Coming up next On Our Rocks, a Monroe native who made magic for Disney Animation Studios fine wines made in the middle of Motor City.

A Michigan chef who lives by the rule.

The eyes eat first.

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 and thank you for joining us for Art Rocks.

With me, James Fox Smith from Country Roads magazine.

I'd like you to meet a Monroe man who graduated from River Oaks High School in the eighties with one idea in mind to get out of town as a child.

Jay Davis had dreamed of working for Disney, but chose to get an engineering degree at LSU because he couldn't see a path to make it happen.

But within a year of working on his first engineering job, Jay saw a path to getting his dream job doing animation for the Disney studio.

Here's Jay to tell us his own story.

We always had a sketchbook.

My brother and I both mom would get us sketchbooks for Christmas, and I was always excited to have a sketchbook and I'd still keep a sketchbook.

I've always had a sketchbook.

In high school, I was good and art was always drawing, and I was good at math.

And my uncle was an architect.

Seemed like it was the path to go on into majoring in architecture.

But I took a lot of classes in the art department go and take drawing or any kind of elective when I could fit one in I would do that.

I graduated from LSU in 1990.

The only job I could get was drafting over in Dallas and just draw the same toilet on multiple floors of a hospital in Dallas.

And it was a big company and I was miserable.

So a guy next to me, he was drawing over there and he said, Hey, I'm getting out of here.

I said, what?

He told me about the program at Texas A&M.

This is 1991.

They were one of the only two A&M and also Ohio State had computer visualization programs where they had the facility there with high power computers for 3D animation and that's what I wanted to do.

I didn't see a path to do that when I was growing up.

I wanted to work at Disney.

But how do you do that?

I took my portfolio there, my drawings and paintings and things that I'd done, and I got in and I never logged into a computer.

I didn't know how to type.

It was just on my portfolio.

So I had a lot of learning to do because it was computers.

At first I try with the architecture degree to become an Imagineer, and I was rejected then.

And then they rejected me again, and I think I got rejected like three or four more times before I got hired as an animation trainee.

And that was out of school at Texas A&M.

When I got that letter from Disney telling me I had a job, I couldn't believe it.

I couldn't believe I landed a job at Disney.

It was like my childhood dream had come true.

I know that I had worried my parents a lot because I quit my job in architecture without having a job, and I had done a lot of weird things on my path to get there.

That was in September of 1994, and I was in the first training class and I was there with the traditional animator interns.

So but I was the first digital trainee in that first class.

There were four of us that did that, and then I moved out to L.A. or Burbank.

I started at Disney in a weird time.

Lion King had just made $400 million, and I was there for about 12 and a half years and I saw that they shut down to the animation, they shut down the Florida studio, and they went completely 3D.

They also bought Pixar during that time too.

Hunchback of Notre Dame was the first movie that I was working on.

I worked on the crowd characters.

I did a little bit of animation, and that was one of the first films with computer generated characters.

I did simulations.

I did a lot of file editing, a lot of technical things.

That was not my forte.

It was stuff that I had to learn when I was there.

I was there for 12 and a half years.

Scared is going to get fired the whole time.

Had to really up my game.

Usually I could draw the best in the room but when I was there, I was surrounded by these giants of art and they could draw circles around me.

So I had to really up my game meet the Robinsons.

I wanted to work on Meet the Robinsons so bad because Bill Joyce, who lives in Shreveport, had written a day with the Will Robinson, and I was excited to work on something that he had made.

I'm a fan of his, and I've got the cover of the Leaf Man book framed in my bedroom.

I got the lead position for Doris The Evil Hat.

That's one of my two favorites.

And I was working closely with Bowler Hat Guy, too, because she's his hat.

While we were working on Meet the Robinsons.

Disney bought Pixar, and John Lasseter was put in charge of Pixar and feature animation in Burbank and also the parks.

We had to stop working on it, and they came in.

They rewrote the story with John Lasseter.

Now looking at it, and when they came back with a new rewrite.

Doris was a much bigger character and she was the real villain.

Spoiler alert, my job became much bigger.

That's how I became a supervising animator on Meet the Robinsons.

Disney was a dream job until it wasn't really the dream job anymore.

A friend of mine that I work with at Disney e-mailed me from London.

He wanted to know if I knew somebody that wanted to work on his next film.

And it was Hellboy to obscure Mo del Toro's next film and I had just seen Pan's Labyrinth, and I was thinking, that is the kind of stuff I want to do.

