This time on art rocks, taking a piece of wood and seeing the bowl or the vase hidden within.

Even in the same short piece of wood.

I've got a big piece of maple one time and it was just every piece was different.

You wouldn't have thought any of it came out of the same tree.

Finding a path to self-discipline through the creative process.

But when you start, you think you know how to draw.

That's when the process of learning comes and you need to have patience.

Trading the actor's role for a director's Chair.

I learned pretty early on that if I wanted to always work in theater, consistently work in theater, I should probably have more skills than just being able to memorize lines.

And nature's raw materials transformed.

I'm interested in exploring the transformative nature of materials and how the language can shift those stories.

Up next on Art Rocks.

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Broadcasting.

And by viewers like you.

Hello, I'm James Fox Smith, publisher of Country Roads magazine and your host for this episode of Hot Rocks.

We all know the phrase about not seeing the forest for the trees.

Well, Audie Maxey can't look at a tree, let alone a forest, without seeing the wooden vase, bowl or other decorative objects trapped within an engineer by day, a wood turner by night.

Maxey explains how he turns his talent to creating beautiful things.

My grandfather was a wood worker of sorts, so he did all kind of ax handles and boat paddles and worked with wood all of his life.

He would have loved to have had a cabinet shop and made things of that nature, but he had just a very crude drawing of an ax.

He could do as much with an ax a lot of people could do.

Nowadays, with modern tools, he just kind of developed a taste in me and I just followed it up and went from making boat paddles and ax handles to gradually making furniture small items like it.

And then I just decided I could do wooden and looked interesting and I bought a small lathe and started making some little Christmas presents and the coals and things.

And I realized I kind of like making the bowls.

I didn't like making parts that had to fit together like a metal shop and the word wood swelled and high humidity and it dry out.

So it would fit one day and it wouldn't fit the next.

And the bowls just kind of flexed and moved as a one or two wasn't a problem, and I just gravitated to making bowls and have a small lathe and made small bowls and so when I can make bigger bowls, I need a bigger lathe in about one and wore it out and bought a bigger lathe.

And now I've been making stuff ever since.

Making the big one is really not any more challenging.

It's just takes longer because you get more would remove.

It's not uncommon to take £100 block wood and turn £6 balls, 7 bowl out of it.

The lathe actually holds wood and turns it.

And then I have different knives that I can use to just shave away what I don't want.

It's kind of different from like a table.

So the blade turns and wood is basically stationary.

I leave the wood turns and the blame the stationary, it's a little different, but it works for me.

This is a sunset piece.

Just looking at it to me, it looks like beech rolling waves and the sun going down over the horizon.

Just looking at a green pattern.

This one is made from and Hackberry.

I don't get much of it, but I really enjoyed working with these pieces.

This is one of my favorite pieces.

Just because the the green out of the maple tree is just different and just looking at different areas, you could see the fiddle black, wavy pattern, the some of the bolting down in this area.

It's just a beautiful piece, a little bit of birds off one side, but it was very challenging because of the depth and this is basically a 19 inch.

Q When I started and I was just able to just flatten off the bottom like a little foot and then just start turning away a little bit.

Just all I had to really is brown to do it.

So it's still 19, almost 19 inches across in, but the depth, the further you cut, more dangerous it becomes and the harder it becomes because the tool a lot more of it sticking inside and I just ran out of to rest and just had to just keep gently easily taking off a little bit more out of the bottom.

So that was this one more challenging.

And patients, just because of the depth I really like working with Walnut, it just finishes very well.

The dust is very nuisance, but I really like walnut maple.

Any kind of sport and wood can spot really pretty.

It makes dark lines throughout it.

It really, really pops when you see it.

Oh, it's really want to lose it.

You don't know what you've got until you start cutting into it.

And it really amazes most of the time, even in the same short piece of wood.

I've got a big piece of maple one time and it was just every piece was different.

You wouldn't have thought any of it came out of the same tree.

I'd go to bowl and it had this beautiful fiddle back pattern of just really amazing.

And the next piece might have some sporting where had these dark black lines through it.

There was a couple of pieces of it had birds, these little eyes that just shined.

It was amazing piece of Maplewood and I wish I could get another one real soon.

But yes, I'm always surprised by what you find.

And then I use tongue or finish.

Oh, it's some of the Chinese views.

2000 years old.

It's supposed to be found safe.

It is classified as food.

So I make rolling pins and little faces, big flour basis sometimes just depending on what kind of wood I can get.

Oh, those are the main things I make.

I make little cups, time of year, special order for some wineglasses that I've made.

They become wooden gifts.

Christmas presents, things of that nature and what I can.

I take a few art virtues throughout the year aside and date them and put what kind of wood made for them.

Sometimes I put from recovered alone from start to bond a few pieces just because we can't get big leaf maple and some other things here locally.

But I'm just flooded with wood from other places.

People know that I do this and they call me all the time.

I want to take this tree down, which you can get some of it making something out of it, or more.

Had this storm came through, this field fell down, a comeback me something out of it.

So I have it all the time.

Part of it is just good therapy.

And you come home from work, eat supper, or I come outside and turn.

