(upbeat music) - [Narrator 1] Welcome to "Kalamazoo Lively Arts," the show that takes you inside Kalamazoo's vibrant, creative community, and explores the people who breathe life into the arts.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator 2] Support for "Kalamazoo Lively Arts" is provided by the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation, helping to build and enrich the cultural life of greater Kalamazoo.

(paper scraping) (lively music) - I wanna get right into an intense statement that I have found on you.

Your work as an artist comes from wrestling with the unknown.

Take me there.

- Yeah, well, you know, the older I get, the more I'm trying to find ways of putting myself into my work, and really exploring deeply what that means.

And I've been finding common themes in more recent years of a lot of life is unknown, and a lot of things we want to control, and we just can't.

And so what does it mean to make peace with that, and to trust process?

There's a lot of parallels with that in art making itself.

You know, I start a painting, and I don't necessarily like where it's going, and you just have to trust the process and be diligent, and follow through and dive into the unknown, 'cause you never know what's waiting for you.

It could be something really beautiful.

Make peace there, live there, abide within it.

- So talk a little about this journey to where you are today.

- Oh, wow.

Let's see, I graduated from U of M in 2013, so it's been a while now.

Since then, I came to Kalamazoo, and got a studio at the Park Trade Center, which I still have.

I've also been working from home lately.

And I've just been panning this whole time, ever since.

Oil on canvas, watching my work kind of evolve, trying different styles, trying different ideas.

- Describe your work, your niche.

Where have you found yourself recently?

- In my efforts to bring joy to people, to give people respite from the weight of the world, to make people feel seen, to feel happy for 10 minutes, I've been wanting to use lots of warm, bright colors, lots of florals.

I really love incorporating kind of 2D, like, sixties wallpaper pattern kind of motifs, alongside 3D stuff.

I've been wanting to branch out more lately.

The last big show that I had, I had a bunch of paintings, but then I also had a couple of pieces that were crocheted, and one that was sculptural.

It was concrete.

I like to nod towards fabric work like that.

So you can see in this painting, it's kind of got a little bit of everything.

It's got- - "Limbo Sweet Limbo."

- Yeah, that is a...

So I painted it to look like it was cross-stitched, 'cause I- - [Shelley] But that's paint?

- That's paint, yeah.

I admire those art forms.

It's something very meticulous.

It's something very time consuming.

And that kinda speaks to what I was talking about earlier, as far as, you know, there's darkness in our lives, and we learn how to abide within it, 'cause that's life, especially in my own personal life right now.

I'm in a transitional time.

I'm gonna be moving soon.

And for a while, this past year, we didn't know where we'd be moving to.

And I've had to learn how to abide within that liminal space, within the limbo.

And so this painting is, on a personal level, a reminder that, you know, most of life is processed, most of life is unknown.

Get comfortable with it.

Make your home there.

- All right, take me through the process of making what you make on canvas.

- So start to finish, it all comes through my hands.

I build all my own canvases with my dad in the wood shop.

Stretch canvas over, prime it with gesso, and then lay the imprimatura.

- Wait, lay the?

- Imprimatura.

- Okay.

- So that's the kind of the wash, a light wash of paint, that goes underneath every single painting.

And we do this for a couple of reasons.

For starters, oil paint is very luminous.

It reflects light from behind layers, from all different angles.

So the wash that you put underneath it kind of helps set the tone, and inform the colors of the painting, how it's gonna feel.

- So you kinda knew where you were going, but then creativity took over.

- Well, I have the ideas of what I want in my head, and it's a matter of kind of wrestling that out onto the canvas, one piece at a time.

So I'll do one flower at a time, and then I'll do the next layer in, and then the "Limbo Sweet Limbo" is what I wanted.

I knew that I wanted that in the middle, so.

- And oil painting, what's good, what's bad, what's ugly?

You obviously have found your talent there.

- Yeah, well I love oil painting, because it doesn't dry right away.

