About to happen on rocks.

We meet the Baton Rouge artist whose stunning canvases convey powerful messages about the plight of wild things.

I want the paintings to sort of reveal themselves slowly, like there's something else going on.

There's something kind of dark here.

A journey through the classic looking glass that is Alice in Wonderland.

It was our opportunity to tell the story of the story, really how it came to be.

The things you can do with the sweet texture of chocolate.

I never woke up and said, I'm going to be a chocolatier.

It just all sort of came into place.

Plus, Conrad Al Briscoe's legacy at the Louisiana State Exhibit Museum in Shreveport.

That's all right here.

Right now on Art Rocks.

Art Rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.

Hello, I'm James Fox Smith, publisher of Country Roads magazine.

And this is where Art Rocks.

To consider the artwork of LSU, professor of painting and drawing Ed Smith is to experience the beauty and diversity that birds represent in our environment.

But Ed wants us to see more than just the creature's natural beauty.

He wants to leave viewers a little more aware of the ominous consequences of habitat loss and environmental degradation.

I moved down from New York to Louisiana, Baton Rouge, take a job at LSU, and I had always been painting from nature.

But the bird life down here, the landscape, the density of the landscape and the birds were just something that was everywhere.

Read a few books on Audubon, and I was thinking about how do you take such an iconic image that Audubon painted and how could I do something with it?

I sort of looked at birds and this sort of this survival mode that they're coming together to survive somehow.

You think about just what's happening with the environment.

Also, Katrina played a big part in it to see images on TV, people clustered, people trying to survive, people on the bridges at the Superdome.

And I just started thinking about it's such a, you know, people coming together to try to figure out how do we survive, how do we get out of this mess?

And so the birds are kind of a metaphor for that, really.

And I want the paintings to sort of reveal themselves slowly, like there's something else going on.

There's something kind of dark here.

There's something kind of something that we have to pay attention to as much as anything.

It's just like, how do we get through this life?

How do we maneuver?

And so that I think the painting is ultimately about just being we're in this predicament, all of us, humans, birds, nature, everything.

And we want to come out the other end.

Okay?

I don't find the anatomy of a bird particularly difficult.

I was always good at drawing.

I mean, I'm one of those kids that that was my sort of natural inclination to make feathers is basically as you kind of have to get into a series, they're always, like, layered on each other.

So you start with the first one and you just fall.

They fall off.

I think you try to get the space in them.

So on the edges you paint them darker as you get out to the edge, their lighter.

And then I have actually have these special brushes that they're called feathering brushes.

They're these these sort of wide these wide brushes like this.

Then you pull, you pull them through, and they're almost like the veins of the feather.

And that's how I get that.

One of my favorite paintings is Raft.

When I painted that painting, it was like, I think I'm on to something here.

I think this is something that I can mine for a while.

I know beauty and art in contemporary art is kind of a dirty word, but it felt beautiful and it felt important and it felt interesting.

It felt like there was a lot more there than just was kind of surface thing in this particular painting.

All this fruit is combined, which would never happen in nature or sort of forcing it to take place.

And then at the same time the base of the tree is starting to rot.

And it's really about how we're modifying things, what we're doing to sort of please ourselves, to squeeze as much out of them them as we can.

But it's not sustainable.

It's going to collapse under its own sort of weight.

I just started this one.

It's not even close to being anywhere yet, but, you know, I was thinking about a big sort of shape in this field and then how things get pruned to the point where it's distorted so much that it's becoming almost grotesque.

Maybe this is a direction that I'm going to go for a little while.

With this one, I mean, it's obviously this kind of orb that's floating in the sea.

But I was looking at orchids.

They're so delicate.

I mean, even the slightest shift or orchids can't survive anymore.

And so it's kind of this like the bird masses.

These orchids have attach themselves to this thing.

I don't know what's happening yet.

And these things are.

Maybe they're searching for something, you know, they're.

They're finding a place to root.

I don't know where they're going.

What I like about oils is they're slow.

They dry.

Slow.

You can get certain colors.

The way they mix.

They'll stay wet on a canvas for a long time so you can manipulate them in a lot of different ways.

And there's also a luminosity to them.

There's they're transparent.

You know, paintings have a depth to them.

When you're painting in oils, being a painter, it's it's sort of Virginia Woolf, a room of one's own.

You come in there and you make the world the way that you want it, or you think about it, you know, you, you, the world off.

You just build stuff.

I think most painters would agree, most musicians, writers.

You work on something for a long time and you just go, It's that's terrible.

I have to destroy it.

