Coming up next on Art Rocks, a New Orleans artist who makes buildings dance to the beat of the city that surrounds them.

I take my liberties in my expression of the other building.

I'm looking to express not only a representation of the city, I'm really looking to represent the life here.

A gallery that uses art to encourage play and vice versa.

Through this very recognizable gang, we find a meeting point where we are both equal a photographer's timeless images.

I'm inspired on a daily basis by what I see around me, by the by the old buildings, by the the the beautiful farmland and the painting that George Rodrigue believes cemented his reputation as an artist.

That's all coming up on art.

Rough.

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 thanks for joining us for Art Rocks.

Many will recognize James Megalopolis as Louisiana's premier painter when it comes to capturing the inimitable spirit of New Orleans.

It's buildings and its musicians.

We visited James's studio to learn how this former street artist goes about committing the city's essential rhythm to canvas.

I love to get started at five in the morning and work through til about midday.

Take a nice long break, maybe even up to three or 4 hours.

I like to read after I eat and just kind of wind my way back.

But then I do like an afternoon session where I'm able to regard again critically what I've done in the morning and work on it.

And I like to finish in the early evening.

It has a lot to do with the solitude and if in my studio there's a lot of activity, then I try to avoid it and start later in terms of my solitary concerns.

I take my liberties in my expression of the the building.

I'm looking to express not only a representation of the city, I'm really looking to represent the life here.

And so I like that the buildings have a sense of movement and musicality because I feel like I'm not really portraying in a literal way the city's look.

I'm more talking about our cultural life, trying to present something in a little more total sense.

New Orleans has probably the most unique housing stock in the United States.

It's an extraordinarily original environment.

It's an environment that is social in a way that no other American city is social in the sense that most of the city or much of the city was developed prior to a wide, extensive use of the automobile.

So there's a unique built quality to the social spaces in addition to a unique architectural style.

Are double shotgun or single shotgun and are more Victorian embellished buildings on the uptown side of the city.

There are utterly unusual and truly inspiring.

The ornamentation is truly special.

The twenties and thirties saw a great deal of Victorian embellishment and it's a it's a real pleasure to portray it.

Really what I want to do is I want to go to the life, I want to go to the lifestyle, and I want to be there.

I want to live it.

And I hope the canvas represents that living this.

I use a lot of color because New Orleans is an extraordinarily colorful city.

Color for me is an embellishment that is not unlike a fanciful addition to a recipe or an it or a flourish in a dance move.

We're a culture that is extraordinarily lively, rich, and out of control in a certain way.

Music permeates movement, permeates, sensuality, permeates.

Paint is a way of expressing some of these more subtle qualities of our culture.

And the color certainly helps me get there.

You learn a lot about a subject by not only looking at what's brightly lit, but what is more subtly shaded and there's almost nothing more fascinating than our buildings and the sunlight we enjoy and a tremendous amount of sunlight.

And there is a extraordinary beauty hidden in the quietude of an afternoon shadow.

I love portraits.

There's a wonderful thing to portray a human being.

I have been honored to paint the Jazz Fest six times, and it is, in a sense, a a responsibility to the city.

It's an opportunity to present an aspect of our musical culture.

And yeah, it's a super challenge.

I love taking it on.

I love the.

The difficulty of it is working with a larger group and portraying intimately an artist's personality getting in deeply into their music.

I frequently alternate between the two tools, the knife and the brush.

I find them both very useful for certain things.

So typically I'll start a painting with a brush.

I'll indicate the major proportions of the building, and then I will.

I'll follow with a palette knife.

And then it depends on the subject.

I'll go back and forth.

I don't have any rules or regulations.

They're both great tools.

I like to use them independently.

The palette is is quite fresh.

It's only about eight years old, and it probably has two inches of solid paint on it.

And I'm probably due for a trade out.

But it's a fellow traveler for a long time and they're hard to get rid of.

They're hard to change out, you know.

I'm still in love with it.

I did not start my artistic life as a child.

It's something I came into kind of accidentally in adulthood, and I didn't imagine that I would end up having more than a hobby with it, but I kind of fell in love with it.

And I've been deeply engaged for about 35 years now.

In a sense, it becomes a spiritual practice or a psychological practice.

So the making of art is in part a study of transcendent life.

So just like living in New Orleans is a study in transcendent life.

It's like you go here because you get high on it, and it's a way to get to another place.

It's a way to become larger.

Over 30 some odd years, James definitely has become one of the most iconic painters in New Orleans.

Like a friend recently said, When you close your eyes and think about New Orleans, you see a James megalopolis painting about my fellow megalopolis says he rarely does commissioned work unless it's for a charitable cause, and he prefers painting what he's feeling at the time.

His motto always be painting for yourself, no matter where you live.

In Louisiana, opportunities to connect with the arts are everywhere.

You just need to know where to look.

So here are a few of the many festivals, exhibits and shows coming up around the state.

To learn more about these and other events in Louisiana, visit the website at LP the dot org slash art Rocks.

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

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

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

All around the world there's a growing trend towards creating art, using methods that invite viewers to become actively involved in Denver, Colorado.

Red Line Gallery embraced that idea with its playground exhibit.

In doing so, the gallery challenged traditional ideas about how we interact with familiar spaces and objects.

No, don't touch signs here.

Let's take a look at that play.

The seemingly simple act is something Courtney Lane still has thought about more seriously than most.

Play is a very interesting concept for for many reasons.

It's a way to get children to engage with ideas of responsibility, caretaking, cooking, raw.

Play is also, conversely, a way to get away from a programed understanding or a way of looking at the world.

And lastly, probably the one that excites me the most is play.

It's a way to think about the now.

It's a way to engage in the current moment.

As co-curator of the exhibit Playgrounds for Redline, a contemporary art center in Denver, she brought together national and international artists to mess around with the idea of play.

So you see everything from found objects, sculptures to artists who have engaged with hacking video games to couch fort pool table in the shape of Cuba and even hopscotch.

That's thousands and thousands of numbers long that goes throughout the city through this very recognizable game.

We find a meeting point where we are both equal.

Argentinean artist Augustina Woodgate said she hopes that common ground will inspire conversation.

No one knows their neighbor anymore.

No one uses the sidewalk anymore.

No one no one place outside anymore.

Woodgate has installed her hopscotch boards several locations throughout the world, including her native Buenos Aires, and most recently, Denver, Colorado.

Her work, connected through the city's storm drains is meant to be temporary.

The type of paint that I'm using eventually, eventually will run away.

It will.

It will wash off with the with the food traffic as well as with the weather.

If it rains alone or so, I it's important for me also to maintain that level of ephemeral ephemeral aspect of of a hopscotch.

Woodgate works with communities to identify places they believe hopscotch could get people talking.

It's interesting different, different neighborhoods as well as in different cities and in different countries.

And conversation changes.

Hopscotch is like a starting point for them to discuss all these other topics between them.

Really.

My purpose with this work is yes, I pay attention to is I bring attention to to sidewalks to to that public space that has been throughout history a very important political space.

A sense of place was also important to artist Connor McGarrigle.

Work.

You can see this long line that is a map.

So it's a satellite image of the length of Colfax.

And Connor, who's an Irish artist, found out that Colfax is the longest avenue in the nation.

So we walked from the east end of Colfax all the way to the other end of West and hired a satellite to take a picture of him throughout that entire walk.

So it was a sort of straight line wandering, so to say, and way to explore the city and and to see what it's really like from ground level.

Well, the reason why I love art is because art is communication for me.

And it's very base level.

We're all individuals and we're all part of a larger society.

And artists act as mirrors.

Artists push against artists connect us, and in this instance, encourage each of us to play.

Herman, Missouri photographer William Fields finds his inspiration in the rolling landscapes of Missouri River Country.

His photographic techniques lend a mystery and a sense of timelessness to his images.

Look closer.

Through his photography, William Fields explores his fascination with the landscape shaped by rivers, the natural geometry of the land, the infinite variety of shapes and colors, and the passing generations of people working in that land.

I constantly am overwhelmed and knocked to my knees by the beauty that I see all around me.

I came here 21 years ago and I didn't know how long I would stay, but I've lived here longer than I've lived anywhere else in my life because of the fact that I'm inspired on a daily basis by what I see around me, by the by the old buildings, by the the the beautiful farmland and by the just the the amazing Missouri River and everything it has to offer the open spaces.

And it's the the quality of light and it's the the way the distant hills can become like a watercolor where there's there's layers of values from one row of trees to the next to the next to the next hill, to the next farm.

Of course, the sky.

The sky is always a huge part of when I make a picture, I look for active skies, you know, big, strong clouds of, you know, towering stuff in the atmosphere.

That's that's what excites me.

It's just a constant visual delight to me.

One of the great things that I find so unique about this area is the river bottoms.

All of this land that we see out here, these cornfields and these farms were once part of the river itself.

The river came right here to this building.

This was this was a port where they shipped stuff.

So all that land out there is now part of the landscape.

And it was when Lewis and Clark came up the river, it was the river.

I'm fascinated by the the physical decay, the the machine that's rusting on the side of the trail or that the barn that's falling down with one door hanging off the hinges.

And, you know, all of those things are just a visual treat.

You know, it's great stuff.

It's just a big concept that's hard to get my arms around.

And then words.

Sometimes if I could articulate it, I wouldn't have to make pictures of it.

When most of us think of legendary Louisiana painter George Rodrigue, it's his Blue Dogs that leap to mind.

But Rodrigue had a special place in his heart for another painting, the yearly dinner.

Ogden Museum curator Bradley Sumrall explains the significance behind this painting for Rodrigue and the culture that raised him.

This is George Greig's Alley dinner from 1971.

This was the first major painting where Roderick used the human figure in the landscape.

It's really considered his masterpiece by the family and by scholars.

And we're really, really proud to have it here at the Ogden.

So this depicts the Derby house outside of New Iberia and a traditional dinner that was held within French Creole families there.

The men would come with their own bottle of wine and sit around the table.

These dinners would last for like 6 hours.

One of the elders would make the only which is a mayonnaise.

And then the boys would serve the table.

And the women did all of the cooking.

They were these gourmet societies, these little groups of of going moms within the French Creole culture.

But what you see in this composition is how he pushed all of the action up into the upper section of the painting.

And then you have this beautiful foreground that almost becomes like an abstraction of the greens and the browns and the blacks here.

And it's truly masterful and shows the trajectory of his career.

Rodrigue was painting what he knew, and I saw an interview with him recently where he said, Don't let anybody tell you what to paint.

Paint what?

You know.

And this is what he knew.

This is the culture that he knew.

And as a matter of fact, I believe that this is his grandfather.

There one of George Rodriguez, daughter in laws, relatives is in the painting, too.

These were the people of his area.

This is a painting that's deeply tied to the culture and the traditions of a particular place, as we like to say at the Ogden.

It has a really strong sense of place, and I think that's what sets it apart from many paintings of this period.

Few of us ever forget the first horror stories we heard those first fright.

Stay with us.

And maybe even made us believe in magic for a little while.

Now, one Orlando, Florida, based theater troupe is bringing that delicious sense of dread to the stage.

Here's a look behind the scenes of Phantasmagoria.

About six years ago, I said, I need to get out of my own box and redefine what a horror circus means to me.

Within two months, we had a show called Phantasmagoria, replete with the puppets and the costuming and the projections and everything we were doing.

I think what really sets it apart from other theater I've been to is that it's really kind of a multisensory experience.

It's not strictly theater.

I've been in trance since day one.

Automatically I was drawn in to their performance.

After that first line, you're hooked.

It's hard to stop watching.

Take your eyes off of something because they always have their characters doing something.

A lot of people who come aboard, they enjoy the show.

They get pulled into the world of the show and they have great talents that we can use, whether they're great dancers or or great stage combat people or great circus artists.

I was initially just an audience member.

There's just something about the like the weird Victorian storytelling world, the little sandbox that we get to play in that I, I can't stop.

The first thing is removed more than half of the window set to Victoria, Darling.

It's just simply divine.

And to have this gothic darkness to it even better, I when we first designed these costumes, we had never even heard the word steampunk.

We were designing Victorian costumes with a twist and then everybody started saying to us, Oh, you're steampunk.

We went, Yes, we are.

It's kind of fun to see a little steampunk family that we kind of have there.

Costumes are sometimes even nicer than ours, so very eccentric individuals.

I happen to be an eccentric individual myself, so we seemed to mesh pretty well.

I saw their performance at Gods and Monsters, the comic book Shop.

I think all the cosplayers there initially thought, Who are these people?

Because they don't know the characters that they play in the show.

So they were a little skeptical.

But once they saw that performance, I think they had them put.

If you look at what phantasmagoria features, it's folklore and it's literature or fantasy and horror, and we're just kind of a continuation of that tradition of Dreamers.

I think.

We've got so many different layers and so many different parts and pieces that create us as a whole.

I really think you'd be hard pressed to find somebody that we can't relate to, and that's what we strive for.

These are people who are really special to us and they treat us wonderfully and support us.

Let's do the same with them.

And that's what I think a lot of people can learn about, quote unquote fandom or the people that follow you is they have a stake in this, too.

We're trying to volunteer the audience.

Yeah.

People started saying to us, you know, you guys are like a graphic novel.

Come to life.

You're like a living comic book.

And we started going, okay, let's use that.

After some time, we had a sense that within the world of the comic book story.

We can take a pause from it being a theatrical presentation of literary work, and we can really take the time to dive into the relationships between these characters.

3 to 1.

We're in the midst of pre-production on the very first issue, which was called Issue zero, and it's kind of an introduction to the troupe.

At this point, it's really wonderful to watch how the storyboards have built off of the story and that we've gone into the studio and built visual storyboards with photography.

What other sorts of shenanigans and adventures have they been getting into when they're not presenting a show for an audience?

What goes on between the shows?

Barry Kirsch, who is our photographer who walked in the door one day and just said, I really like what you guys want to do.

And what I like about it is the way you've built a family and you're living that family and truly has done that weird artistic switch where the actors playing the troupe have become the truth.

We are phantasmagoria and that's kind of beautiful.

We love it.

And that's going to do it for this edition of Art Rocks.

But remember, you can always watch episodes of the show at LTV dot org slash rocks.

And if you want more, Country Roads magazine is a great resource for learning all about what's going on in the States.

Vibrant arts and culture close to home and all around Louisiana.

Until next week, I've been James Fox Smith and thanks for watching.