♪ -My name is Sean Diediker, and I'm a painter.

I've always designed my paintings based on travel and chance.

I love exploring the human condition as I look to find beauty in true, unscripted reality and then documenting that experience with paint.

♪ ♪ I love merging the craft of Old World masters with modern-day media to create and share unique windows into humanity.

♪ Join me as I canvas the world to explore the interplay between art and the human condition.

Every episode a place, every episode a painting.

♪ ♪ -We're always exposed to frequency and vibration, but we're not always tuned in.

♪ It's different than noise.

We hear a lot of noise, and we equate sound with noise sometimes.

But if you can separate that and really connect to the sounds around you, the birds, the wind, the rustle of leaves, it's all so healing.

♪ ♪ ♪ -My family has a lot of history here in New Mexico.

My granddad had a trading post.

It was at Star Lake.

It was dirt floor, adobe walls, and he used to trade rugs for gasoline with the Navajo.

I lived in Farmington, New Mexico until I was 8.

Walking around the desert collecting lizards was part of my childhood.

It was a good place to grow up, and the scenery here, it's raw and beautiful at the same time.

Now that I'm back in New Mexico, it does feel like I'm coming home in many ways.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ You own Blue Rain Gallery?

-Yeah.

-Tell me how that started.

-Well, I started it when I was around 23 years old.

I just lost complete interest in school, and I was a straight-A student.

But I lost interest, and I decided to start a little gallery out of my dad's house in Taos in the upstairs bedroom that I grew up in.

And then I talked my ex-wife's family into producing some things for me and the carvers on my side, so we had a little hodgepodge of Hispanic and Native cultural aesthetic in there.

We kept reinvesting over time until, you know, 30 years later, you know, major gallery.

-Yeah.

This space is unbelievable.

-Yeah.

-So you moved down to Santa Fe from Taos?

You had a gallery in Taos for 15 years?

-Yeah.

Yeah, we transitioned over here, and we're happy here in Santa Fe.

♪ This is one of my favorite painters.

I refer to him as the Dos Equis guy of the Southwest.

He's the most interesting man in the Southwest.

-Leroy, what are you most proud of in your art career?

-As far as a gallerist, I've enjoyed working and developing other artists with new ideas.

For example, we've always carried Native Pueblo potters, but I've also always carried Native glass artists, coming up with an idea to merge them together in a collaborative setting.

Some of these potters might have a monochromatic palette, but you take them to the Northwest coast and you show them the glass shop and how many colors they can use, and their eyes open up because it's a rainbow.

It's just wonderful to introduce a new medium into the Southwest context that never existed before.

I have a very famous grandfather, Bernardo Miera y Pacheco, and he was in the Spanish army and was an engineer.

And the king sent him over here to help make the first maps of this area, and they were actually painted on oil and canvas.

They were paintings.

-Really?

-And you can find them through museums throughout the world in Mexico, in London, here in Santa Fe.

But he was also a santero, and so he carved things for the church.

One of the main altars that he carved is here in the Cristo Rey.

That was carved around 1750 or so.

-1750 -- Your heritage was here before the nation was really a nation, right?

-Yeah, well it actually helped Westward expansion if you think about it because those first maps as a cartographer were important to other explorations.

-What would you like the general public to know about the Native American contemporary art scene?

-That it's growing and changing.

There's a lot of innovation.

Always it's in evolution.

-You are not just a gallery owner, but someone who is also an artist and a gallery owner.

-Mm-hmm.

-Tell me why you love art.

-Recently I started doing my own work, playing with clay and glass.

Clay is very healing.

There's a wonderful feeling having your hands mix with the dirt and the earth, and it's actually therapeutic, especially if your life is in turmoil or whatever.

And so there's something about that, that earth and the spiritual grounding of creation.

♪ -I think that Leroy's artists love him so much because he sees from their perspective too.

He's a maker.

He's not just a numbers guy, so I think that makes for a very good collaborative partnership between gallery owner and artist.