It's gritty and it's beautiful, but it's also got an edge to it.

And I was also enjoying Miyazaki, and I wanted something new and something more exciting for me at that moment.

I quit Disney.

I moved to London for a year and worked on Hellboy, too.

I was the supervisor for the Golden Army robots that attack Hellboy at the end.

That was an adventure that was the hardest job.

My two favorite films are Meet the Robinsons, which was the last film I worked on at Disney and then Hellboy two, the film that I worked on in London the next one.

I didn't animate that much on Hellboy two I was supervising, but I'm so proud of that film.

I came back to Los Angeles after that, and I was burnt out.

I was just completely burnt out, and I decided to start painting.

I looked at what the art department was doing on Hellboy two.

I just wanted to get back to the basics of painting and working with my hands and something practical, traditional art.

I went back to Burbank and rented a house and turned the garage into a studio and started painting, and I met a lot of the artists over there.

They specialized in dark and erotic surrealism, and that's what I started painting.

That's the stuff I was interested in at that time.

I lived in Austin, Texas, for about five years, and I took a botanical illustration course over there, and that excited me.

Flowers can be just as erotic and exciting and weird as anything else I was doing, but more people can appreciate the flowers and botanicals I left Austin to go back and work in animation for a year up in Vancouver for the same company I worked for in London, and that's what I worked on.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and Huntsman Winter's War.

Those two live action films.

My dad got diagnosed while I was in Canada with cancer, so I just dropped everything and came back to Monroe.

He passed in 20, 18.

I had bought a house here.

I decided I was going to buy a house here anyway.

I love Monroe.

If I could have done what I was doing, I probably never would have left Monroe.

But I knew I had to back when I left.

So I moved back and started taking walks, a lot of walks with my dog and like Coralie Park and Forsyth Park and leave the parks around here and all the magnolia trees.

And I was looking at the magnolias freshly that was new to me to look at them after seeing everything else and coming back and seeing them again.

They just looked like these prehistoric trees took thousands of photographs like digital camera phone and turned some of those into paintings.

And I had a Magnolia Show on oil paintings of magnolias.

I've had two floral shows like that here in Monroe.

And it started with the magnolias, and now it's birds, but it's showing the beauty.

That's Monroe, our area of the country.

I want to make things that showcase the beauty of our area and make people proud, not just Monroe, but in northeast Louisiana.

And Great Blue Heron.

It was the first commission I did.

It's a watercolor painting of a great blue heron, and it took me forever to finish this painting.

Watercolor for me is difficult because it's unforgiving.

And with oil, you can wipe it away.

Or with acrylic, you can paint over it, but with watercolor, it's like pen and ink.

You mess up, you mess up, and it's done.

So would test everything out and then put it on the great blue heron.

And it's my most popular print now.

It's printed on watercolor paper, and it looks like the original.

So but it's beautiful and it's and it's serene, and that's people's favorite.

I did buy Bartholomew the atmosphere and the mossy trees and trying to get just the right look for Bayou Bartholomew.

The part that I went and looked at, it's got a lot of stumps in the water, and these trees that have the moss, they're coming up out of the middle of the bayou.

You've got all kinds of birds and all kinds of wildlife lurking and hanging around there.

The Spoonbill, I call that painting Hollywood.

My friend, who's a duck hunter, told me that that's what they call these spoonbill ducks.

So it's Spoonbill Duck, but this is actually a roseate spoonbill.

I call them Hollywood because it looks like he's wearing a feather boa.

The dramatic lighting in his pose He looks like he's royalty.

And I think a lot of the Hollywood folks feel like they're royalty.

My favorites.

They were redoing the zoo here, and I wanted to design an entrance, an archway.

It ended up being a mural.

I probably never would have agreed to it if I had known what it was going to entail.

I'm so glad that I did, because it really pushed me beyond my limits.

It took all of my skills, posing of the birds and the clarity in the composition.

A lot of that came from my animation days.

Those are two characters with appeal.

These birds and then the crawfish.

The mural itself is painted in acrylic.

And acrylic is something I had never painted with before and painting at that scale.

So there was a lot of learning my architecture training wasn't wasted.

The attention to detail in the tediousness, in the accuracy that you have to have when you're designing something in architecture to something to be built architecture is tedious in that way, or drafting is but animation.

The attention to detail and the minutia of working on those details is much more tedious than in the architecture.

Architecture and design especially taught me about composition and that's something that when you're composing a shot in an animated film or opposing a character, all those things helped.

They're opening a new animation studio in Shreveport, interested in that, and I'm actually trying to get an animation program started here so that the kids around here in the area can get the opportunity that I didn't have growing up.

I taught animation with animation, mentor and all I school There are lots of online schools now that teach animation the same way I learned it at Disney Ready for a change of perspective.

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

So here are this week's picks for some notable exhibits happening soon 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 rocks.

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

So to see or share any segment again, visit El-P dot org slash art rocks Making good wine is most definitely a form of art.

Most of us probably imagine rolling country landscapes when we think of vineyards and wineries.

But in the heart of Motor City, Detroit Vineyards is redefining what a typical vineyard and winery can look and taste like.

So he has that story Our wines are of like the city.

They're a little edgy, but they have some class and polish establishing vineyards, making fine wine in Detroit.

Some would say impossible.

We're here to say that it's not.

There hasn't been a winery here in the city in six years.

Detroit Vineyards was a project started in 2014 just based on the idea of the possibility of planning grapes in the city of Detroit and also having a fully functioning winery Grapes were grown here in the late 1700s and so really we're just bringing that tradition back where at 1000 grass an avenue just down the border of Eastern Market and Detroit.

Our winery building was originally an ice cream factory.

It was the old Strauss ice cream factory.

And so we've taken it over and turned it into a winery.

We are definitely unique here.

We're an urban winery.

We're in the city of Detroit.

Other wineries I've worked at.

You walk outside and you see mountains and vineyards, and that's beautiful.

But now we see this thriving metropolis as awesome town and town.

The Renaissance so I think we're unlike anything else you'd see in the wine industry.

I never thought I would be able to work with traditional winemaking in the city limits or anywhere near Detroit.

So I was very excited to join the team here and do traditional winemaking once again and also bring some of the other skills that I have picked up along the way in the form of hard cider production and mead production.

Everything that we sell here is crushed, this damned fermented racks and bottled right here in the winery.

It all starts in the vineyard.

The key to great wine is great raw materials.

So there's a winemaker.

It is important to me to have a connection to the Vineyard.

People have responded really well to planting vineyards in the city so far, especially because right now we've got vacant land and we're creating a situation where people can look out their window in the city of Detroit and see a vineyard.

So it's pretty scenic for where we are.

So we really are invested in the city of Detroit.

And we want to give back to the community.

So when we plant vineyards, we are working with a nonprofit organization and we will use their land plant vineyards on their land, and then we will buy the fruit that that land produces back from them at a premium.

And so that money is going to go back into the community to continue the renaissance of the city.

The winemaking process starts with the intake of the grapes.

They are removed from the stems.

And in the case of red wines, the red wines are fermented in contact with the skins.

The white wines are pressed into juice, and then the fermentation process starts.

In both cases of red and white wine, fermentation happens by a purposeful innoculation of east, which will then convert the sugars into alcohol.

At that point, depending on the wine treatment could be stainless-steel aging, settling, clarification stabilizing.

Some wines will receive oak storage for up to 24 months, depending on the variety and type of wine that we're trying to produce.

One of the benefits of having a winery in the city is that you can go and have a great meal and then you can come here and taste our wines after the Detroit Vineyards is not only a working winery, we are also a public hospitality space.

In the public hospitality space, we offer wine tasting, which could be a flight to a glass of wine.

I think more importantly, this is a place for people to gather, and also anybody who's interested in furthering their understanding of wine in the world of wine.

Hopefully people can walk away with a better understanding.

So here in the tasting room, we do a couple different kinds of flights, can do three or five course in some cases, we will waive your flight fee with a purchase of a bottle.

You can also and join the space and have a glass of wine, of cider or mead.

So there's plenty of ways that you can have fun here.

Customers respond very favorably to our wines as a winemaker.

The important thing for me is to make sure that our customers find something within our product family that is enjoyable to them.

Ultimately, if the consumer enjoys the wine, that is good to them.

I think my favorite thing is that people are in awe of the fact that we're doing this at all.

You know, some people keep saying how cool it is.

Oftentimes people when they think of wineries, wine countries, vineyards, they think of these bucolic sceneries in lovely areas.

The things that makes me proud of the winemaking process in Detroit and Detroit vineyards is all the things that lead up to successfully getting the raw materials.

