- [David] On the next Applause, we travel to the backwoods of Bissell Farms for a look at the process of maple syrup production.

And we stopped by an art fair unlike any other.

Plus, we meet a Cincinnati artist born in Syria and learn about his journey to the United States and his passion for painting.

All this and more on the next round of Applause.

(organic music) - [Narrator] Production of applause on WVIZ PBS is made possible by grants from The John P. Murphy Foundation, The Kulas Foundation, the Stroud family Trust, the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation, and by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga arts and culture.

(organic music) - [David] Hello, I'm David C. Barnett, and welcome to Applause where each week we present local, regional and national arts and culture programming.

Growing up in Northeast Ohio, Nate Bissell, owner of Bissell Maple Farms knew his family always made syrup, but he had no idea how far back those traditions went and how it became a passion for generations of the Bissell family.

Ideastream's ongoing series Making It, follows people in Northeast Ohio pursuing their passions.

We venture now to Ashtabula County for a look at the sometimes tedious job of making maple syrup.

- I am Nate Bissel, I am chief instigator and owner of Bissell Maple Farm.

Growing up dad always made syrup.

I did not know it was in my family's history then I found some old photos and my family's been making maple syrup for over 100 years in Ohio and that even gave me the maple syrup bug even more.

These are actually pictures from the 1800s.

That'd be my great grandfather and great great grandfather make maple syrup here in Northeast Ohio.

The only reason I sell maple syrup is so get to make more maple syrup.

So I'm gonna try to explain this from treated table.

There's a lot of preparation, even before you tap a tree.

So you wanna be prepared for the first sap run.

So you need all of your tubing fixed, making sure everything's tight and drawn tight and it's sloping the right way and then they go out and tap the trees.

We're going out there and we're looking for trees that will produce sap, we're drilling a 5/16 hole.

(machine drilling) This year we're at 9600 taps.

So it probably comes down to about 8900 trees.

- I do like 100 a day.

These guys do like 600 a day.

- We wanna to tap well before the first or the spring.

We actually tap trees in January, it doesn't hurt to tap early.

It's better to catch the first sap run than the last sap run.

- This is the first run, usually by now we've made sap.

- If you think of the tree as your home, you have a little spout which would be the driveway and then from the spout, you have a drop, that would be like your street, from the drop that goes to your road, which is lateral from your lateral it goes to the main line which is like a highway and then from the main line it goes to a wet dry line which is like a superhighway.

So that little droplet of sap travels all down.

I think we have 35 miles of tubing and all the land that we manage, and that little droplet goes all the way down and gets collected in the tank and that's where the vacuum and the sap part ways.

That sap is then pumped to larger collection tanks that will collect sap.

With a tanker, then we'll haul that sap to our facility here in Jefferson.

They pump the sap through a flow meter so we know how much sap was collected.

From there we'll go into large collection tanks.

So I think we have 30,000 gallons of sap storage for this facility.

And we will process that sap into two things.

So raw sap will go into a reverse osmosis, pure water is our rejected product and all the sugar that doesn't make it through the filter, that becomes the concentrated sap that we boil.

So the boiling process is where the flavor's made.

That is the most exciting part and we're making caramel, so maple sugar is about caramel and people will talk about the different flavors and it's this simple The lighter the maple syrup color, the more delicate the maple flavor, the darker the maple syrup color, the stronger the maple flavor, but in essence, we're selling caramelized maple sugar, and it's all preference.

The skill of the farmer the type of equipment, the soil your trees are in, the type of weather you have, will all basically make an impact on the flavor of sap you'll make in any given year.

I wanna have that experience with my family.

That's why I do this.

And it brings everybody together for a common goal.

This is hard, this is not an easy thing, and I'm talking about the maple syrup business.

But when you do it with family and you do it as a team, and you're trying to accomplish a common goal, that's really rewarding.

- [David] For more profiles of Northeast Ohio people who are making it go to art.ideastream.org, and search, Making It.

Jeff Gilkey loves to fly.

Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci's quest to take to the air, Gilkey looks at Da Vinci's drawings and reflects on the fascinating observations he made.

- That's been something that is attracted me to fly, you know, ever since I was a kid, just sort of a miracle just be able to float up in the air, and be in control of that.

To be able to maneuver in all three dimensions, and I can go off-road and then also go into the air to get somewhere.

