This week on Art Rocks.

Everything's coming up roses with a garden design that has been inspiring lovers of art, architecture and outdoor spaces for more than 150 years and a new market for nostalgic and painted signs.

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, I'm James Fox Smith, thanking you for joining us for Art Rocks.

Ask any horticulturalist.

Gardening is an art one in which the tools and the palette just happen to be living things.

Long ago, wealthy Louisiana settlers sometimes brought French landscape designers to their rural homesteads to create garden designs of lasting beauty.

In rural west Feliciano Parish.

The founders of Aston Villa were among them while it was the Barrow family that initially established the elaborate garden design at Aston Villa.

For more than 50 years now, Genevieve and Morel Trimble have owned and operated the site for many years now.

It has been Ivey Jones, Aston's manager and chief gardener, who keeps this treasure of rural Louisiana looking stunning.

So let's go for a walk the Barrow family started in in the late 1840.

He had planted boxwood sweet olive camellias and lots and lots of azaleas.

She had an architect to lay it all out.

And back in those days he had a lot of help They just laid it out to start planning everything in order to maintain the boxwood.

I got a routine.

I clipped it the first of every month during the growing season so that four times during the summer.

Every month I clipped a box with it.

This is that old Japanese box, and it's very hardy.

And I have a little dye back here and there, but nothing major bases.

Just during the summer months at water it.

Oh, it's old.

I know.

That helps a lot I love to garden and March and April and May, but I love it all year long because it is always blooming there's always lots of color in this garden.

Mr. and Mrs. Trumbull, we started this Rose Garden it along with Dr. Neha Oduwole as a matter of fact, when we started this ruined garden.

We didn't even notice concrete floor was here.

We start hauling our bricks and debris.

We didn't take out anything but trash notice.

All the walls are still up and everything.

Brick floor.

We didn't trade in that.

All the old steps and everything.

So all we did was cleaned it up and thought.

Put be.

It's the restored plant.

You played tulips, red tulips, pansies.

Petunias.

Several varieties of tulip azaleas and foxglove.

They're Finian's camellias.

Just a variety.

Never finished playing and always played.

The daffodil bulb will come back, depending on which variety you plant.

But the tulip we had played different every year.

Every year of January 10th, I go to Natchitoches Coast and pick up my tulips and bring them back.

I started playing and I played 8000 tulips each year.

Misty like that's what I call Her Majesty.

She likes to mostly white.

She loves white.

But now and then I slip in a little red a certain time of the year.

She had to take other colors, but during the spring, she'd prefer yellow and white.

Dr. David Lewis on this property back, Lewis developed the old red azalea right here on this property.

The pride of Aston Villa today is an astounding of here.

As you drive here, you're going to see a half mile of azaleas.

We have the afternoon, Valerie, at the Lavender Formosa gig.

Urban as white and pride of mobile and pride of road down.

And everybody loves it.

We call it the Avenue The way we keep it.

I mean, everybody's very impressed with it, you know, because it's always clean and mowed.

And we have a problem with keeping the vines and the saplings out of it.

But I've managed to maintain a pressure to keep it myself, take care of it.

Now, over 200 years old doing Andrew, which came through here and we lost about a thousand trees on this property.

Not one live oak went down.

That means a lot.

I had one guy came in here and he asked me, which was reliable, which was the azaleas so evidently he didn't know different.

There was big statues.

They weren't here when the house was here.

We put this that he had to get like 74 the little garden down here where we call it Music Room.

Miss Thibodeau was lifted out of New Orleans how long was planned?

A live musical instrument.

So we call it the Music Room.

But all the artist that just was here when we came in this table leaked here as well as his daughter.

He bought those two leg and my brother and I, James, we built a table top and also windows to our Maria bordellos.

At the same time, we have a few thousand come through every year, especially in the springtime.

We do weddings out here.

We do photoshoot, bridal pictures, senior pictures and family portraits.

But you need an appointment to get to do it.

Something we do charge is Molefi I do give guided tours.

Somebody wants to.

Oh, so you can welcome to come out and bring a picnic lunch.

It is available seven days a week between March 1st and the last day of June and from October 1st to the last day of November, I've been here 50 years and every morning when I come in here, it's just like the first day I enjoy it.