And I think a lot of that was the thrill of revealing what's there, you know, cutting into a bark wood and seeing what the grain looks like, what the pattern is.

I've salvaged many pieces of somebody else's firewood, go to somebody at home and say, You're not going to burn this.

Maxey explained that the drying or seasoning process means that it can be months before any turn, bowl or vase will be ready for use.

Good things, as they say, take time.

Accomplished artists from near and far are showcasing work in communities near you.

So here are some of our picks for notable exhibits coming soon to museums and galleries in your neck of the woods.

For more about these and many more events in the arts, subscribe to Arts Monthly.

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Come along now as we visit a young man with the great good fortune of knowing exactly what he wants to do.

ORLANDO Florida's Kenneth Rodriguez might still be in high school, but he already has a path plodded for making himself a career as a professional artist.

Want to know how?

Come and see and my name is kind of obvious.

I go to University High School, Orlando, and I love art.

When I was a little kid, I looked up to my brother.

He just too.

He was my inspiration.

But when you start, you think you know how to draw.

That's when the process of learning comes.

And you need to have patience.

I started trying different mediums.

I really like pen, like graphite, and I like realism.

When I draw a realistic person, like a portrait or just flowers.

I like flowers.

So I try to combine things that I like.

And one drawing.

Last year he came and he was a transfer.

He had a lot of patience.

You.

He actually saw the detail and everything is very mature, very patient, and very focused on his goals for his future.

It's kind of rare to see that in a high school age, because during that time they're still wondering what they want to do, where they're going to go here.

And he had that goal set on when he made that happen.

Most of the time it doesn't come out like how I imagined it.

And so I just have to keep trying to do it, like how I see it.

He pushed as far as experimenting a push, as far as patience and learning and push as far as researching how to do it correctly.

So so and that is showing that he's very mature for his age.

I mean, that's going to carry a very far.

I want to be a graphic artist and then go pursue video games or tattoos.

I found this website that you can sell prints.

I was drawing, but I want to make something out of it.

I started selling them online, and I do commissions, too.

It's an advantage to start now.

The roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd.

Ask.

Any act of live theater can be absolutely addictive.

Chad Sweet lives and breathes this unique atmosphere as a technical director and a production manager of the Reno Little Theater in Reno, Nevada.

Let's look into Sweet's entire journey from the moment he steps on stage to being a character, holding the whole show together.

To me, theater is the ultimate art form.

It combines literally every art form in the world.

You have literary with a script, you have performance art.

You've got oftentimes dance or choreography.

I mean, even the way a character moves around the stage.

I mean, you have to a lot of times choreograph that stuff.

It has to be really well thought out.

You have visual art with scenic painting and the design of the set.

You know, it's just a really beautiful amalgamation of almost every single art form.

As most people in theater.

I started out as an actor.

My first show was at the age of 11.

I was in Peter Pan.

I found something I really loved and I didn't go to school for it.

I thought I wasn't good enough to be an actor.

So I thought, You know what?

I'm still going to try and be an actor.

But as a backup plan, I'll go to art school and I'll be a painter.

It's a really solid economic backup plan there.

I got my first professional theater job right out of college.

I worked at a small summer stock theater in upstate New York, Cortland Repertory Theater, and I worked for about ten years off of that first audition.

And I learned pretty early on that if I wanted to always work in theater, consistently work in theater, I should probably have more skills than just being able to memorize lines and be entertaining because I went to school to be a painter.

I easily picked up doing things like scenic painting and design work and things like that.

And then I got into props, design and building and set building as well.

And I worked all over the country.

I worked down in Mexico.

Reno Little Theater is one of the longest running community theaters in the nation.

It's been a fixture of the community since 1935.

I am the technical director, production manager and resident designer here at Reno Little Theater.

We do six mainstage productions a year.

At any given moment, we've got about three productions in the hopper.

We'll have one on stage.

We've already been in production and rehearsals for the next show, and then we're also starting pre-production for the show following that.

As a set designer, I'll have a brainstorming meeting with the director.

I'll go back and do some really fleshed out sketches.

I'll do a ground plan, and then from there I'll start doing renderings.

I'll bring those ground plans into a three dimensional view so the director can really understand what their people are going to live in.

We'll pick out colors, we'll pick out styles of furniture.

Then I get to work sourcing the things that I need if I need wallpaper.

I got to find that wallpaper and hopefully find it for really cheap.

And then if there's furniture, what are these furniture pieces and where am I going to get them?

Am I going to be able to pull them from our storage?

Usually the last resort is to go out and buy something.

But there's Craigslist.

Craigslist has got to be the best invention for theater in modern history.

The technical director's main responsibility is making sure that the set gets built safely.

The funny thing about designing and about set building is that it's never done and nothing is ever static.

The everything always changes.

Production manager is a bit more administrative.

They're in charge of making sure that all of the tech departments are getting their work done, getting it done to the satisfaction of the director and the designers, and also getting it done under budget.

It's the iceberg effect.

A lot of people see just the top 5%.

You see a couple of actors on stage and you think, Wow, that performance was brilliant.