But it's through that process that as an artist you find things that interest you and you find ways of sort of saying something about the world that hopefully people find important and that you that you find important.

Ed just wrapped up an exhibit at the Soran Christensen Gallery in New Orleans.

His work is also in many permanent exhibits, including the LSU Museum of Art in Baton Rouge.

No matter where you live in Louisiana, opportunities to connect with the culture are everywhere.

The trick is knowing where to look.

So here's a list of exhibits, events and festivals coming soon to a space near you.

To learn more about these and other events in Louisiana, visit the website.

An LP B dot org slash art Ross.

For more about these and other events, snag a copy of Country Roads magazine.

There are racks all around town and also the Art Ross website has an archive of previous episodes.

So to see any segment again, just log on to LP PB dot org.

Generations of readers have been lured through the Looking Glass by Alice.

The White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter, and all the characters sprung from the fertile imagination of English author Lewis Carroll.

An exhibit at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City marked the 150th anniversary of the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

So let's follow Alice's journey from 1862 through the present day to becoming a true literary classic.

We're having this exhibition now to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the first publication of Alice in Wonderland.

It was our opportunity to tell the story of the story, really how it came to be.

It's really a delight to be able to show the original manuscript of Alice.

In this exhibition, it's traveled only a handful of times since it was given to the British Library.

The Story of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was first told one summer afternoon.

Lewis Carroll was on a rowing trip up the River Thames with Alice Little, the real Alice and her two sisters and another friend.

And along the way, the children asked for a story without any idea what would follow.

He sends his heroine straight down a rabbit hole.

Alice in Wonderland is a tale of a young girl landing in Wonderland.

She goes from episode to episode, meeting character after character.

There is, of course, the White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter, and the March Hare, the Queen of Hearts, the Mock Turtle, and the Griffin.

Her conversations with these creatures bring the story to life.

She spends the book trying to make sense out of this nonsensical world.

Lewis Carroll, the author of this iconic story, was also a mathematics dean at Christchurch College, Oxford University.

His real name is Charles Ledwidge Dobson.

He came up with the pseudonym Lewis Carroll to publish children's books and Alice related material for the rest of his life.

It took him over two and a half years to complete the original manuscript.

That's illustrated with Lewis Carroll's own pen and ink drawings.

He decides to publish the book.

So Carroll works with John Tenniel, one of the most recognizable illustrators of the day, to do the illustrations for the published book.

So that's really interesting to look at Lewis Carroll's original illustrations in the manuscript, together with John Danielle's iconic illustrations in the original manuscript.

The opening that we're showing is the illustration of Alice when she's first suddenly grown very tall.

She's taking up the entire length of the page.

Her eyes are cast down, perhaps demurely, perhaps just looking, searching for her very distant feet.

When you look at Danielle's illustration of the same moment, it's still Alice.

But some important changes have been made.

She's facing the viewer, and she has this expression of shock or wonderment.

She's confronting this change really head on.

So there's no ambiguity about her character, which I think is more in keeping with the character that Lewis Carroll has created in text.

So it's the way that Tenniel sort of subtly shifts the perspective or the exact moment that's being illustrated that helps add a level of of magic to the story.

It's published on July 4th, 1865.

John Tenniel, the illustrator, gets a hold of one of these early copies, and he's completely dissatisfied with how his illustrations have been printed.

So he writes immediately to Carroll.

Carroll thinks about it for a little while and finally decides to recall the entire edition.

For this reason, there are only about 20 copies of the first edition that still survive.

Alice was well-received from the moment that it reappeared.

Carroll was interested in expanding his readership.

As soon as he starts getting a slight profit from the book.

He turns around and reinvests it into new editions.

He's also doing something that's really interesting, which is licensing the characters, issuing later tie ins.

He publishes a facsimile of the original manuscript.

These things are all very unusual for the time.

I think it's his sort of branding almost of the story.

One of the things that makes this book so influential is it doesn't conclude sort of overtly with a moral.

Most children's writing up to this point would have concluded with a moral.

It's incredibly playful and witty and inventive.

It's an example of one of the first stories that exists just for itself.

Story for story's sake.

The pottery shop at Liberty Craft works in Dearborn, Michigan, deals in the gorgeous platters Pots, crocks and serving vessels that these skilled crafters turn out each and every day.

Come inside the studio for a look at the history and the techniques behind the creation of these pottery designs.

All of you.

Good God and welcome to the pottery shop.

I think one of the most important things that we try to give people when they come and visit the pottery is a sense for those traditional techniques that were done to create the pottery itself.

