Coming up on Art rocks, a Baton Rouge multimedia dreamer whose collages express the workings of the subconscious mind.

The thing I like about Japanese work is that they always have these flowing forms, and I've always wanted to be able to do that.

But with paper all together now composing tunes for ten pianos and digging the roots of a repertory theater, that's all about to happen on art rock.

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

Hello, I'm James Fox Smith from Country Roads magazine, thanking you for joining us on Art rocks.

We begin with Baton Rouge as Demond Matsuo, who credits a lifelong fascination for ancient mythologies and modern video games as the dual inspirations behind his exquisite collage creations.

He shares the thinking behind his unique approach.

I grew up playing a lot of video games, and I grew up looking through a lot of art books because I stayed in the House of light.

So I finished a Cyclopedia Britannica when I was really young.

But these happened because I saw things on people's walls or in museums, and I wanted them myself.

That was the original reason for my art.

But I used to do martial arts, and that's where the Asian thing came from, because I was really kind of angry kid.

My favorite martial artist was always Miyamoto Musashi, and he, at the end of his life, just stop fighting and you just become more Zen.

And that was the whole goal.

I covered a whole canvas in paper, different type paper, the whole canvas, and then I do a wash of gesso, and then I draw all my forms on the canvas.

I've always like geishas because I like the movement and the fabric.

I was reading all this stuff about the Silk Road.

All those are not ones that you use for Japanese art.

There's some Japanese pieces in it, but all the rest is actually from the Ottoman Empire, because I know they had really nice silks and really nice velvets, and I thought it would look would go with the form.

And I thought that you couldn't tell that it was Ottoman or that it was Japanese.

The thing I like about Japanese artwork is that they always have these flowing forms, and I've always wanted to be able to do that, but with paper and try to make it flow like they did, but without just line.

I'm more partial to just doing line, but as of late I've been thinking I'm getting good with color.

That's what I told myself.

And so I started to do things so you can see the form.

So you can see the paper so you can see it move.

I'm starting to be able to make it move and I'm like, wow, I can do that.

So I make it move, you know, and then it looks like fabric.

And you might think it's just Japanese, but it has Chinese and they may have Mongolian anything.

Then there's Russian textiles, but that's for me.

And that's not for you to know.

This is for me to have fun because I get bored really easy.

So I have to do things to make it more fun.

That painting is fighting ghosts is two fighting ghosts.

There's a tangle at the bottom, and then there's a fox spirit at the top.

And the fighting ghost was big for me because it was.

I wanted to exercise a lot of anger I have inside of me.

When I was young, martial arts made me look at things a lot prettier and made me see that my hands can do a lot more than just breaking stuff.

But I still can can show that and still make it pretty.

The theme of ghosts is because ghosts are ephemeral.

Supposedly I saw them when I was a kid, and supposedly they followed me when I was a kid because I'm Korean, so they always have stories for everything.

Hokusai is one of my favorite artists and the reason why my name is Demon Mitsuo.

My favorite haiku port is Mitsuo Basho and supposedly haiku poets.

Whenever they move to a new town, they change their names.

So when I was young, I changed my middle name to Matsuo the not on the other ones head is actually from like a robe that you do in No Dance.

I was really into all the Dutch artists and they always have hunt scenes.

There's always hunt scenes and everything going on.

But I like the mythology of it.

Like Actaeon, when you looked at Diane and she sent the dogs after her and he turned into a deer.

I like all those ideas.

I wanted the myth of it, because deer in Buddhist mythology is a kind of divine animal, because they go and they disappear.

You see them, then they're gone.

But that's everything is ephemeral.

And that's why I use deer for me and a lot of mythologies use them.

And then I just got obsessed.

I'm like, man, I know the bones.

I know all this stuff.

I know how they move.

And I just got obsessed with it.

So I just started doing more and more, and I always wanted to make things pretty.

I always want to make a myth and make it pretty.

Because I'm a storyteller, I can tell stories.

That's always been my talent.

But I didn't know how to tell it in front of you because I'll hide in a second.

These I can hide.

I can just put them out there and then just go somewhere, and then they talk about it later.