You can continue to work with it, it can be, really make it soft, and as I mentioned, it's very luminous.

It has kind of a life of its own.

I love it.

So we've got the canvas, it's all built and stretched, and it's got two layers of gesso.

It's all ready to go.

Now we start the imprimatura.

So I'm gonna use mineral spirits.

It's kind of a paint thinner.

And I'm gonna use a couple of colors that I really like to use for my imprimatura.

I've got Venetian Red and Indian Yellow, so, very bright, warm colors.

Just kind of dab it in.

(paper scraping) And very lightly wash it over.

(gentle music) (paper scraping) As you can see, the paper towel kind of crumbles a little bit on here.

So before I'm ready to paint on it, I usually give it a good vacuum.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) That was a little faster than I thought.

- You got a quick arm here.

There's another painting we'll describe.

Talk to me about, maybe, a darker painting.

- Absolutely.

That one's a landscape.

That's a new thing for me.

In recent years I've been doing landscapes.

I did that one.

The painting is called "Making My Home in This Darkness."

And I did it at a time when I was depressed, and I was kind of thinking that I wanted to do a landscape, not really sure what to do.

And I was flipping through my photos, and I came across that one, and it was exactly what I had been dreaming about lately.

And I saw that image and I just had to paint it.

And it has been one of my favorites.

- Where have we seen your work throughout Kalamazoo, and how has this city lent to your success?

- Well, so I've shown my work a lot at the Park Trade Center.

I had a big show this past spring at the Arts Council, solo show.

Just of everything I've been doing for a while.

I have a few murals in town.

I've got one on the Vine Neighborhood Association.

Yeah, few in town.

Kalamazoo's been great.

It's a very warm community for artists.

- Were you a painter as a little girl?

- Oh yes.

- Was this planted in you early?

- I have always wanted to be an artist.

Like if you would've asked me in kindergarten, "What do you wanna be when you grow up?"

"I wanna be an artist."

- And I imagine you also tell someone who has these artistic needs and wants at age nine to, "Go follow your dream, dear."

- Well, yeah.

I understand I'm also very fortunate to be able to do what I do.

Life's hard.

It's a tough world out there, but there are definitely ways of making art, and continuing to follow what you know to be right, what you wanna do.

And it looks different for everybody.

- Did your art look different than it did in 2013?

- Oh yes.

I actually just took apart the last of my senior thesis paintings, and I cut up the stretchers to make new ones for my new series.

So that's that.

(laughing) - Onto the next chapter.

- Onto the next, yeah.

- What is the next chapter?

What still needs to be done?

- Well, soon I will be moving to Chicago, and I'm really looking forward to the opportunities that a bigger city can lend, a bigger market for actually buying work, (chuckles) networking with other artists from all over.

I'd like to show my work on a bigger scale, I think.

If I can, I'm gonna try.

- Yeah, good.

All right, take-home message from you.

How would you summarize what you do in a nutshell?

- I do, in a nutshell?

In a nutshell, I wanna make beautiful pieces of work that inspire people, with color, that give people, if anything, just a little respite from the weight of the world.

- I think "Limbo Sweet Limbo" has made that mark.

Congratulations.

- Thanks.

(lively music) - [Director] Is there's anything else that you would like to cover that we didn't really talk about, or else?

- Let's start with my childhood.

(all laughing) - [Director] So, where did it all begin?

- I think you got it.

- I think that's good, yeah.

(glass snapping) (glass scoring) (upbeat music) - When did you know you wanted to be an artist that does mosaics?

- Well, a funny thing is, when I was in third grade, we did an art class where we took seeds and beans, and different things like that, and that was actually my first mosaic.

So I can kinda say I've been doing it since I was in third grade.

But really, I started working with glass probably about 15 years ago.

I took a class, actually, in Kalamazoo, and you come home with a box full of pieces when you're finished, all your scrap.

And I said, "I need to do something with this."

