Amber Voorhies

Season 11 Episode 12 | 28m 45sVideo has Closed Captions

Amber Voorhies

This week on Art Rocks!, meet Central Louisiana artist, Amber Voorhies, who is just as skilled at the painter's easel as she is at the potter's wheel. Her paintings and ceramic vessels equally and impressively capture nature's elemental forces. Using clay from the region, Voorhies also teaches pottery at the River Oaks Square Arts Center in Alexandria, Louisiana.

03/22/2024

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Art Rocks! is a local public television program presented by LPB

Amber Voorhies

Season 11 Episode 12 | 28m 45sVideo has Closed Captions

03/22/2024

Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback

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This time on Rocks will meet an Alexandria artist making beautiful things in both two and three dimensions and watch as one artist's glass Bead mosaics reveal the light within these stories right now. Art rocks accommodations provided by Hotel Bentley and condos in Alexandria, Louisiana, a hotel steeped in traditions and history since 1908. More at Visit Hotel Bentley, Tor.com Art Rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you. Hello. Thank you for joining us for Art Rocks. With me, James Fox Smith from Country Roads magazine. It's not often we meet an artist who's just as comfortable at the painter's easel as she is at the potter's wheel. But this describes Amber Vorhees, whose paintings capture nature's elemental forces as impressively as the ceramic vessels that she crafts from the clay of her central Louisiana home. We visited Voorhees Studio in Alexandria's River Oaks Square Arts Center, where, surprise, surprise, she teaches pottery classes to I went to school for studio art. There, I focused on ceramics, but I also got to explore the world of painting. I use the medium that I find I can express myself the best with whatever it is that I'm exploring at the time. With ceramics, I studied under Bob Howell. He upholds the standard for the craft and the art of clay. Bob Howell was my professor at Louisiana College. I would like to continue that legacy that he instilled in us, that love for careful work and the good craftsmanship. I love ceramics because of the connection that we have to history with it. And it sort of marries art with science. It allows us to explore avenues in almost a scientific way, changing one variable or another variable. And let us really practice that intrepid thing that we want to experiment and try new things and get dirty. I create mostly functional ceramic ware, particularly vases, and I like to embellish them with often times the scraps of clay that mimic patterns in nature. I love to look at waves and ripples in the sand and scales of fish and clouds, and I love to notice patterns and similarities, and I try to show that in some abstract way. It might look to you like ears or hands or fins. I am simply using the clay in a way that replicates or mirrors those patterns that are found in nature. I love throwing on the wheel. I love the metaphor that the clay provides when I contemplate what I'm doing with Clay. I'm also thinking about how I live and how I walk and how the universe works. So centering the self, you can center the clay and the work grows from that. I will alter my forms after I throw them on the wheel, but only slightly. I like to think of it as an allowing of the medium as well as an affecting of the medium. So I try to balance that with my glazes. I tend to lean toward colors that may be make you think of Greek pottery or ancient pottery. The River Oaks Art Center, where I have a studio and I work, we have a community of potters and artists and we love to experiment with different things that we can do with clay. One of those things is Raku firings. We fashioned kilns out of trash cans, essentially for a couple of decades with a monastery guide for most of that time. And I love the Montessori philosophy and the Montessori method. It's very akin to the creative process where you pull in something from your environment that starts. You want a track and allows you to explore and takes you through. You almost digest it and then you give it back in some way that you are left with an artifact of your own journey. At River Oaks, we have started offering ceramics classes, and I love the educational setting that we provide. It's not part of an academic setting. We are teaching the skills, but we are not necessarily looking for a product that is going to be graded. About 15 years ago we had a consultant from Kalamazoo, Michigan, come in and create a plan for us that was for an educational component that we referred to as our arts academy. The art center. River Oaks wasn't quite poised for that undertaking at the time. It didn't take off. Our community wasn't very receptive to it. With Amber coming around, being out of retirement from the education system and really wanting to focus still somewhat on education, this was almost the perfect fit, as is reflected in her pieces. It was cosmic. She is the perfect temperament for these classes. Within a matter of hours, all four of her classes had failed, and these typically have anywhere from 8 to 10 participants per class. Our community was very receptive to it and demonstrated their willingness to take part. So it was very rewarding for us as an art center to see this happening. I tend to work in waves, shifting back and forth between painting and ceramics, and whatever it is that I'm inspired by at the time is what I'll follow. I'll take it through to completion and then I'll move to another arena. I create paintings so that they will look like they exist outside of time. I don't have a definite light source. I like to sort of play with that and I want them to look as though you could have come upon it thousands of years ago or sometime in the future. I incorporate a lot of stars in my work and the stars represent a lot for me. I think they show a connection between what is here on Earth and what is outside of Earth so they can connect us to our ancestors and our loved ones who aren't with us on Earth anymore. I used to hide a lot of stars in my work, and now I just put them everywhere. I like them to be seen. I love what I can do with the Cypress paintings, with the composition, because I can show the reflection in the water, which carries its own metaphor the cypress trees