I always like connecting with other painters and other artists just because I like to feed off of their creative energy.

The painting world is like a community because you're all in the trenches together.

I wanted to talk to David because not only do I completely respect this guy, I feel like with his Survivor series that he's making a very important social statement.

♪ -Sam was the first in the project, Sam Goldofsky.

"When the Germans came in September of 1939, we tried to run away.

There Germans were with tanks coming right in front of us, so we came back to our town.

Then all the trouble started.

Eventually we were taken away from the house and sent to a ghetto.

I think it was at the end of 1942.

We were pushed into one room.

In summer of 1943, the ghetto was liquidated."

When people do represent the Holocaust, they tend to represent the atrocities that actually had happened, and a lot of the artists that represented the Holocaust around that time were in the Holocaust, which is amazing.

I'm coming at it from a different perspective.

I kind of want to focus on the survival aspect, the 75 years of their life that they could actually control and how they built amazing families, how they're not necessarily defined as survivors only.

I got into this idea of painting Holocaust survivors randomly.

A collector had asked me to do a painting of his mother-in-law, and I don't do commissions, but the collector came to me.

And he goes, "Well, my mother-in-law is special.

She's actually a survivor of the Shoah," and I said right away.

I was like, "I'll paint her.

It won't be a commission.

It would just be a painting that I made, and you can purchase it if you want."

And then about a week after he had talked to her about being in the painting, she looked at my work and didn't like it, and so she didn't want to be painted.

And so that kind of fell apart.

About a month after that, I had been in Israel teaching a workshop, and one of my students in Israel visited me in Brooklyn.

And I was telling her the story about how I could have done this commission, and it would have been amazing to meet this survivor.

And she goes, "Well, my parents are both survivors, and they live in Ft. Lee and in Queens.

I'm sure they would love for you to paint them," and so I just kind of started, embarked on the journey from there.

I don't think that there's anything unique actually about how I see.

I think that maybe it's just that I want to see longer.

I really do think of my work as social documentary.

I think of myself as a social realist.

The painters that I fell in love with when I was in college were the Ashcan School, like, Robert Henri, John Sloan, William Glackens.

They were all newspaper illustrators, and so they would go around New York City and illustrate and capture difficult things that were going on to be put into the newspapers at that time.

I really kind of see myself as following in their footsteps, as documenting stories within paintings like the survivors.

Well, I had the idea at first to do a big painting that was about five figures.

They'd all be life-size, and then I talked to the Museum of Tolerance, Elana Samuels, who works there.

And she was like, "Well, I have 12 survivors.

You want to paint 12 survivors?"

and I'm like, "Let's try to do something big then.

Let's go."

I had to get better camera equipment.

I hired a lighting guy.

Got my videographer and I to fly out there to film.

It took about 3 years.

I started going full-force into it in May of 2017, a couple months after I had all the footage and designed the painting.

8-by-4-foot panels are what I can get to make the panels for the painting, so how can I put five panels together?

And it came out to just about 18 feet.

♪ ♪ -Good evening, everybody.

We're welcoming you to the USC Fisher Museum of Art, to our incredible exhibition, "Facing Survival," with the art of David Kassan.

♪ ♪ -The best reaction was from John Adler.

First he was a survivor.

He escaped, and then he was able to join the British military and fight Nazis.

He walked up to the painting, saw it.

He actually started crying.

Turned around in his walker and just walked right towards me into my arms.

It was incredible.

I mean, that's, like, the most rewarding reaction I think I've ever had for a painting.

♪ We had a big exhibition, but I don't think that that's the end.

I think it's only the beginning.

It's exciting.

♪ -David Kassan -- The guy is superhuman.

In my opinion, David's painting, "Bearing Witness," is one of his best works to date, and 3 years in the making?

That's endurance.

♪ ♪ ♪ -Something I think people misunderstand about this region is that the Native American culture here is really strong, but it is very multicultural.