(lighthearted music) Very tranquil and peaceful up there, the air is fresh and clean, I can smell the pine needles, I can smell the desert sage that I'm going over, and it's just a very peaceful experience and a nice way to look at the world from up there.

(lighthearted music) - What inspires you about the way Da Vinci looked at the world?

- He would look into natural designs for inspiration.

How the wing of a bird is designed and how it's kind of the perfect design for flying.

He looked at nature to find clues on how to design his machinery by sort of reverse engineering it, you know, looking at it a very basic level to figure out how to function.

And I mainly picked it up from that Codex on the Flight, there's a lot of him sitting back watching birds.

How a bird likes to climb up by climbing into the wind and when iy descends it likes to go with the tail of the wind, how a bird will pump its wings, and then it'll glide and rest.

He was concerned about how the bird could fly in stable flight.

You know, when a bird flies and it gets jostled by the wind, it needs to get back straight and level and if it has a stable aerodynamic design, It'll just naturally go that way.

I think through you know, observations like that he was trying to figure out flight at least.

- Yeah.

- It's the only example he had.

And nature has a way of creating this sort of perfect compromises between, you know, it can't weigh too much.

You know, it would still got to be strong, it's got to be efficient, all these sort of trade offs that have to be made for an animal to live and survive your evolution sort of forces the design to be kind of perfect optimal type design and I think Da Vinci recognized that and I could see him looking for, into nature for his inspiration, especially his flying machines.

(lighthearted music) - What really intrigues you about his whole process?

- Back then if you wanna capture something you had to draw, you had to very carefully examine what you were looking at.

How is the bird's wing connected to his body and how's the how are the feathers curled and all his drawings have that level of detail and inside of them.

(lighthearted music) He was really good at that.

He's really good painting and, but it was just not the painting he had invented his own ways of, he had to create his own paint.

(lighthearted music) Out of rocks and stuff here, he wasn't able to go to the store and buy paint, you know, he had to design his own painting schemes.

He came up with new ways of putting up frescoes, but he was inventing painting while he was painting.

- [Megan] That's kind of amazing.

- [Jeff] Yeah - And thinking about flying.

I mean, knowing them figuring out the mechanics of-- - The thing about flying, I got picked up on that, looking through the Codex, he kind of looked at it as the ultimate achievement.

Kind of like a moon shot sort of a thing that if he could achieve flight, he would be the most famous person on the planet, you know, and I think he was pretty famous already, but be able to demonstrate flight, you can see in the Codex, he talks about how it would be the greatest achievement of all time if he could demonstrate flight.

But I think at some point, he understood that he wasn't going to be able to build an ornithopter, which is a flying machine that flaps its wings like a bird, that with human power, there's just, the human body isn't able to flap the wings hard enough to make it flying and his studies kind of shifted more towards gliding flight and I think he would have come up with something like a hang glider, if he had the time and resources to actually work on it.

But he probably got distracted and he seemed to be a guy who was distracted all the time, he would work on one project and work on something else, and got distracted away and was able to finish his flying machine.

(lighthearted music) - His intense desire to fly, what do you take away from that?

Why do you think that was sort of his ultimate goal?

- I think everybody feels that.

I remember, as a kid, you know, watching birds, it's just this miracle that this animal can flap his wings and fly and go places you can't go.

And I think there's sort of Ben has had a little bit of envy of that, that we wished we could see what the bird sees.

And you get some of that when you, that's why we like to climb to the top of the mountain is we can look at see what the bird would see.

- [Megan] The world looks so different.

- New Mexico's lucky that we have a lot of untamed country, live it's in wilderness scenarios.

But live it's just vacant land that no one's bothered to go.

It's left in its natural state.

And I flown over canyons that aren't even, don't even have a name to them on the map.

And they're some of the most beautiful canyons and eroded formations I've ever seen.

But they're just blank spots on the map.

And, so when you when you fly, you're able to look at that and I'd like to take Da Vinci on a flight over some of my favorite spots.

(lighthearted music) - [David] If you've lived in Cleveland for a while, you know that the East and West sides of town are often at odds with one another.

On the next Applause, a look at the city's great divide.

And we'll dive deep into the underwater photography of Stephen Franks.

Plus, we take a look at caricature and culture in the work of graphic artist Conrado Walter Massaguer.

All this and more on the next round of Applause.

In Florida, Art Fort Lauderdale is an art fair unlike any other.

For four days, attendees take part in a curated experience traveling the inter-coastal waterways to waterfront homes full of artworks.

Take a look.

- My name is Evan Snow, I'm one of the co-founders and managing partners of Art Fort Lauderdale, the art fair on the water.

- I'm Andrew Martineau, co-founder of Art Fort Lauderdale and also the curatorial director for this fair.

- We never had a signature for the Art fair in Fort Lauderdale or even in Broward County.

So we decided to create a revolutionary Art Fair taking place exclusively inside luxury waterfront homes made only accessible via boat.

- You're really on a curated experience.

We're really like I'm looking at like how people experience work within an environment of a group of people that you're with for the entire journey.

We really kind of like calm the whole experience down as opposed to being very hectic.

- One of the really unique things is having the art in the homes versus a traditional tent or Convention Center even for a savvy art patron.

Most people get art fatigue go into these art fairs.

- [Andrew] So within this environment, we're able to actually place work in the place where it will eventually live.

And where people would kind of like see it every day, we've kind of placed the pieces you know, in the bathroom above the bathtub, or in the bedroom above the bed head.

- We are a primarily independent artists driven art fair, it's so tough for an independent artists not represented by a gallery to exhibit in a major fair, the barrier to entry is so high, it's 1000s of dollars and if you're even represented by a gallery, so we made it inclusive, so artists of any level emerging, established, local, national, international or otherwise can exhibit on our county's largest platform.

One of the main focal points with the Art Fair is each home is a different exhibit.

- As we start selecting the words for the fair, we kind of match the works with the homes that we're gonna be in.

So this home that we're in right now is more of a modern contemporary home, recently built, and we wanted to have a lot of bright lights, bright light and bright colors kind of coming through.

And a lot of the work kind of represents a lot of that, a lot of works also very modern, contemporary pieces.

- So we have three homes this year, serving as our exhibit locations, two of which are independent artists exhibitions for artists not represented by gallery.

We also are very excited to have added a Bahamas house exhibition benefiting the grand Bahamas children's house, which was unfortunately damaged by Hurricane Dorian with a portion of proceeds so that they can help rebuild and actually resume their art programs which unfortunately, they had to put on pause as a result of the hurricane.

(upbeat music) - I'm Jennifer Nayak, I'm welcoming you to Bahamas house.

I am a collector and I'm a curator and I'm an arts and culture writer.

I know these artists personally.

And I was devastated to find out that so many of my favorite galleries that I like to go to were closing.

So the artwork in this room is Laurie Tuchel, she's a grand Bahamian based artist, she uses a lot of layering effects with her colors, and she paints a lot of Day in the Life scenes.

So these are actual moments.

So this is an example of the Junkanoo pieces that were sent over from Grand Bahamas.

One thing that's interesting about the Bahamas is that all of the materials the artists use are shipped in.

So you have to use the most basic things.

And when you look and see how they're used, this artist used recycled lawn material, I think this might even be like a child's chair.

They use staples, masking tape, glue, and paint.

And if you feel the weight of this, it is about 20 pounds, 25 pounds.

Imagine dancing through the streets wearing this on your head.

These are handed down generation from generation, year after year, because the artistry is so good, but also the engineering.

Caroline Anderson's work is really probably my most poignant and my most important and expressive from my post hurricane pieces that were given to me.

These talk about the destruction and the experience of going through the hurricane.

This is what hurricane Dorian looked like to her.

(upbeat music) - The social interaction, I think is super important to get more people being able to appreciate work.

- [Evan] And you get time to reflect and think about the work you just saw on your boat journey as you go from home to home.

It's a really true discovery experience where you're gonna find artists that you might not have found anyplace else.

- [David] We now head to Cincinnati to meet artists Ahmad Darouich.

Born in Syria, we hear about his journey to the United States and his passion for painting.

(speaking foreign language) (enchanting music) - That wraps it up for today's show, you'll find more stories online at arts.ideastream.org.

Thanks for watching.

I'm Ideastream's David C. Barnett, hope to catch you next week for another round of Applause.

(organic music) - [Narrator] Production of Applause on WVIZ PBS is made possible by grants from The John P. Murphy Foundation, the Kulas Foundation, the Stroud family Trust, the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation and by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga arts and culture.