So much.

You got to have a lot of pride in this great pain to keep up like this.

Look, it is good you're busy at 100 00 Lord.

Misty has all the pride in the world for her age.

She motivates me to keep going because up until a couple of years ago, she was still doing very well when she was in good health, they were right along beside us.

Aston Villa is open to the public six months each year.

Spring in full admission is $5 for visitors over the age of 12.

So check the Aston Villa website for details.

Our lives can be enriched tremendously by experiencing the creative endeavors of others.

So here are some of our picks from notable and Thought-Provoking exhibits happening at museums and galleries in our part of the world.

For more about these and loads more events in the creative space, visit LBB dot org slash art rock.

There you'll find links to each episode of the program.

So to see or share any segment again, visit lpi be dot org slash art rocks let's consider the ephemeral art of ice sculpture.

People have probably been doing it for thousands of years, but like most things, the process has now evolved into the high tech era in upstate New York.

Charles Jones has made a name for himself using innovative techniques to produce breathtaking designs.

Now he's teaching the process to others.

So bundle up and let's take a look My name is Charles Jones.

I am the owner of The Iceman It is an art studio.

And we create ice displays for major hotels and restaurants in the upstate area of New York.

I am a chef by trade.

I'm a certified executive chef.

I've been teaching culinary arts for 27 years.

I've just recently retired to just focus on teaching of ice sculpting and working with the artists that I that I have employed with me in this industry.

Water, the most basic ingredient.

We take water and bring it to its highest art form, a sculpture and that is truly a passion that every one of the people that work with you, these artists work with me.

They understand that It starts out with a vision.

Our clients have a vision of what they'd like to see.

They work hand-in-hand with our graphic designer and we work with a graphic designer whose name is my wife.

We would be nothing without Amy.

So she works with the clients and really gets an idea for design.

They put that on a two dimensional.

It's a piece of paper, and from that point on, we work with computers to understand how we're going to create the sculpture sizes dimensions.

Now that we're ready to make the sculpture, we start with making of the blocks about it.

We make the blocks of ice.

They're £300.

They're 20 inches wide, ten inches deep and 40 inches long.

They are going to be completely clear.

And it's in the way that we make them.

The technology that we use These pumps keep the water circulating and it keeps the water circulating to keep the ice very clear as it freezes from the bottom up.

We don't want it to freeze at the top until the very last minute of the harvesting.

When we take our little stick here and you put it in, you can see that it's at 11, 11 inches of very clean, clear ice From that point, we bring them into our studio and we decide what we're going to do with them, what particular use they're going to have We then slice the ice as the appropriate thicknesses, depending on what we're going to do, because our sculptures are not just confined to that 20 by 40 by ten piece.

They may have a wing sticking out.

They may be taller.

They may be wider.

And we want to be able to make sure that we can configure these pieces together.

So at that point they're sliced and we have a special machine that we use.

It was created by a local sciencey machinist and it gives us the opportunity to slice our ice within a quarter inch tolerance and then what this machine gives us is a perfectly slice, two and a half inch all the way down.

From that point, we bring the slice of ice into one of our freezers and our computers, and we will tell the computer to help us with a C and C machine to cut the ice into certain shapes or sizes.

It does a lot of our work that we would have taken hours to do by standing over the piece of ice and engraving it.

And I did it for years and years and years.

Now I can ask Timmy the computer to do that work while I'm creating other things or designing other things.

We do So from that point, it goes into our studio where one of our technicians and artists will work with a piece of ice, possibly will be adding color to it by adding sand, possibly adding snow to engrave into it, to pack into it, possibly drilling it, working on final details, giving it texture, So when we take the ice and begin to melt, it becomes shiny and it's melted.

Now, when I take this piece and I do the same thing and then I put these two together they actually form one piece of ice You can't pull this apart.

It's now together and it's our gears.

Pretty cool, huh?

And that's the idea of fuzing and how we fuze ice together I've been doing it for 25 years, and I tell people a lot.

The ice hasn't gotten any lighter.

I'll probably stay around for quite a while and watch from the background the continuation of the ice man.

It's going to be brought to the next level.

I am quite confident of that.

We're dropping anchor in New York City now for a visit to the South Street Seaport Museum.