So a potter started with this and he made or she made the shape.

Then she passed it off to me and I sculpted the little bird on the nest up at the top.

And then I passed it off to an the other decorator here.

And she did all of this wonderful slip trail.

It shows another dimension of what it was like to live.

Back then, people didn't have supermarkets.

They were growing all their own food.

They needed to preserve it for the winter so that they had enough to eat and ceramic crocks and bowls and that kind of thing were very important for that process.

Particularly crocks.

That was probably the single most important piece that Potters would have made back then.

People could use that for pickling vegetables, for salt, curing meats.

They often came with a couple of bands right around the top that you could use to attach a piece of cheesecloth to keep debris out of it.

So everybody would have had ceramic wear in their homes.

The Potter was a very important part of any community.

It's become more of an art form, you know, in the 20th century, in the 21st century.

So we kind of don't realize that at one time this was really actually a very important service the Potters provided.

We're trying to convey the types of things that they would have made back then, and we're doing it in much the same way that they would have done.

We do take advantage of some modern equipment.

We've got electric wheels, we've got, you know, natural gas fired kiln, which they wouldn't have had back then, also electric kilns.

But what we're really trying to preserve is the type of wear that they would have made, You know, and if you guys feel the inside of these yellow plates, you can actually feel the carving that's been done in there.

And that's going to be different from our other main decorating technique.

This is called Slip Trailer.

There were a wealth of techniques used in early American pottery.

Of course, those first potters were farmers.

They were the early colonists coming over and they made a few pots on the side for food storage for for just daily use.

And that was predominantly made out of red ware.

So it was a very easy to find clay.

It was very low fire clay and they would use techniques like slip trailing, which is using a liquid clay like a paint, or they would use a technique called graffito, which was a technique that the German potters were were using, where you put a paper thin layer of slip over a red clay piece, and then you carve through that slip in order to make your design.

Around 1800, of course, pottery shifted and they all moved to stoneware, which had its own processes.

So we try to capture all of those processes and and not only present them to the public, but also demonstrate them live.

And so if I pull up slowly with even pressure that just gets taller and taller, yeah, it is pretty cool.

Usually there's some sort of throwing being done or trimming or one of the finishing processes.

There's always some sort of decoration to see.

We expanded the shop greatly in the past year and in the process we added this kind of glassed in kiln area so you can get an idea of what the kilns look like that we use and often will be loading or unloading.

So there's a lot of different parts of the process that you can see.

Often I think people have the idea that it's only throwing on the wheel and that there's nothing else to it.

So we give a more, I guess, nuanced view of what that's all about.

People are floored when we tell them that, you know, the process from pulling out a lump of raw clay until you have a finished piece ready for sale is about 30 days, you know, and most of that time is waiting.

Of course.

But it yeah, it's a long process, you know, it's not for the instant gratification crowd.

You know, if you've got to be patient with it.

About 90% of the work that we make goes to one of our gift shops or gets sold through one of our catalogs.

And we also supply many of the historical sites.

The two farms, as well as the Eagle Tavern restaurant.

So if you eat there or visit one of those houses, you'll see our our pottery and use.

Right now we're working on items for our Christmas catalog, which comes out in October.

It's a whole range of things we're working on, you know, press molded plates, small plates, stoneware pieces, you know, coffee mugs, crocks, all kinds of functional ware.

And so it's fairly challenging, you know, as many hundreds of pieces.

So we have to really sort of, you know, just dive in and get it done to produce things that people actually I know they're going to buy them and use them and that they have a real grounding in history.

I love the whole process.

You know, it's just it's a fascinating material to work with.

Time now for another Louisiana treasure.

During the New Deal years of the 1930s and forties, New York artist Conrad Al Briscoe completed a series of striking narrative murals and mosaics that adorned iconic public buildings all over Louisiana.

Many survive today.

Nicky Cole, curator of the Louisiana State Museum.

Shreveport, tells us about the Al Bricker murals that greet visitors as they enter her building.

The state exhibit museum was AWP, a project so a combination of federal and state funding.

The feds put up 60%, the state put up 40%, and they wanted to have something that reflected the the economy of the state at the time.

Construction began on the building, 1937 38, and at the end, the summer of 38 was when Conrado Brito came to the building and completed this work.

What the architect wanted to do was, of course, introduce the viewer, the visitor to what was going to be within the museum.

We were under the department of Agriculture at the time, so we naturally wanted to showcase what was the agriculture industry of the time.

So this four panel mural, which is approximately 750 square feet, does exactly that.