So I started putting pieces together, and it grew from there.

- To many glass is glass, but you must find ways to make it look soft like the green grass, or light like a blue sky.

How do you make glass work that way?

- One of the main tools you use are called wheeled nippers.

And what I like to use is a bank of stained glass.

So I'll get a couple of little containers, and I will cut and cut and cut until I have a pile of this color, a pile of this color.

And of course we use grinders, or we use, I have a wet saw that will cut the glass just like a jigsaw cuts wood.

One of the things that I like to do in a piece, if it's sky or if it's under sea, recently, I did a sea turtle, and I wanted to give that idea of flowing through the water.

So it's a lot in the way that you cut a piece like a wave, or in the, the grass, like you kinda want the grass to kinda flow this way and that way.

I think much the same it's almost like painting with glass, because you're putting the sway in there.

The horse that I did, he's kinda got his head cocked, and it looks as if the wind is blowing.

So you would do that by putting the mane, the hair on the mane, to kinda flow in that direction that you want the wind to do.

It can be pretty tricky, just like light.

You can do a piece, and you want the sun to be shining a certain way in your piece.

Then you have to use, for example, you do a flower.

And the flower, say it's a white daisy, some of the petals would be white, super white where the sun's shining, and some would be a little bit gray.

That's how you achieve maybe a three-dimensional look, or a look of shadows.

- And also does placement, say I'm looking at the horse on the ground, in a dark setting, you bring that up to a light, takes on a whole different energy?

- Exactly.

That's one of the things I love about stained glass, is that you can do a piece, and you can set it down against, you can hang it on a wall, then you pick it up and you put it in the sunlight, and it just lights right up, and it shows all the colors that you didn't see the first time.

That's one of the reasons why I love the stained glass.

- What is typically your end product?

A picture?

- Yeah, so it depends.

A lot of times it's on a frame.

Personally I like to use the old windows.

This is an old window.

I have one over there that's an old window.

And pretty much any hard surface you can mosaic on, you can do a lamp or you can do a table.

Any hard surface.

- Yes.

And what holds the glass together?

- Okay, so when we do a class, we go through the steps, and I prefer the glass on glass, because the color comes through.

So you take a piece of clear glass, and then you're gluing on top of that with the different types of glue, depending on if it's indoor or outdoor.

And you glue your stained glass on there.

And then when it's all dry, you take grout.

Just regular, I use sanded grout, what you would use to put on your floor if you're tiling, and you put that on, and you have this beautiful piece, and then you clump a big clump of grout on it.

People are always a little nervous about doing that part in my classes, but we wipe that off and clean it and clean it, buff it.

And then, when it's dry, it looks like a thin pencil line going through your piece.

That's the grout lines.

- Safety.

Do you ever get cut?

- Of course.

I always, when I start my classes, I put a box of Band-Aids in front of the table, and I tell the students, "Just put this here as a precaution, don't be intimidated."

Somebody gets a poke, I've never had anything that required a hospital visit, or anything like that.

You do get a lot of pokes and little cuts, but nothing too...

Sometimes if I'm working on a piece for too long, I'll have all my fingers Band-Aided up to complete my piece.

Okay, so I'm working on this piece right now, which is a moored boat, and I kinda wanted to get the reflection of the green boat in the water.

And so this glass, this particular glass, has two different sides on it.

So I have to kinda look and make sure that I'm using all textured side or all smooth side.

So when I find a piece and it doesn't fit quite right, I'm gonna use the wheeled nippers to trim it down, and then use a special glue, and just put it in place.

And then continue the process as I go along.

Again, I kinda need to see in the light which side I'm working with, and then just continue to place it where it fits best.

And I wanna give the look here of waves, so I wanna kinda cut the pieces in a way that looks like the waves are just kind of semi-calm day.

And just continue placing.

And then when I'm all finished with the glasswork, then I'll grout the piece, which would be like filling in all the lines of the glass, like I did there on that one.