So we can do the best possible job in our winery and also as a Michigan native.

Detroit's the premier manufacturing city in the world and being part of the legacy that Detroit has established in the world.

And to have that contribution be fine.

Wine is very rewarding to me.

I think a place like Detroit Vineyard is as important to Detroit because we need to show the world that we can do stuff like this that we're not.

You know, I think the story that's told a Detroit still away from Michigan is that it's very depressed here.

And we don't have things like good wines, and we want to highlight that that's not true, that we can do that here and we will You've heard the phrase the eyes eat first.

Well, any chef worth his or her salt will agree that presentation is a vital part of preparing and enjoying a memorable meal.

Michigan chef Genevieve Vang has gained great renown for serving delicious Thai inspired dishes that are literally a feast for all the senses.

So let's let Genevieve take us on a culinary journey I'm still searching what I lost, but maybe the fact that you lost something, you make you stronger and you never stop I was born in Laos, but my original is Hmong.

Hmong people is the Kim from China border, Mongolia and China.

The Vietnam War.

1975.

When the Khmer Rouge went to the country, then we had to leave the country.

So I became a refugee in Thailand and afraid to Paris.

Food is my passion.

Well, food, you have to remember food and bring everybody together.

Right now we are at bank up 96 street food in Detroit, and that is located inside a Detroit shipping company.

But I would like to introduce a whole food to the metro Detroit area, which is my people here.

Mostly the food I serve here is from my roots so you're going to see how I take a beef and make edible.

That's the beef jerky.

We take the beef shoulder and then break down a muscle to make it very tender, like fillet meal and order chicken breasts.

Chicken, crispy chicken breast.

Our chef cooked chicken.

But my chicken breast is somehow is different.

When my cousin we take a bite for the first time to come back and Sauceda is very popular back home.

Who made a poor sausage is the fresh meat all natural meat.

A portion of ground beef and ginger lemongrass you know galangal all the spice and you just offer to the sausage and you let it dry you like dry in all one cup of aisle and you put in a freezer when you need a you just sit deep fry your opponent and grow.

The potato is interesting.

When I came to this place open bank on any sixth street for I have to decide to make a one nation and that's dedicate the potato to this place because it's about food, because the table is so long.

So I have to take it apart by wrapping the flour in a toast.

The cut like a sushi, a sprinkle sauce and I despise peanut butter and garnish and a line for this place because it's my food and the most item in the kitchen is the potato has become so popular and successful.

I hope it's not just a trend I hope is going to keep going.

The dessert.

I like to cook a lot of fruit.

So today I do a poached pure white lie and make a sirup and finished touch wi fi, you know, like greater sugar one by one fraction.

But I start from a base, a very clean, just easy for me to cook for a vegan customer.

And now when the meat come, I just add meat to everybody responds so very nicely.

So I believe I do something good here because I take care of the allergen people and I have a little bit everything for everybody.

My dream is serving the food upscale, but with very original authentic.

Take that dish to the next level.

When you customer eat the food, you eat with the ice and you can take a dish very simple, make beautiful, elegant, plain and simple.

So presentation is a very simple way to me.

And the food carving isn't for people.

I am in a retail business every time I went to the food shop and I always bring a cup of peace of the coffee down and is, is, isn't draw the crowd to a table And that is an app to sell your product.

So it's beautiful because it is so natural.

Is very it's very attractive.

Food is art and economy is art.

If you bring two together is a very powerful you got to think instead just one think.

I'm still have fun.

I still create your dish.

It's never in so many things I have to do is just not enough time to do it.

I am going to keep going until I I can woo I was working.

I used to be a gym, be a chef.

The gym to be a foundation is to a nonprofit organization who recognize an artist chef did a great job for many years and a long term career.

So I was so happy and so honored to have that title this year.

My goal is to think about next generation you have to share what you know to the young people to be entrepreneur and live in the United States.

I'm still working hard, but I'm so proud to be here because I'm lucky I was a refugee not nothing.

And I live in the United States, have a small restaurant, and people love your food, and I be able to keep going to school, are training and on a journey to learn something new and another cuisine.

So I think I am lucky to have the life I have here and that is that for this edition of Art Rocks.

But remember, you can always find, watch and share episodes of the show and help the dot org slash rocks.

And if you're ready for more enriching cultural experiences, Country Roads magazine makes a great resource for discovering enriching events, arts and destinations out and about in the Bayou State.

So until next week, I've been 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