They're not really led behind the scenes to look at what happened eight months ago, a year ago, when we started the process of what shows we are going to do and how we are going to do them and and having the director meet with the designers and figuring out all of the concepts and how they're going to tell the story, the most efficient and evocative way.

And then three months ahead of time, as we're pulling props and we're finalizing designs and a month ahead of time, as the sets being built and the lighting designer is choosing colors and figuring out how they're going to make special effects happen.

And the two weeks before, when we get to load in the set and all of the people that are here involved staff and volunteers, artists and craftspeople.

For any given actor on stage, there are at least 3 to 6 different technicians behind them trying to make their performance the best it can be.

I heard you on the radio last night.

You were wonderful for opening night.

It is a lot of payoff.

I am constantly challenged with how can I do something different?

How can I make sure that when our audiences sit down and they see the world we've created for them to support the story and support the actors, that it's really something new to them.

It's something that's going to delight them.

And I hope we are a place where people can come and connect and feel the community and have thoughtful discussions about themes that we're dealing with in the shows that we present and hopefully connect those to their everyday lives.

Way up in Hudson, New York, Jeffrey Gibson is using beadwork, ceramics, sculpture and paintings to create art that mixes his cultural heritage with minimalism and abstraction.

Growing up as a foreigner is something that I think about a lot now.

You know, when you're a foreigner, you don't entirely understand what you're looking at or what you're hearing all the time.

So you have this kind of subjective comprehension of the world around you that is an estimated guess.

I think about that a lot in terms of how I use materials because I use a lot of materials that I think many people may not know.

The context that I'm drawing them from or what the culture is or the history is.

So my mother's family lives in Oklahoma, my father's family lives in Mississippi, and those Choctaw and Cherokee cultures are extremely different.

So when I would go there, it would be to visit my family.

I never wanted to observe my family.

You want to be a participant in your family so we don't look at each other and think, Oh, that's Native American.

Then I begin thinking, What was it about the quilts that Grandma made, or what was it about the jewelry that she wore or the dresses that she made?

What did the song mean?

That she would sing?

And then it becomes something culturally specific, I suppose.

But otherwise it's just kind of inherently familial.

It really started from places like, I want to take part in all of these things.

I want to know how to be.

And then that starts off pattern and it starts off design.

It starts off color choices.

It starts off the challenge of what you can actually do with beads.

I wanted to make found object work and over the course of time, sometimes they are mashed together.

I'm interested in exploring the transformative nature of materials and how the language can shift from a beaded triangle to a painted triangle to a woven triangle.

And what those three different versions of a triangle mean.

There is this period of club music that was the transition of analog music into digital, and it was the sampling and the turntables where people could sample music that was really had an impression on me.

So this kind of repetitive nature of repeating and picking something from one context and sticking it into another one and making something new, I can spend the time in my studio mashing up, remixing, remaking, taking apart reconstructing, and I can invite other people to take part in that with me.

I think it's important to just to be transparent about the process.

We acknowledge the assistants all the time as much as we can.

If it was just me making, for instance, a punching bag, we would be seeing one a year.

The lines between craft and what's, you know, historically been thought of as fine art.

The decorative embellishment, all of those things in this environment are equalized.

If you look at Powell garments, they're so loud and colorful.

And with that as my inspiration, in many ways, there was no limit to the combinations of colors.

It's more thinking about what the color does in combination with each other.

So it's either really kind of pop or electric or reflective or optic.

I do have an attraction between the idea of minimalism and how minimalism leads towards like maximal density.

I used to think that minimalism was about maintaining this quiet, silent place like this void and filled with things.

And now I realize that the removal of information isn't an effort to actually be able to see how much is present in a very small space or in a very limited palette.

The idea is to like, say, slow down the color red and understand how many shades of red there are.

Slow down the color blue, Understand how many shades of blue, tones of blue.

And then, of course, it opens right back up into including every single color.

My training is as an entirely process based abstract artist, but the text was always meant to name this entirely subjective language of abstraction.

And at some point, when the audience wasn't able to get the content that I felt I was putting into the abstraction, I decided to just start putting the text directly on it.

Most of the titles, for instance, come from appropriated lyrics, and then it just kind of hit something about the understanding that these words describe what you're looking at.

Became a really big part of the work for me.

People who are looking at my work at the time would always question, Well, how does this relate to who you are?

You know, how does this relate to you as a Native American person, as a gay person?

Is this subjectivity somehow representative of that experience?

And it seemed, no matter how hard I would say, no, it's not.

It almost compounded more for people to look for connections in the work.

And at some point I decided to own the words Native American, to own the words gay, and not give them any kind of power over determining who I am.

But I was fine with the work being described in that way, because it is true.

This is my experience.

And in the 20th century, at that time and even today, that's very much how we describe each other.

I acknowledge that we're all very, very layered, complicated people.

In our contemporary world, we don't always have the opportunity to explore that or to share that with each other.

But it's what you can do in art.

That'll do it for this week's edition of Art Rock.

But as you know, you can always find watch and share episodes of this show, an LP, Dawgs, Art Rocks.

And if all this leaves you curious about the culture that surrounds you.

Country Roads magazine makes it ideal companion for discovering creative people, places and things all across the state.

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