And I think the art community is beyond just Southwest art as well, which is exciting to be a part of.

I found myself capable of selling work through Facebook and Instagram based off of how I was sharing my work and being consistent with how I shared it.

I want to be inspiring to women to become artists and be able to say what they want with their work.

I think that you can be a full-time painter and have young kids.

It's all about balance, and it's all about routine.

We can still create what we need to create and be very active and engaging parents with our children.

I can tell you actually when I sell my first painting.

I was still in school for my master's, and it was a painting I had done for my thesis.

It was a painting called "Fairy Godmother," and it was me dressed up with my daughter's wings and her tutu in front of my easel.

I entered a show in Colorado.

I won second place in the show, which was shocking.

It was in 2014, and I got the painting back.

And this couple contacted me and said they really wanted to buy the painting, and I couldn't believe they wanted a painting of me.

They sent me several pictures.

It's hanging in their kitchen, and they connected with it because they have twins, young twins.

And they're both artists and musicians, and they just connected with this idea of coexisting with who we are as we parent at the same time.

That painting was like, "Oh, wow.

I can paint what I want, and people connect with it."

I used to do a lot of paintings of my children and myself, but a difficult makes it to where I can't paint them for a little bit of time.

So I decided to go into another series that kind of... At first it started off with combining my history of fashion design and art.

That evolved eventually into this idea of the lace symbolizing strength, even though we show our skin and you can see through the lace.

It doesn't make us weak.

It doesn't make us delicate.

Each individual thread can be delicate but sown together makes something strong.

My state of mind while I paint is very Zen.

I find it very therapeutic to work.

Even though I may not get into everything or I may not feel successful some days, I always get back up and keep going no matter what.

♪ [ Chuckles ] Would I ever marry another artist?

Absolutely, and I did.

I married one of the greatest artists in my mind.

I think he is the best artist.

David Kassan is unbelievable.

He's somebody I absolutely look up to and adore and want to paint with as much soul as he does.

-I just got married.

I love calling her my wife now and not my fiancée.

-What's it like being married to another artist?

-Oh, it's incredible.

My dream, when I got out of school, was always to do a stamp, and my other dream was to do a TIME Magazine cover.

And so we got married about 2 weeks ago, and as soon as we get back here to the studio, she gets an e-mail from TIME Magazine to do a potential cover.

And so I was super jealous but then also so proud.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ -Many artists are called to Santa Fe, and New Mexico has often been called the land of enchantment.

But a lot of the locals here call it the land of entrapment because it either sucks you in an completely consumes you and you stay and you love it or it totally spits you out.

It's one or the other.

There's rarely in between.

-I love New Mexico.

I love everything about New Mexico.

I've lived other places.

I ended up coming back here.

Just the mountains and the stars and we have a lot of space, but also I feel like it's one of the only places I can make a living actually as an artist.

It's really supportive of the arts.

I've been in this spot right here for 18 years.

I have work in El Centro Gallery, and I have some work at the Ahmyo River Gallery on Canyon Road.

I prefer selling here on the street.

I don't have someone telling me what to do, just a lot of freedom.

-I like when you said "freedom" that the bells rang.

That's a sign, isn't it?

[ Laughter ] A lot of people are drawn here.

It is definitely a beacon for artisans of all crafts, and there's something about somebody that's passionate about their own crafts.

I feel like I can absorb that on some level and bring that back with me to the studio.

♪ [ Flute playing ] ♪ ♪ I'm always looking for faces with character.

That's what I like to paint, and both of these fit that bill, especially WalkingStar.

There's something so unique about his countenance and his character.

His face reminded me of a lot of the imagery of my granddad's old photos.

He had archive photos of some of the Native Americans that he did trading with at the trading post, and I wanted to explore him further.

♪ -I think a lot of people are attracted to Santa Fe, New Mexico in general, for reasons that they might not even be aware of.