themselves and what they represent as far as like longevity and not rotting in water. And I create these paintings as a sort of ode to our beautiful environment here in Louisiana. Some of my work has evolved to include Native American bull boats. I just became interested in these boats that were created for transport rather than speed. They were created to haul a lot of items down a river. And I started thinking about how beautiful that is just to carry your things and not try to get somewhere fast. I love ancient cave art and a lot of my paintings reflect that love and that interest. My daughters ride horses and that is a very common subject matter in my work. I love thinking about the positioning of horses and the ways that the herds behave. I think about them as beings, and I think that a lot of times that reflects how humans behave. I think of the Pegasus as a muse because I was very close to lightning, and I think of lightning as this mystery that I want to live in. And so while we're very interested in science and our environment, I also want to maintain a sense of awe at the mystery that's around us and I received one of my great grandmother's paintings. I tried to mimic her just to recreate that thing and I felt like she was teaching me from long ago how to do that work. And I noticed a lot, like I noticed how she must have held her breath. She used her tools to the fullness of the thing. And I think that that's so important, thinking about the tools that we have, allowing ourselves to use what we've been given. I very much work in the moment. It's a constant observing, responding, observing, responding. And I have no idea whenever I go to that canvas, what I'm after, what my end goal is. I start with certain colors. I know generally where I'm going with a composition. Other than that, I just work until I feel like it's finished. Across Louisiana, museums and galleries are presenting exhibits with the power to illuminate our home state with new light. So here are some standout exhibitions coming soon to museums and galleries near you. For more on these exhibitions and others, consider Country Road Magazine available in print, online or by enewsletter. To watch or rewatch any episode of Art Rocks again, just visit lp dot org slash art room. There you'll also find all of the Louisiana segments available on LP's YouTube channel in Reno, Nevada. The creative impulse runs deep and strong. Local dance outfit. The Sierra Nevada Ballet Company has brought Peter Beagle's beloved fantasy novel The Last Unicorn, to the stage. After more than two decades of absence, Sierra Nevadas Roseannadanna has spent three years choreographing this arresting production, which was first presented in 1989. Let's get a glimpse at the last unicorn's journey from page to stage. And it's my pleasure to welcome you to The Last Unicorn. It's going to be great. The Last Unicorn is a full length story ballet based on the book by Peter SPIEGEL. I read the book in the early eighties and I really loved it, and I had never done at that point, an original full length story ballet. But I had this passion for this book, and my daughter, who was then really tiny, said, you know, why don't you do a ballet? And so I decided to try my first full length original story ballet based on the book. But it was a long journey because it took me three years to do it. I had to start out by getting the permission from Peter Biegel and Peter s Biegel. I'm the author of The Last Unicorn, and he was wonderful. He was very enthusiastic about doing the ballet. That was an easy part. I'm so honored that through all these years, I'm the only choreographer that he's authorized to do a ballet based on his work, which makes me so, so happy. I remember her. I can't believe it's been that long. She came to talk to me. I can remember. We went to a coffee shop and we talked for a long time about what she wanted to do. It's so completely out of my hands. So utterly out of my hands that all I can do is lean back and enjoy it. And now, without further ado, it's my pleasure to present to you after 34 years the last unicorn. Basically, it's a fairy tale. It was always meant to be a fairy tale about an immortal unicorn comes to believe that she is the last of her kind. You always, as an artist, always wonder. Well, maybe I think this is good, but does anybody else going to think this is good? And that was great. It was pretty amazing when when the curtain came down to hear the screaming of people, I mean, they just screamed for joy. And I thought that was that really, you know, that was pretty moving to me. Artist Marilyn Shaker has been expressing herself through painting for more than 30 years, and this practice has transformed her life in remarkable ways. To find out how and why, let's go to North Royalton, Ohio, for a visit. I had zero talent. I mean, I was not somebody even in school or in grade school, but kids, they could all draw. Not me. I was like, always kind of, you know, And I never even thought about it. I just accepted the fact that I didn't draw or paint well and so forth. My mom grew up in that era, too, where I think she was just ten years earlier. Then she would like to have been as far as women being out of the home. She she never complained. And it wasn't like she didn't choose to be a stay at home mom. But I sense that for us, because she had four girls, so she really encouraged us all to, you know, to be what we wanted to be. Then all of a sudden, I have a little desire, like I really want to do something more creative. So first of all, I went to Floral Design School with Bill Hixon and took classes and so forth. And then I was hired at Higbee and I was their floral designer, plus their custom customer arranger, Bill Hicks, and who she trained under. He's quite renowned. He did the White House. I started out I took some classes at Tri-C, the one school that I was the most encouraged. And I want to say almost to the point that I kind of grew was they had an art school and it was the White House School of Art, and this was in Jupiter, Florida. So I started out worst of the class. And when I ended up and graduated from the class, I took best of the class. So I don't say that boastfully, but just to say there is always hope. The beauty of what God created in the flowers and the colors, just the magic. When you think of flowers, if you start to think of the hundreds of different