To tour Wavertree, the permanently moored tall ship that is the flagship of that museum's fleet.

This globetrotting cargo vessel built in 1885 is one of the last sailing ships to be constructed out of iron.

The Wavertree features some remarkable engineering innovations and offers a great history lesson from the waning days of the age of sail The South Street Seaport Museum is a 50 year old institution that exists in the original Port of New York.

It is located in the buildings and adjacent to the piers and with a fleet of ships that are representative of the original Port of New York.

So New York was a port before it was a city for us.

Place really matters where we are doing our work is in actually the original counting houses that are the first World Trade Center of the city of Newark.

The shipping piers and the ships and their connection to the rest of the world is what built in New York.

So we really tell the first chapter of the story of modern New York.

The Street of Ships is a term that's used to describe the South Street, really from the battery up to Brooklyn Bridge and beyond.

The image of the street of ships is that of the bow spreads, the head rig, the spire that comes off the back of the ship meeting with the city hanging over the buildings that are there.

It is that connection between waterborne transportation and the growing metropolis that represents really the birthplace of New York as we know it.

These ships were in the 19th century, the engines of trade.

They were bringing raw materials in and manufactured goods out but they were also instruments of globalization.

They were instruments of connection.

They were the instruments of the migration of peoples of cultural exchange Wavertree is our flagship.

She is an 1885 iron sailing ship.

Many people would refer to her as a tall ship.

So a big, tall, masted square rig, sailing ship, and she is for us.

The connection between New York and the rest of the world.

So she was a globetrotter.

She was a what's called a tramp.

For most of her life.

So Tramp was the name for a ship that would carry any cargo anywhere in the world long as it paid on the day that Wavertree was launched in Southampton, England in 1885.

She was a profoundly normal ship.

No more special than a Mack truck or a freight car today.

But she is the last surviving ship of her type in the world.

She has outlasted all of her sisters.

She did so actually, because of what I think you could call a series of happy accidents, which might not have seemed too happy at all at the time.

In 1910, during her second attempt to try to round Cape Horn the Cape at the southern end of South America and probably the most violent and dangerous body of water in the world, she was dismounted, which means that her tall sailing rig came falling down to the deck.

Iron and wood and steel and cable and courage and canvas all came crashing down, destroying the ship's ability to sail Remarkably, killing no one.

And she was declared by her owners a functional loss.

She was converted first to a floating warehouse.

She was then converted by having her decks cut out into a sand barge.

She was found by the South Street Seaport Museum.

And so in 1970 she came here to great fanfare and she has been lovingly preserved by volunteers and staff of the museum ever since.

Wavertree just completed in 2016, a completely unprecedented restoration project funded by the City of New York.

A 16 month, $13 million restoration that brought her really as close to sailing condition as she has been since she was dismissed in 1910 Life on a sailing ship in the 19th century was a pretty grim business.

So let's first think about what's the function of these ships.

The job is to get a small pile of coal, a couple thousand tonnes of coal or its equivalent halfway around the world or die trying.

Right.

So the inversion of importance of money and human life between the 19th century and now can't be overstated.

Crews were expendable, sailors were expendable, cargos and ships were not.

It was a rigid class hierarchy.

You can see a really stark example of that in the cabin door that leads to the captain's saloon inside the Captain's Saloon.

She's a Victorian ship so posh you know, cushions and nice chairs and a pump organ and a city and a tea service made of silver and so on.

On that side of the door, it's brightly finished with varnish and nice panels.

On the other side of the door, painted white, utilitarian work a day And so too, was the lifestyle.

Aboard the ship, the captain enjoyed a pretty comfortable existence.

The sailors lived forward toward the bow of the ship and lived many men to a small, cramped thing, sleeping, perhaps on a straw mattress, eating salted meat out of wooden barrels.

One of the impacting things about Wavertree, about seeing her, is just walking down to the pier and seeing the majesty of her tall masts and the rigging that's necessary to make a ship like that work.

But the real gem is to get into Wavertree and go down into the hold space, which is open this year for the first time ever.

And be able to take in the size and the scale of a huge cargo sailing ship from the 19th century.

It's like being inside the belly of a whale or in a cathedral.

At one turn, incredibly beautiful.

And the construction is breathtaking.