So these are my nippers that I use a lot.

On this particular piece, I don't need a straight cut, but if I did, I would use the cutting tool, (glass scoring) slice it one time, and then use the running pliers, gentle squeeze.

And then you have the strip that you need.

Sometimes you might need a circle, so you would take the same process, put the glass on there, (glass scoring) have a circle, and then just slowly break it out, as I did with these pieces here.

And then you get a perfect circle.

Then if you find a little burred edge on one of the pieces, then you take it over to the grinder, and then you can grind that off and make a perfect circle.

So those are the tools that I use mostly.

And then if I want a really precise jigsaw cut, then, like this, I would use my wet saw for this, and it would give you letters, or any precise cut that you need, just like a jigsaw with wood.

(glass snapping) (upbeat music) - Take me through this procedure.

- Okay, so this is a piece I did a few years ago, I believe in 2019.

It was a contest in the Otsego area, and they wanted it to be small town Michigan was the theme.

So my idea was to research the area, and I found that the church that's now standing was built in the 1900s.

And of course, you know, horse-drawn carriage to get to church.

And so I did that panel there.

And then this was more '50s.

I did the kids playing marbles, a little girl in the swing.

And with '70s, I think of the Good Humor man, and buying ice cream out in the street.

And then present day, at that time, just some of the things that were going on, the Maude's restaurant, and all that sort of thing.

And then whenever I have a piece in the public, this piece was on display for a couple of weeks, I like to put a finish on it.

- Now describe the painting that says something about voting.

- Okay, so that piece I did, again, it was for a local contest.

- And I hope you're winning all these contests.

(both laughing) - Well, I did win for the gnomes here.

I won first place on that one, and that was kinda fun.

This piece here was "Go Big or Go Gnome."

That, again, you can just use your imagination.

And I added mushrooms where I wanted to.

And after I had him done, I went ahead and kind of filled in different things.

- Don't forget the butterfly.

And what about the "Vote"?.

- And so the "Vote," that was a piece that I did in 2020, which of course was 100 years celebrating women voting.

And so that piece just spoke to me.

And I would have to say that's probably my favorite piece that I've done, just because of what it means to me.

I have two daughters, and bringing your daughter to the voting booth, and showing her this is how we do it, you know.

And kinda Lady Liberty, kinda on your shoulder, saying, "Yeah, do this."

- We're hearing your beautiful St. Joseph studio with a lake right across, a hop and a step away, beautiful area.

What's your Kalamazoo connection, and what makes Kalamazoo so art rich?

- Well, I love Kalamazoo, first of all, because both my kids were raised there and we lived there.

My daughter went to Western, and I was there for a long time, and did a lot of the art fairs there.

And there's a great glass store, like I say, that I shop, and have classes there.

And a friend, not too far from there, that's just now opening a gallery, which I will be participating in, in her shop, and doing consignment classes there.

- And obviously you took a class, you fell in love with art.

You would ask us all to find a passion, and fall in love with art at all?

- Absolutely.

To me, sitting and working on a piece is a great stress reliever.

I was working on a piece for ArtPrize, a couple of years ago, in Grand Rapids.

I did a crow piece.

It was crows in the woods and the trees.

I would go out to my studio and work, and all of a sudden I didn't notice that it was getting dark.

I mean, you just get lost in it, like any other passion that people have for their art.

And that's how I feel about it.

Just something, I'm just finish this little area over here, and before I know it, it's dark, and- - The sun will rise again for you.

- Yes, exactly.

- Thank you for your good work.

- Thank you, Shelley.

Nice to meet you.

(upbeat music) - Thank you so much for watching.

There's also more to explore with "Kalamazoo Lively Arts" on YouTube, Instagram, and wgvu.org.

We'll see you next time.

- [Narrator] Support for "Kalamazoo Lively Arts" is provided by the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation, helping to build and enrich the cultural life of greater Kalamazoo.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues)