Coming next on Art rocks, an artist whose passion for the work of pioneering naturalists guides his contemporary hand.

When I was looking into these early naturalist painters, I was obviously very drawn to that style and how they would go out into the wilderness and document this.

Before there were cameras, art and technology and a great cosmic collision.

What we bring now is, is on top of making it beautiful.

What we bring now is because it's 3D.

We can actually explore the 3D model and look at the parts and pieces.

Getting to grips with a Renaissance Masters darker side.

Botticelli is interpreting stories from ancient Roman times and contextualizing them into political struggles of his own day.

Now we can look at Botticelli's work and interpret them through the lens of struggles in our time and photographing family.

You can enter into a museum or gallery, and after seeing a show, you can go back into the world and actually see the world anew.

These stories up next on Art rocks.

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

Hello.

Thank you for tuning in for Art rocks with me.

James Fox Smith, publisher of Country Roads magazine.

Nature.

It is said, a pause, a vacuum.

This is especially true in Louisiana, where the warm air, fertile soil and water water everywhere attracted early artist naturalist like John James Audubon, who came to chronicle life's teeming multitude 200 years later.

Baton Rouge painter Chase Mullin follows in the footsteps of those early illustrators, creating precise, photo realistic works that juxtapose the secret life of Louisiana's flora and fauna against the man made in exquisite and startling ways.

Let's take a look and a listen.

When I was looking into these early naturalist painters, I was obviously very drawn to that style.

I think I somewhat romanticized it and how they would go out into the wilderness and document this before there were cameras.

This is just how the knowledge was gathered in this House, passed on for something very romantic about that.

I like the clean backgrounds because it reminds me of scientific illustration.

That's where my interest started with older illustrators such as Audubon and the more naturalist painters.

They always had this very, very clean, simple background, and it drew more attention to the anatomy into the subject.

It's about really honing in on a single subject, and you're really exploring that subjects shape, form, texture.

And it's easier to do that when you're devoid of a setting.

I like these birch panels because they're very smooth, and they allow me to kind of elaborate with detail, and I'm not fighting the texture of canvas as much.

It just makes it more of a scientific panel.

So while typically do is start there, paint the entire thing white with a sand double gesso sanded down to the texture that I like.

And then I'll paint the subject.

And then once it's finished, I'll go back with a nice white wash, which kind of cleans any blemishes I may have made.

It also serves as a closing ritual for a finished piece.

That piece is titled Seed Savers too, and it's actually an accompanying piece for seed savers, one which is a very similar composition.

When I made that, I was doing some reading about native plants and crops to specific regions, and I was really interested in this idea of seeds and crops that are gone.

And there's this new generation of chefs that are looking to find seeds and crops that have left our food ways, and they're going to find these seeds and hopefully bring them back and try and reintroduce them to the cuisine of the South specifically.

And I was thinking about how cow birds, any animal that spends a lot of time in these pastures and then farms in the South, how they can act as vessels for seeds and just kind of carry them.

It was just such a fascinating subject to me.

So I kind of wanted to build a piece that showed all of these potential vessels for seeds, bringing them to new areas and also sharing them.

I also put a cattle egret on top of cow because they typically hitch a ride.

It just it all felt like somewhat of a caravan.

Hummingbirds are an interesting subject for me because they offer such movement and their colors are so varied.

It's just such an easy way to jazz up a painting, to fold them in into interesting ways, because it just adds all these new lines and direction.

And it can also, depending on what species you choose, you can really add a pop of whatever color you want without changing the natural arc of the piece very much.

It's just kind of like confetti on a painting that's South Coast.

I been experimenting a lot with water levels and water lines, and specifically the perspective change above and below water.

How do I bring that perspective in without completely changing lanes?

As far as my solid white background and then completely removed and devoid of context and region and I found this.

If I could consider the water to be negative space the same way the white is air, but it's still negative space.

It's just two elements.

I can just fold it into the rest of my work, and I can merge those with birds, and I can put it into one composition.

I'm particularly interested in that piece right now because it opens the door to me using the same perspective, other ecosystems and brackish water and swamp.

And I can really play with land and sea at the same time.

When I was looking into these early naturalist painters, if you were to take the same approach, the environment wouldn't be devoid of manmade context.

It's clearly there.