And yet its function was to do a very mundane and dirty job.

And this is where I would say that Wavertree is truly unique.

There is not another ship in the world that has a space inside like the one that Wavertree has.

She isn't the ship that built New York, but she is of the class of ship that made New York what it is.

And so for us, particularly as the last of her type, she represents Newark's connection to the rest of the world that in the 19th century, from an East River pier, you could get on a ship like Wavertree, you could go out the Narrows, turn left, go right, go straight and end up anywhere in the world.

You in a fast moving world, it's hardly surprising that many folks are drawn to objects that preserve the nostalgic look and feel of days gone by.

That fact hasn't gone unnoticed by Reno, Nevada sign painter Derek Macdonald working in tile by hand.

Macdonald finds that there's plenty of demand for his traditionally produced hand-painted signs I describe my work as traditional, vintage, inspired and historic.

I pretty much keep it for lack of a better term, old school My name is Derek McDonald and I'm a sign painter.

I was the quintessential creative kid that would flip over his math test and draw silly pictures on the back.

And I was also and still am into old cars.

So I started going to all these car shows and I saw lots of pin striping on motorcycle tanks and hot rods and lowriders, and I started getting really into that.

And that led me into the world of lettering signs because there are very parallel worlds.

And that's basically how I dived into it.

I just genuinely was really into anything with a historic feel or a vintage kind of feel to it.

When I begin to work on a project, the most important step is breaking into my reference material.

I've got really old rear sign painting manuals and trade books and magazines, all the yellow page books.

They have great illustrations.

I collect vintage matchbooks, Right now I have over 700.

And each one of them has an awesome, really inspiring artwork on them.

I'll jot off three or four sketches and refine it, and then I make the sign materials I work with very.

Of course, my main thing is paint, and that's a very specific paint design for industrial art.

So it's oil based.

It's called lettering enamel When I worked with glass on a storefront window, I try to create almost like a little fantasy world, even if it's just one window and one storefront and somebody is just going to walk by it for 8 seconds.

At least I created that little tiny fantasy world for just that short amount of time for that person.

And they might look at something I made and go, That's the way they used to do things.

So it all kind of comes back to that nostalgic feeling Not only do I go paint glass windows on site, but I'll also do pieces in my shop My shop is based right here in Reno, so let's assume I'm going to make your traditional wooden sign that's going to hang over a storefront.

I'll have to go to my scrap wood pile, which is in my garage right now.

I've got tons of old signboard I'll hand cut the boards, I'll edge ceiling primary and then base coat them These were blue collar.

Get it out the door.

Things back in the day.

Some of these shops were union and they would have, you know, ten sign painters all in a line.

And they were knocking out these.

And you can see they developed these techniques over years and years and years where they can get a really efficient sign or a really efficient letter painted in a very short amount of time.

There's just a certain feel to some of these signs where you go that's 1930 sign right there you'll see these certain characteristics in the letters where they pull the brush and flick the brush out at the very end and you'll see these little brush flick outs.

That was a speed and efficiency technique.

You only see that in those old vintage signs One of my favorite things to work on is old vehicles up close and personal with, you know, old truck doors doing lettering job on old trucks.

I have a buddy who's a vintage truck collector and he bought this truck from an old fellow in Idaho.

It's a 1959 Chevy step site truck so I'm going to paint decal cattle company and a big black and white cow.

Then I'm going to do the process of aging the sign back So the process of creating an aged sign or a distressed sign is a multi-step process.

I can thin the paint down a little bit.

I put a little bit of talcum powder into the paint.

It actually flattens the sheen so it won't be super high gloss and the paint will be kind of diluted.

So it's not very opaque.

So it's already kind of translucent once it's dry, then I just start wiping back with some solvents like acetone or mineral spirits, and you start rubbing back on the letters and you follow the same direction that your brush strokes go.

That way you revealed back the actual brush strokes What I really get out of the end of the day is creating that nostalgic feeling.

And when I think I've really nailed that, that's the biggest reward I get and that is that for this edition of Art Roth.

But you can always see or share episodes of the show at LP B Dorgan Rocks.

And if you're wondering what else you might be missing.

Country Roads magazine makes a great resource for finding out what's going on in the arts and culture out and about in the Bayou State.

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

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