kinds of flowers, you know, from purple or a red, yellow, blue, green, whatever, there is no limit to what God created. It's funny because I'll be going through my mom's work and then I'll find something totally unexpected, like those portraits. My mom had a spare bedroom upstairs that probably had 200 paintings on it. You couldn't even walk in the room, literally. There were paintings that were tilted up against each other so they wouldn't get burnt. And I said, You know, if Mom's really going to move, we're going to have to organize these paintings. So I went over there one day and moved all the paintings to the basement and organized them by size. And once Pam saw that, I think that ignited her like, my mom and I had some personal issues. I still had a relationship with my my father and my siblings, but it was a sensitive topic. So we didn't with my siblings, I didn't really talk about my mom because I didn't want to engage them in my issues. My family was not the Brady Bunch. I wasn't, you know, Miss Cookies and Doe and my husband didn't come home and, you know, we were what I would call normal, just average people. You know, I have a son who has a business and the daughters and, you know, everyone is so unique. And the issue that I had with Pam was 100% my fault. And just the fact that she has come back into my life and she has been so kind and receptive and loving, it's a gift from God. Anybody who has a relationship that isn't working, there is always time to make amends, and that's what I'm doing. I truly just wanted sincerity and then let's just move on because, you know, relationships take two people. Pam really is the one that's marketing it. I'm just helping her organize that getting painting signed. But she's I call it the chief marketing officer. So I asked her if she could paint this mountain scene for me. I had a picture I had given her and the painting came back very different than the photo because she saw all of these colors in it that I didn't see. I have done a couple smaller shows. They've been indoor, so it wasn't the big tent thing. But it's been fun because it's been the creative side of me. So I have submitted applications for the Boston Mills Brandy Wine Show. I haven't heard yet, so I'm hoping to have my mom's work get accepted in that show. She said that that's always been her ultimate dream to have her work accepted in that show. I definitely have slowed down, but I'm finally getting back all the interest and the desire. I'm kind of painting what I want, but I would like it to be enjoyed. So I would like people to like it. But that's not my first goal. My first goal is what I want and then hoping that it's like it takes extraordinary time and patience to assemble thousands of glass jewelry, beads into eye catching mosaics. But that's the artistic path. Nevadas Sabrina Frye has chosen for herself. She uses inventive techniques, hand placing thousands of beads to create immersive and highly tactile art experiences. Let's take a look. I love buying beads. Beads are an addiction. They're beautiful and they're tactile. And glass is such an incredible element to work with. It's vibrant and it's happy and it's alive. It has a life to it. My name is Sabrina Frye, and I'm a bead mosaic artist. So I use beads like a painter uses paint, and I create mosaics out of glass beads. And so from far away, they do get mistaken for paintings. But when you get close up, it's hundreds of thousands of glass beads that make up this image that looks like a painting. I work out of my home. Half of my home is my studio in my basement. We live in the Carson Valley, South Lake Tahoe area, so it's very inspiring. I get to look at the mountains in the sky and nature all day, which is a big emphasis on my work. There are so many types of beads out there, translucent beads and transparent beads and silver lined. And the beach that I work with are primarily glass. Sometimes they work with natural stones as well as accent beads, and they're very versatile. I had some beads left over from a attempted jewelry making stint. This was about ten years ago. I wanted to do stained glass and I didn't have the money or the space to do it. And so I looked at these beads and things that I had and I thought, well, these are glass. And I have wire that could potentially look like the black lines around stained glass. And so I picked up some beads and wire and did my first piece and learned a lot of things not to do. But it was a good concept and so I started playing with it and experimenting more and more, and then it just grew. I tend to use repurposed materials for my work. I will take, say, a repurposed serving tray and I have to sand it, I have to prime it or otherwise nothing's going to stick to it because it was made for durability and for things not to stick to it. So I have to do that and then I'll bring it in and outline whatever I'm going to do on it. So if I'm creating an animal, I create a very strict outline of what it's going to look like, and then I can start the bead process. I use very, very pointy non-magnetic tweezers because a lot of the beads have metals in them, silvers and things, and if you use regular tweezers, they do magnetize and you won't be able to get your beads off of them. I wear them out about every six months. I have to get a new set of tweezers because I use them all day long. I think of every bead as a piece of DNA. We all have a different story in our lives that make up the complete image of what people see from afar. But it's all these little pieces of our lives in our DNA that really make up who we are. And it's sometimes hard for people to realize what makes up your story and how the pieces come together, but they see you as a whole. And that's how each one of these beads is. They're all very different, but they're coming together to make one complete image. I get that question a lot. How many beads are in this piece? And I did count. There are 156 size 11 seed beads per square inch. I'll do a piece, say that's 12 by 16, and it'll have something like 90,000 beads. Last year, when we moved, I had to weigh the beads for the movers. I had £2,000 of beads just not attached to boards. Just beads. So, yeah, I have. I have a lot of beads. I started mixing my own glue mixture that allows me to do what needs to be done, create blends and mixes for each piece and take as long as I need it to take and then do the glue after.