So if you were to take an Ottoman style, the world of birds, a book of birds, and you were to fold in what we've done to the landscape, how would that show up?

The one sign for me is iconic in its own way, and it also adds the sense of place that can really give you as much context as I can give without a background.

That is an agave found heavily in Texas.

There's just something about the shape of it and the color.

Like, I love the striations in the leaves.

It's a very meditative subject for me to paint just because it's so geometric and it's form.

I don't think of my work as realism, as it does exist.

I think of it as realism in the form that it could exist.

So friends, like we have with the turtle shell.

I was drawn to turtles for a little while, and specifically the shell.

I liked the form.

I like the shape and the color and texture and I found that to be a really just interesting vessel.

And I wanted that to be the subject of a piece.

The turtle shell is somewhat morbid, and it's very hard to distract from the idea of death.

So I was searching for something that was alive, something that was coming back and growing.

Looking at plants that were regionally specific to where the turtles are, some kind of freshwater plant.

And that led me to the lotus.

And the lotus has a lot of symbology to it on its own.

Its height was right.

The shape of the lotus leaf was somewhat shell like composition.

And then it just became a puzzle of drawing this thing out until I found the right decomposition.

There's certainly a lot of skeletons that have shaped my work.

I would be lying if I said I knew why that was.

I'm not quite sure.

I knew that there were certain compositions I wanted to build.

There were certain subjects I wanted to showcase the skull on its form.

There's something morbid, but really pretty about skeletal forms.

I think it's just the way the light plays with the shadows.

It's the the way that the animals form is still held even in this final stage.

I've drifted more into wanting my work to be able to capture the South as a region, having traveled a lot.

There is a particular fondness I have and an affinity that I've become more connected to as I've drifted away.

I've always been drawn to art and just creating in any form that I could.

painting became my sole focus and it's just an easy way for me to explore all of my interests when it comes to scientific illustration, naturalism, or even contemporary art.

I'm self trained.

I was always drawing and painting since I was.

This is I can hold the pencil.

I can barely remember when I was in kindergarten and I was learning to write the alphabet, and I was turning all of my alphabet letters into little monsters, just adding arms and teeth.

And the teacher actually noticed that I thought she was actually gonna lecture me on it, but she's like, oh, would you like to try it?

That's neat.

And it was a sigh of relief that I wasn't about to get some kind of punishment for that.

It was always an interest just to be creative in some manner.

I actually did the Red River Arts Festival in Shreveport.

I had some paintings that put together.

I had learned how to make some prints, not archival, very, very basic.

And when it comes to prints, but it was something I could find this hobby and it was a way that I could maybe not feel like I was totally burning myself out.

And it went well.

A lot of people want some stuff, and I was like, this is this could actually make a little money.

Doesn't have to be just something I did with in mind in the wee hours of the morning when I'm, you know, not working.

So, that was really inspiring.

And you just led me to pour more and more time into it.

Let me see if I can maybe do it as I clear the work itself for me.

Is moving home, feeling a part of this community, in this culture and this place and having a kinship with it.

And now trying to add to it in a way whenever I can.

And the work.

That.

I.

For more about these and many more events in the arts, visit lpb.org/art rocks.

There you'll find links to every episode of this program.

So to see or to share any segment again visit lpb.org/art rocks.

Here's a look at some images influenced by forces that are literally out of this world.

Animator John Levy marries art with technology to create his own unique brand of cosmic imagery.

And while the subject matter might be otherworldly.

Levy is on familiar ground in his day job.

He's an animation creator for NASA and has created content for various movies and TV shows like lost.

A lot of people know about visual effects and sophisticated graphics from the movies, from television.

There's a general perception in the public about this kind of work can only be done in Hollywood.

We're here in Hampton, Virginia, and we've collected a group of guys from across the country, and we use latest tools, latest technologies, and bring that Hollywood level of graphics to the work we do here.

I'm Jon Levy, studio director of NASA's Advanced Concepts Laboratory here at Ami Studios.

The tagline for Image Studios is design and story at the forefront of technology.

With that, the technology component means is the targets always moving?

There's always a new computer.

There's always a new way of communicating.

VR is the latest and greatest.

It's been around for years, actually, but you know, it's back in the spotlight.

AR for augmented reality there's always another tool and 3D graphics.

There's always another, piece of hardware to learn.