It's sort of divided into northern and southern region.

In the center, there are two iconic figures.

On the left side is a woman who represents agriculture.

And on the right side is a lumberjack representing the lumber industry, which still today is one of the strongest in the biggest industries in the state.

And of course, it's in that wonderful style, the WPA style that was born out of regionalism.

And since we're in the south and the north, it it went more toward abstract in the south.

It was showing the land and the people in the land.

Now, Brito synthesized the the movement, the regionalist art movement that had come out of New York.

He was part of the students Art league, and he was very much aware of what was going on in the country in terms of portraying people in the landscape.

And he was fortunate to be able to have contracts to create art that was public art.

And these murals, that's what these murals are.

They're a public art.

So you drive by and you can see the murals.

You don't even have to come in to the museum so that people who didn't know anything about art could appreciate it and could understand it.

And so he showing them things that they can recognize.

You know, that's the whole point of public artists giving you a dialog, in other words, something that you can relate to.

We're on the crossroads on I-20 and I-49, and so we get East-West traffic constantly and we get out of state visitors that come in and they can't believe it.

And it does convey exactly what Louisiana was like.

And then when they come in the museum and see the artifacts and the additional paintings that we have in here, they get it and they are there just amazed.

So we're we're very proud to have it.

Westward to Houston, Texas is where we found Annie Rupani, a woman who has tastefully found her calling in chocolate.

Each delicate piece Rupani creates is a tiny, delicious work of art.

Step into a shop now to see how each sweet masterpiece comes to be.

Chocolate is such a great medium for all spices and fruits, and I don't think many people have ever explored that.

I started off with cardamom.

That was the first spice that I ever used, and I made it Cardamom rose.

And so it was a white chocolate ganache infused with cardamom, a little bit of rosewater and dark chocolate on the outside.

So that just opened up a whole world of anything that I tried at a restaurant I wanted to try in chocolate.

My name is Annie Rupani and I am a chocolate artist.

Cocoa is the fruit that chocolate comes from.

Ironically enough, the English language is the only one that turned cacao into cocoa.

So very few people actually make the connection between cocoa and cocoa.

But it's essentially the same thing.

The raspberry pistachio is dark and white, but it's delicious.

Chocolate was one of those like interim things.

And I was like, okay, well, I'm going to play with chocolate and try to figure out, well, where am I going?

And I was studying six days a week, and then I started taking a day off and playing with chocolates, reading artisanal books on chocolate.

And that led to me going to a pastry school in Malaysia.

I never woke up and said, I'm going to be a chocolatier.

It just all sort of came into place.

Initially, we started off by coloring the molds.

Cocoa butter is the fat that's in chocolate and we take them all for comfort butter.

The second step would be creating a shell inside of the mold.

So we're trying to create a really thin shell.

So when you bite into the chocolate, you have a crisp bite and then you just get overwhelmed by the ganache which will melt in your mouth.

Ganache is basically an emulsion between creme and chocolate.

It can be any liquid in chocolate, so you can make a water ganache or you can make a coconut milk ganache.

And so we play with a lot of that.

We make creme ganache is which are the most normal.

And then we also make group berry based ganache as we also do coconut milk and ashes.

So after we're done making our ganache is which is where all the fun happens with the infusions and the fruit.

And then we pipe the ganache, we'll pipe it into the shell and let that set, and then we'll add another layer of chocolate to finish off the chocolate and stick it in the freezer for about 10 to 15 minutes so that it releases from them all.

The bullets are really popular.

It's a Chinese spice spice praline.

So it's a hazelnut praline with Chinese spice spice.

There's milk chocolate on the inside and white on the outside.

Chocolate is so interesting.

Just like coffee or wine.

There's terroir that affects the way that chocolate tastes.

So Colombian chocolate tastes different in Venezuelan chocolate, that'll taste different than Bolivian chocolate.

So the chipotle will be dark, the s'mores, none of them are solid.

They're all like they all have an interior, like a good shot in the center.

It's so accessible.

Chocolate is on every candy bar.

It's around when you grow up.

It's just a part of everyday life.

It's almost a category of it's, and I love this just one peppercorn.

Yeah, it's very unique.

People are a little scared of it, but.

But not me.

It always surprises them that there is something associated with chocolate and happiness, and that is that for this edition of Art Rocks, of course, you can always watch episodes of the show at LP B dot org slash rocks.

And if you want more, Country Roads magazine is a pretty good place to learn about what's going on in Louisiana's vibrant arts and culture all around the state.

Until next week.

I'm James Fox.

Smith and thanks for watching.