And that way it's sets and it works with me and not against me. There's a final touch up phase that I do with the beats. I sell them with an acrylic glaze so that the glue is protected from the elements. I create them to be durable, but people's reactions are that it's delicate and we are programed as children. Don't touch the art at shows. I had to figure out a way to give people permission to touch and I put Go ahead, touch me signs up all over the place. And it draws people in because people are natural. We tactile creatures, we like touch. And so giving permission to do that gives so much joy. Adults, kids, everybody, they come up to the booth and it's just this sensory experience. They get to feel the trees, they get to pet the birds and they love it. I love doing shows because I get to see that joy and see that curiosity and the wonder, that sparkling, the piece. It's on the wall when the sun hits it every day is going to make them smile because it can't, not because it's happy. And so I make happy art to make people happy. And that is that for this edition of Art Rocks. But never mind, because there are always more episodes of the show available at LP, Dawg, Dawgs, Art Rocks. And for more stories like these, consider Country Roads magazine a useful resource for discovering what's taking shape in Louisiana's cultural life all across the state. Until next week, I've been James Fox Smith and thanks to you for watching. Accommodations provided by Hotel Bentley and condos in Alexandria, Louisiana, a hotel steeped in traditions and history since 1908. Moore at visit Hotel Bentley Gqom Art Rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.

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Art Rocks! is a local public television program presented by LPB