We, wield the tools.

We are experts at these tools.

And at the same time, that's not what it's about.

It's not about those tools at all.

It's about messaging.

It's about concepts and connecting with people.

I won an Emmy for my work on lost visual effects for the pilot, lost.

it was a great day.

Red carpet, celebrities, limos and people.

They see that.

And, you know, I get some pats on the back, but working at NASA is lot longer lasting.

I moved here from Portland, Oregon, and, and I moved here because I want to contribute to something more lasting, something more significant.

I want to take my skill set, and kind of bring it full circle, bring it back to design, bring it back to, making a lasting impact.

It's, it's a joy to wake up to joy to participate in this process.

It's a joy to work with people here and the ideas and capture that, in a video and see our customers.

See the engineers, excitement when they see their idea embodied, when they see their idea on the screen and they share with you.

Art is artifact is a thing.

Needs to stand on its own.

If it's a painting in a gallery hanging on the wall, you don't get to stand next to it and explain to people what you're painting is about.

Art is also, the execution, the quality, the craftsmanship, and it's the concept.

So if you have a piece of art that's beautiful but has no meaning behind it, it's flat.

It's it's it's doesn't last.

It's not that interesting.

If you have a piece of art that has a lot of meaning and significance, but it's ugly, no one's going to look at it.

And so what we do when we create is we marry the concept with a beautiful execution.

That's when it has legs.

That's when people see it.

That's when people are engaged, interested in the product.

I would also say that, you know, traditional media, knowing how to draw and knowing how to paint is really important because the computer may render an image and, you know, it's technically accurate and then lights here in the grounds here.

And but it's ugly, doesn't know it's ugly.

And so you have to have that traditional art background to be able to make a judgment call and say, you know, I'm I think it should look like this.

And then you have to wrestle with the computer to make it look like that.

So I would just go for automotive design.

Automotive design, school is really car drawing school.

So for years doing car driving school and in the early days days of car design, they would use, hand painted.

They do gouache and pencil and they illustrate car design.

It's similar here at NASA in the in the 70s.

in the shuttle program, for example, they would do beautiful renderings of the conceptual, spacecraft.

It's cool stuff.

I love it, I love looking at that, that alert work.

What we bring now is, is on top of making it beautiful.

But we bring now is because it's 3D.

We can actually explore the 3D model and look at the parts and pieces.

We can, integrate landing gear and jet engines and we can, layout how it how it looks.

We can spin it around and look at it at different angles.

And it's a marriage of, of CAD computer design from the engineering world with beautiful renderings that communicates it's magic.

Amongst the artistic giants of the Italian Renaissance, Sandro Botticelli stands out as one of the greatest painters of them all.

His works appear in many of the finest museums and galleries in the world.

Yet much of Botticelli's work depicts the ugly side of life images that represent periods both prior to and during the artist's lifetime.

Watch closely.

Sandro Botticelli was a legend, even in his own time, a leading figure of the Italian Renaissance.

He built a name for himself, painting works like Primavera and The Birth of Venus, and Taking on the divine right alongside, or rather underneath Michelangelo, Botticelli forged his reputation on the crucible of the Sistine Chapel in the 1480s, when he led a group of Florentine painters to Rome at the Pope's request, and covered the walls of the chapel with the most monumental narrative scenes from the Old Testament.

Nathaniel Silver is the curator of the collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Botticelli, he says, was the go to artist for some of Rome's wealthiest patrons who sometimes commissioned grisly subject matter tales of rape and murder, seen here in The Story of Lucretia and the Story of Virginia, which have been reunited outside of Italy for the first time since the 16th century.

Lucretia and Virginia were both ancient Roman noble women, renowned for their heroism in the face of violence by men.

Lucretia was raped, and to defend her honor and that of her family, she committed suicide.

Virginia was murdered by her father to prevent damage to the honor of the family.

Their stories are shocking and horrendous examples of abuse by powerful men, but they were meant to be cautionary tales, especially in Florence, which had recently overthrown the tyrannical rulers.

The Medici family, says museum director Peggy Fogleman.

Botticelli is interpreting stories from ancient Roman times and contextualizing them in terms of the political struggles of his own day.

And so now we can look at Botticelli's work and interpret them through the lens of the political struggles in our time.