They realize that the reason they come here is for their own personal healing just because of the energy here and the deep roots here.

There's a lot of indigenous history here in this land.

I've heard over the years that there's obsidian crystal under the earth here in this area of Santa Fe, and that's a big healing energy.

-We offer healing through sound and frequency and vibration, so you can just drop into an inner part of yourself, whether that's for inner healing or inner peace or just relaxation or meditation.

Sound is a great vehicle for just allowing the mind to rest and the body and the rest of the spirit to do what it knows how to do, and so we're making more people aware of that and offering it as medicine.

You know, it's better than pills.

-If I'm being honest, I'm always skeptical of healers, but with these guys, something was different.

Thunder and WalkingStar invited me to a sound healing that they were doing that evening, so we get into this room.

And there's a ton of people, and they're all laying down.

And these guys are...

The lights are low.

The incense is going.

I think it was sage, and they start to play their music.

[ Waterphone playing ] I heard sounds from these guys that I'd never heard before, so after about 10 minutes, I wanted to lay down.

And as far as the healing part goes, total believer now.

At the end of that session, I was so relaxed, I felt like I left my body a little bit, and when they came by with the didgeridoo and some of the other instruments and they play them close to your face, you really feel that vibration.

And something happens.

I don't know how to explain it.

All I know is at the end of that session, I was healed.

-We consider what we do as actually not even a performance even.

To us, it feels like it's a ceremony basically because it's medicine.

♪ [ Humming ] ♪ ♪ -Santa Fe to me is like, in some way, going to another country or being in a another country.

It can welcome you, and when it does, it's like you don't want to leave.

-The culture, the architecture, the light, the art -- There's many reasons why people come to Santa Fe, but those are a few of them.

♪ -There's so much to learn from being here.

I love the community, and I love the culture.

And I love hearing how people feel being out here.

It's absolutely incredible.

♪ -I've been here in Santa Fe for about 13 years now.

I was brought back to the place that I was born.

People that come here, they end up just staying here.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ -"Canvasing the World" fine art reproductions printed on Pearl Linen and museum-quality cotton rag are now available.

To order your own fine art reproduction of "Medicine Man" or any editions from the "Canvasing the World" television series, please visit CTWgallery.com.

If you'd like more information on the series or a peek at what's currently on Sean's canvas, you can follow "Canvasing the World" on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter, or visit us at canvasingtheworld.tv.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ -Alright.

Let's hit it.

♪ ♪ I've been drinking this tequila for years, but only here in Santa Fe have I learned about this special feature.

I go to the liquor store, and I pull this off the shelf.

And the gentleman says, "Oh, do you know about ringing the bell?"

and I'm looking at the bottle.

I'm like, "There's not a bell."

I don't know what he's talking about, and so let me show you.

You can ring the bell.

[ Bell dings ] ♪ One of the hooks of the show is to not have a scripted destination.

You basically see where the wind blows you, and it's super liberating.

And so when you can open up your mind by not having anything on your plate for the day, new things open.

New doors open, and as a creative, I think it's critical to make yourself available to that.

Once we get to an area, the idea is to meet people here and get referrals for stories and content, so I was walking up Canyon Road.

I went to a gallery, Selby Fleetwood, who a friend of mine, Eddie, used to run the place, but he wasn't there anymore.

But I told the lady that now ran it, "I'm looking for a particular story," and she was like, "You need to talk to someone named Una."

Okay.

So she doesn't have a number for her, but she writes down an address that's further up Canyon Road.

So I go up to this address, and it's a gallery.

And Una is there, and we have a brief exchange.

And I told her what we're doing, and, you know, a few hours later I get this text message from someone named Thunder.

When I saw images of these guys, WalkingStar and Thunder, I said, "I've got to meet these guys."

There's something about the way they look, especially WalkingStar.

He reminded me of so many of Maynard Dixon's subjects, just the face structure.

It's like, "Maybe this could be the painting."

♪ ♪