I went to LSU, but I didn't take the prerequisites because I went to Ed promising.

And I said, oh, can I take your class?

I promise you I'll impress you.

And I didn't take any of the prerequisite.

I think I showed up now, I think I learned more at 200 government, which was like a studio commune because there was so many kids and so many talented people come through there, just pop up.

And we were just people.

And it was an old Coca-Cola building.

We only had to pay for electricity.

We had bands in there and we just lived in there, and people would be coming through all the time, and then you can just try everything.

You work together because, you know, artists usually don't work together.

It wasn't that competitive and people would just work and and do stuff and say, you want to do a collaborative.

So people would do really large collaborative demand.

He's infiltrated kind of our Baton Rouge creative community, and he's been here for a long time.

And he kind of started from the bottom, working out of warehouses, showing his artwork on his own, just kind of on the side of the street near LSU.

And then from there, it's those kind of intangible, what we call 10,000 hours, that really divides any artist from being a professional artist who's working and living and producing something that's truly unique.

To learn more about these and other events in Louisiana, keep your eyes peeled for a copy of Country Roads Magazine.

And While We're at It Lives at Ross website features an archive of previous episodes.

So to see any episode again, just log on to ltv.org.

Oscar composer creating memorable music for a single instrument is hard enough.

Imagine then, the challenge of composing for an ensemble comprised of ten pianos.

That's what American composer Michael Tork was asked to do.

Listen to the way talk applied his jazz influenced esthetic to building an unforgettable soundscape.

It took some collaboration three four.

My name is Mia Vasilyev and I'm the founding director of Miami Piano Circle.

My name is Michael Turkey and I'm the composer of this piece.

Miami Grande's.

Good.

Now, guys, you play simple stuff.

Would you be very precise with your battles?

My name is going to be down to your fans by degree, education and experience.

Am pianist and conductor 41 three and.

Now I can hear everything.

And I can see that everyone's kind of feeling it together.

And it's really exciting.

This year we're collaborating with Barry University, is presenting this brand new work, which is an exciting commission.

So she called one day and said, I want to write for ten pianos.

And the weird thing about that is, I mean, ten pianos.

And this is what just got a wild reaction.

People thought, wow, ten pianos.

I am one of the pianists that that's really my my core behind the whole thing.

And most exciting I believe in the series is a commissioned by Michael Torquay called Miami Grands, and we're fortunate to have the composer in attendance at the rehearsals and the performance.

This is a totally Miami inspired piece, so each movement of the piece is based on different cultural or geographical locations.

In Miami, for example, the Everglades, mojitos and stilettos.

And when people ask me why ten pianos, I always say, because that's all we can sit on the stage.

Of course.

So, ten pianos.

It's just a nice even number.

And that is all we can fit on the stage.

Actually, in this case.

Right now, in music and in the arts, the power of the imagination is even more than like, the reality of it.

And so, I mean, I'm hoping I captured what I think that it is.

When we have ten pianos, each one of them indeed making a full orchestra sound.

People are very responsive.

I think the whole show as a concept, reaches the audience.

If you had to come up with a plan to preserve a dying town, where would you start?

Way back in the 1960s, the people of Creede, Colorado, turned to the arts for salvation.

They founded a theater company to replace some of the revenue lost to a fading mining industry.

Now, 50 years later, that company is a nationally recognized theatrical enterprise.

Take a look.

Christy Brands commute to work is two blocks.

Still, most days, it takes nearly an hour to navigate.

Traffic can't be blamed for the delay.

Nope.

Creede is not prone to that.

What?

Hold Brant up her fans.

Hi, babe.

How are you?

I'm good.

I'm.

I think some people that come here aren't necessarily that attracted to everybody knowing who you are, everybody knowing what you do.

And where you are every day.

I truly feel like I'm a part of this community.

That sense of community has had a more practical purpose to.

It has helped to create repertory theater, to thrive, and the hard right.

Understanding that, though, means looking back 50 years well, and to see them to mine and shut down.

And we was afraid that the town would dry up and blow away.

So we created this to keep the town of going.

Feel like it was 23 years old when Creed Repertory Theater put on its first productions in 1966.

This is a mining town, and it was rough and tough, and we had never seen anything like actual theater.

So it was it was just mind boggling how those people could remember all of those lines.

But before a single line was spoken like it and Jim Livingston had to pitch the theater idea to its junior Chamber of Commerce, a foreign concept in the small community 250 miles southwest of Denver.

Not everyone fished, and not everyone, went around and party from ranch to ranch.

So there had might be something in town and it might be good for the economy.

And it might also, be good for the local people who, who didn't get to do a whole lot of things.

Creed's Chamber of Commerce agreed.

Still, a key component was missing the talent.

I knew that if we were going to do it, there was no frame of reference here.

for theater, I knew a drama department at one of the major universities would be able to supply that.

And if someone were crazy enough to come here because we didn't have any money, just, raw, raw material and and, not old opera house, a few other things.

Well, then maybe we could pull it off.

A dozen theater students from the University of Kansas caught wind of the idea.

Crazy or not, Steve Reed was among those who embraced it.

I was thinking, okay, coming out Colorado to the Rocky Mountains, starting a theater in an honest to goodness old West mining town.

This is an adventure.

You know, we we opened our homes in our community, those kids to put those plays on.

We gave them a chance, and they gave us a chance to learn what theater was all about.

So it was a two way deal.

I've never been to a place like this where you feel, like people, want you in their family.

CRT garnered national attention during Maurice 12 years of leadership as former executive and artistic director.

LeMay also helped expand its footprint both in and out of Creede, adding a second theater and staging work in Denver.

I think you have to be more cautious when you're the Denver Center Theater Company or you're, you know, a major theater company.

In a way, there's more at risk here.

You can kind of take chances.

No one's going to know if you mess up.

Jessica Jackson is Creed's current artistic director.

I found an audition advertisement for the 2015 season, and it said, quote, we're hiring a family of artists.

Does that stem from the fact that the community and the theater are so tightly knit?

When we bring in our summer company of about 90, we're increasing the population of creed by 20 something percent.

And so we feel like we have a responsibility to bring in people who are going to not only be good company members, but be good community members, too.

Because whether you like it or not, you are not anonymous here.

You are a member of this community as a founding company member, Gary Mitchell was among the first to experience the close relationship between the theater and the community.

Well, it was Mr. Roberts.

It was June 26th, 1966.

We'd been working on this play for ten days, but we'd also been working on building a theater for ten days and surviving as a company for ten days.

We were having so much fun, finally doing a show, even though the paint was wet and there was this incredible feeling and energy.

The theater has had less than incredible moments too.

Then in 1970, when the theater burned, that could have been yet.

I mean, you know, the managing directors that year, you know, they could have just said, you know, but we can't do this anymore.

But they came out here, they met with some of the townspeople, and they all got together and say, we can do this.

Let's just do it.

And they did.

Restoring the theater's scorched interior in one month's time, audiences then and now are eager to fill seats.

Jessica Jackson pointed out.

Part of the reason for strong ticket sales is CRT is long standing and exceedingly rare choice to run performances in repertory.

There is the opportunity for audience members to see six different performances in one weekend here, and that is a monumental task.

for an actor, that means being able to run four different shows in one week and for the production and technical crew, it means this.

There's something else that sets Creed apart from other theater companies.

Instead of its actors slipping out the stage door after a show, they do the opposite.

This is a very valuable experience for Creed.

It makes everybody that comes to the theater feel more a part of the theater, and it makes us understand what this art can do for people.

There have always been ups and downs, you know, there always are.

But this community is just so amazing.

I'm mighty proud of what they're doing.

And we had no idea that it would last this long.

It's grown beyond anything that I ever could have imagined.

This is something great.

But for Christy Brant and everyone else at Creed Repertory Theater, it's just another day at work.

You might be surprised where some of the most creative minds in product marketing choose to set up shop in a tiny town named Camp Spring, Kentucky, on land his great grandfather once farmed, Keith Nelson runs his innovative and highly successful design company Nelnet says the appreciation for heritage and craftsmanship learned in Camp Spring is what helps bring brands to life.

We're in a place called Camp Springs, Kentucky.

My great great grandfather actually came from Germany in 1845.

He settled here.

My family basically has stayed and taken root here.

The farm is still working farm.

My oldest brother actually manages the farm and it's turned into a wedding venue.

My mom's still active in cans, pickles, and we do a farm festival, so it's rural, but it's, you know, there's kind of interesting things kind of tucked in the hills.

And I guess maybe we're one of those.

Small batch in a nutshell, a branding studio, whether that be for musicians, the distilling industry or candy that really is what we do.

We tell stories visually with an esthetic that I think is as unique.

So I was able to bring this work ethic to design and, creating that, was was kind of unique.

And in really drove me throughout my career.

And.

And one of the influences, with kind of creating small Batch was could you take a team that, you know, in a larger agency might be spread out across multiple projects, multiple responsibilities, but what if you could take kind of a core team that just focus on creating some?

One of our team members is Jeff Chambers.

He's a writer, creative director from you know, actually, the Herzog space that we're in right now, we did the branding for the record store, and Jeff wrote for that.

And so we've we've probably worked together ten plus years.

It's interesting because he brings the level to small batch, the tone, the coffee tone, not just visually what we do, but in words and storytelling.

It's an invaluable talent that he brings.

These guys always grab on to something within the story, and then we get back together and bam, it's this fantastic thing.

Rob Warnick is a local illustrator who has this really kind of, ironic, kind of fun, cartoon kind of style.

But he's worked with us on brands like Ferrara Candy company out of Chicago.

we reinvented Lemon Head, which is a brilliant, you know, a 70s brand.

He just brought a tone to the project that we needed truly, I look at this work as a reflection of us and myself.

We have to be proud of that.

And I think tapping into the right people for the tone or the esthetic is, is just important.

I was influenced by people along the way that, illustrators that I just admired or saw them firsthand creating spray paint, ink, whatever it might be.

and what that ends up doing is creating something that, you know, there's not a repetitive nature in, the work.

It does feel completely hands on.

And I think in a pretty mobile computer centric world, maybe that's what drives my interest in creating something, even if it shows up on Instagram or on an app, if it has origins that were created by a person.

So that's really important.

I think in a lot of ways I try and create that imperfection sometimes in the work.

But for me, I layer things and bring that into the work.

There's a moment where I'm like, okay, that's done, or someone can just replicate that.

Like we made something unique.

So Boone County Distilling Company came to us a couple years ago and said, hey, we want to resurrect this distillery.

That was in Boone County.

So the first product that they launched was called 1833, and it really championed William Schneider as the influence, the tagline that Jeff Chambers was made by ghost, I think, I think the idea of storytelling and the way we interpreted can be different.

I think, yeah, the process can be really focused.

So if it's an illustration or, you know, a bourbon label, a lot of times I'll look for inspiration in that totally might start to feel through color and texture and type how the end piece might feel.

So essentially a mood board, but usually things start with tracing paper and it's pretty loose.

And then you kind of slowly tighten and funnel and finesse and we'll share conceptual directions with the client to kind of bring them along.

As we're creating.

You've got ink and printers and paper, and there's a lot of attributes, the tactile things that you kind of have to have that vision early on to plan for that or to kind of bring that to life.

I think there's a lot of pride in the sense that a lot of the work is created here, and it's inevitably influenced by our environment.

There's a truth to what we can bring to a project that that applies.

And the farm is is still we're still sustaining that in that, is really important.

You know, in the afternoon, my kids get home from school and they pop up here and they're an influence to me.

It's just, procuring that from your life.

And someone ask me, how's it going?

It's like it's just one big life, you know what I mean?

Like, there's blurred lines in a really good way.

where?

Family.

I hope my family, my kids, and, you know, are influenced by what they're seeing so they can turn it into something completely different.

And, you know, take something from it and make their own thing, you know, because I, I think that my parents and my grandparents would be proud of that.

And that is that for this edition of Art rocks.

But remember, Art lover, you can always watch the episodes of the show at LPB for ugly, rocks.

And if that's not enough for you, Country Roads Magazine is a great resource for enriching your cultural life with art.

Cuisine escapes, and events all across the state.

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