Part of that contextualization comes through the work of Karl Stevens, a graphic novelist and cartoonist for The New Yorker.

He tells the women stories just as Botticelli once did.

Now, this is pretty intense.

You take us into the story nearly as Botticelli does.

Well, what Karl has done by placing these hands here, when we're standing right in front of his cartoon, those become our hands.

So he actually places us right in the middle of the action.

And there's no way to personalize this story more than feeling like we are actors in this drama.

The death of Lucretia led to the establishment of the Republic of Rome, and the death of Virginia sparked the restoration of that republic.

There were violent milestones, although here Botticelli holds back in the story of Lucretia.

He shows Tarquin attacking Lucretia, but he doesn't actually show her rape and the subsequent scene he shows Lucretia fainting in front of her family, but he does not show her actually committing suicide.

There was nothing he could depict in paint that would be anywhere near as disturbing as his viewers could imagine, if he gave them the right tools to get there.

So take me through how this story unfolds.

So this is a complicated story.

Renaissance viewers didn't read left to right, but we start here at the far left.

We see the King's son, Tarquin, threatening Lucretia on her doorstep.

The next day we see Lucretia, and she's confronting her family.

She's explaining what's just happened, and they're outraged.

It call culminates in this incredible crowd scene in the center, purchased by Isabella Stewart Gardner in 1894.

This was the first Botticelli in America.

It's loaded, silver says, with historic and architectural metaphors.

Above her, you see embedded in this building a low relief scene depicting a man on horseback confronting an invading enemy army.

Now, this is a story also from ancient Roman history.

The story of a warrior named Horatius Copley's.

Effectively, he was going on a suicide mission.

And that's exactly what Lucretia is about to do here.

So the heroism of that particular type is exactly the kind of action which Lucretia is about to take in her own story and which persists.

I think it's actually in the DNA of the Gardner to link the historical past with the contemporary present and through art to begin these conversations and really mine the collection for the significance and meaning that it can have in our own lives.

And finally, we'll pop into the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio to witness an exhibition of work by black artists and photographers that focuses on various aspects of familial relationships.

Come see what they see.

So the inspiration for this exhibition comes from a book that was published in 1955.

It's called The Sweet Flypaper of Life.

So, you know, in this period, the 1950s, African American family life was not exactly something that was visible.

The photograph was are by, an artist embroidery, however, and the text is by, Langston Hughes.

It's almost like a fictitious family album.

And there is a really sort of beautiful relationship between, you know, what you're reading and the and the images that surround it.

So this exhibition sort of begins with that book, but it includes a number of contemporary artists who, you know, thinking, and sort of visualizing African American family life, but also sort of pushing our notions of what a family is.

You know, the show has, you know, a lot of different sort of representations of family, whether it's, you know, immediate family, extended family, and, you know, from from my work, I really wanted to focus on pictures of people who have been very, very important in the sort of development of my artistic practice and myself as a, as a person.

And for me, the really powerful thing about the piece collectively is that, you see, you know, all these young, intelligent people who are in their environments, and very much in, in their space and they sort of command your, your attention in a way.

And I think that's something very, very powerful.

And, you know, it's sort of set up in the way that they, they have a sense of radical presence.

To me that's really beautiful and powerful.

So.

Dena Lawson was born in 1979 and has become a really, you know, influential photographer.

This work, pictures is 48 images of her, the artist's cousin Jasmine, visiting her partner in Mohawk Correctional Facility.

with their children.

but what I think is really sustains this piece is the evident care and love and the sort of bonds of family that persist in this situation.

And they are, you know, despite that sort of difficult circumstances, are really kind of beautiful and touching image of a family.

It's important that people are able to come to the museum and, you know, recognize something of their own life and their own experience, on the walls of the museum and it's equally important for people to recognize and experience difference.

I mean, I think the most powerful thing about art is that you can enter into a museum or a gallery, and after seeing a show, you can go back into the world and actually see the world anew.

That's my ultimate, ultimate hope is to change the way that, or influence the way that people see the world around them.

And that is that for another edition of Art rocks, that you can always search, access and share episodes of the show at lpb.org/uh, rocks.

And if you're wondering what else you might be missing out and about in the Bayou, State Country Roads magazine makes a great resource for finding out what's going on in the arts and culture all over Louisiana.

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

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

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