your art in person, especially with my art because you just can't relay what my art does over image.

It changes so dramatically.

I can take a picture of a canvas that I've done, and it looks exactly like it on the internet.

But I can't do that with my art on metal.

I've never been able to predict what piece would sell.

I would go into a show thinking this piece would go first and should I take this piece or not?

And the one that I thought should I take this piece or not was the one that sold first.

It has always shocked me as to what the public likes or dislikes out there.

Oh, and every community is different.

It's been a great ride.

I did play golf competitively all my life.

I had major double fusion back surgery 14 years ago, that went awfully wrong.

And overnight, I was basically crippled and completely through with golf.

I got into art because of my pain.

I was unable to work.

I was on heavy pain medication.

I started painting really, to try to find something to take my mind off pain, never intending to sell the first piece.

And it did.

I was able to escape pain through art, which is pretty amazing.

I created SB magazine 21 years ago.

Before then, all Shreveport had was tabloids.

We didn't have a really nice publication representing Shreveport and Bossier.

It was a big project.

It took a number of years for the communities to accept it, but when they did, they really did.

And we've been going since 2000 with SB magazine, and I've enjoyed graphically what I've been able to contribute to that.

(Music) CONNECTING TO NATURE I started out as a graphic designer and did that for many years and then I became a stay-at-home-mom and still needed a way to be creative.

I used photography as a way to document my kids experience of COVID and the pandemic and being together all the time and in that, I was hoping to try to find ways to still do photography, but also hands on.

when I learned it in college, we still had dark rooms and films and processing, and that is just not available anymore, and so I found my way into experimental photography, alternative processes.

So using a lot of like instant films, vintage cameras, and UV sensitive papers manipulation techniques and things like that.

I have always felt a deep connection to nature, and even as a kid, I felt many, many hours outdoors playing.

It has always been a way for me to calm down, reconnect and kind of de-stress, and doing the lumen prints with nature is kind of my way of honoring that relationship.

I feel like the prints, themselves, they are like exposing the energy and the spirit of nature.

A lot of that work relies on the weather and the plant materials.

So, if it's hot, if it's cold, if it's humid, how many hours of sunlight, the temperature, if the plants are fresh or dried, and all of those things create different effects on the prints, and so, I think of this as collaborators together, and so I kind of assemble everything and then nature does the rest.

I try to compose depending on what kind of I’m feeling from the plants or what type of concept I’m trying to put together.

I’ll put the plants together on top of the paper, and sometimes I’d add sometimes water or vinegar or something, because I will get different effects, and then I will put a plexiglass over the top and plant them together and place them outside.

then depending upon the weather if it is a hot sunny day, it can take about an hour, but if it is winter in cold, that's the opposite extreme, that could take two to three days that I will leave it outside.

And then I bring them in, back into my dimmed basement, and I take it all apart.

I have to be careful not the tear the paper.

so you can see here that I created this circular kind of shadow.

on this paper, the lilies look almost like ghost pedals.

That is kind of like a final support to nature.

I actually don't use chemicals to process the prints like you would in traditional dark room practice.

I scan them instead, on my scanner and then my digital file look becomes my, like, final, original.

Sometimes if there is a piece of dirt or mulch or a bug or maybe there was a bug on the leaf that I didn't notice and creates an empty spot, then I’ll fix it, but at this point, or sometimes the plant materials dry and almost adhere to the paper, and I can't get them off without tearing the paper.

this is where I fix those little, I don't want to call them imperfections, but and then if I want to do any color adjusting, if I want the colores more saturated or less saturated.

I try to stay as true to the original.

There are some instances where I have completely changed the coloring.

for example, the ones that I have left out in the snow, and those tend to have a blue tint, because I want to honor the fact that it was winter when I made them.

I heard about art spot from a friend of mine and the focus was to bring attention to the fact that while art change and global warming are big topics for people, and you don't know where to begin, and you feel like that is too big of a topic to tackle, my idea is to do something as simple as a pollinator garden in your yard even if you have a few square feet of space, and my display is called the pollinators, and it is named that because I have used native Ohio plants and then also other plants that are known to attract the bees, the butterflies, the moths and use those to make my prints along with a circular shape which is to represent birth, sun, the cycles of nature.

I most often will go to one of the city parks, but I like to find the areas of the park that are more wild and less taken care of and manicured, because I want to get a more like authentic nature experience.

And I also have been known to pull over to the side of the road and walk under a bridge to look at a stream or a creek and see what's under there and what plants are under there.

I do a lot experimenting.

I use an app on my phone when I'm out foraging for plants to help me to identify the plants especially if I'm looking for native plants or invasive plants I want to know what I'm collecting.

And then also, if I'm using them for a print, I always write what plants I have used so I can keep it for my own information.

So, it says, "those that is are possibly fig buttercup."

It all started because I cared about the planet, was trying to live sustainable, which then led to me wanting to be outdoors which then led to me wanting to make sure I had the right plants in my yard, which then me to seeking out what are those plants, and then finding out that some of those things are endangered like the bees So I thought, "How can I get this message out through my art?"

Also, yeah I do have to consider where I'm sourcing my materials.

That's why I consciously made the choice to have a lot of pollinator plants in my yard, because it is at my disposal, I can do whatever I want with those, when I'm foraging out in the wild, I try to minimize my impact, so if there is a piece of bark on the ground, I'm going to take it, yes, I did trim some flowers today, but in my mind, the message I ' m trying to get out and the impact that I'm hoping to make is going to be worth the risk that I might be taking.

(Music) The Award Winning Arts and Culture series ¡Colores!

is now available on the PBS app, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and at nmpbs.org.

From classic episodes to brand new shows, ¡COLORES!

is everywhere!

watch now on your favorite NMPBS platforms.

(Music) Funding for Colores was provided in part by: Frederick Hammersley Fund, New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund, and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation, New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts and Viewers Like You.