Coming up, this time on Art Rocks, the arresting beauty and inimitable spirit of Louisiana, a life captured in watercolor.

I use watercolor for the Christmas cards as well, but it's two different technique.

I'll do a line drawing.

Most of them are a combination of ink line with the watercolor.

And visiting an inspirational space to better understand the motivation of a great American sculptor.

These stories up next on Art Rocks West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LPI, offering diverse exhibitions throughout the year and program apps that showcase art, history, music and more.

West Baton Rouge Museum Culture Cultivated Art Rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.

Hello.

Thank you for joining us for Art Rocks.

With me, James Fox Smith of Country Roads magazine.

What exactly is the Louisiana tableau?

It's music.

It's unique land and water scapes.

It's teeming flora and fauna.

It's traditions and celebrations that deliver inspiration for some of the state's best known artists.

One of them is Craig Ruth of Denham Springs.

And to spend a few hours in Craig's studio is to be surrounded by images that celebrate everything inspirational that the state has to offer.

So let's take a look.

The main thing I try to do is just celebrate what's beautiful, whether it's Louisiana or Texas, captured the things that most people relate to with Louisiana's the swamps, crawfish and the wildlife.

Most people love being outdoors, fishing, hunting.

Everything that I do is based on my personal experiences.

If I have a swamp scene, it's from pictures that I took.

I'll go out in a canoe or whatever and spend all day.

So what I'm mainly trying to do is capture the scenery.

There may be a pelican there, but he may not pose correctly.

So I'll have to go back and put in the pelican or the duck or the alligator.

I had one of his paintings I didn't want in sale and we kept it over.

Our bed is beautiful.

That was a sunset with shrimp boats and the Gulf Coast and it was just gorgeous until we were going to Fairhope, Alabama.

He took it as salvaged and I'm like, you got to paint me another one because we don't have a lot of originals that we've kept.

He sold most of that was a favorite.

We've had people want to buy it.

Years and years ago I didn't want to sell it because it was just so beautiful.

When I do an LSU painting, it's always going to be a star player because those are the ones that are making the big plays.

The paintings I do are usually based on a significant play.

One of my favorite paintings was of Jacob Hester in the Florida game in 2007.

I just love the way it came out.

Everybody loved Jacob Hester.

Jacob Hester is from Shreveport and he actually came through when I was doing an art show and I got to meet him and he got one of my pictures.

And then in 2019 it was Joe Burrow and Coach Joe and I did a championship painting for the 2019 championship, focusing on them.

And then same thing with the baseball and basketball.

You do pick the star players because they're the ones that are highlighted.

When I've done a championship painting, I've always offered to give all of the players one of the prints because of the regulations.

I haven't been able to do that.

I'll usually have an edition of at least 500, if that's something that I think is going to be really popular.

And back in like 1983, we did our first Christmas cards.

The reason there's such a variety of what I do is because I needed to have different types of things to bring in income.

The more whimsical work developed because of our greeting card line, and we wanted that just to be more fun and capture what's humorous.

The crawfish dancing in the alligator is playing the fiddle or whatever.

It's two different types of work I'm trying to create for different purposes.

I use watercolor for the Christmas cards as well, but it's two different technique.

I'll do a line drawing.

Most of them are a combination of ink line with the watercolor.

Christmas cards is probably the most popular.

Businesses love to send that, and we do recipes on the back when a business sends it.

It's also a gift.

I work on recipes.

I've had some that I work on three or four years because I just couldn't get it right under the greeting.

We can add logos, I can send a template to people and they could have multiple people sign it.

And you can't really tell that they didn't physically sign it.

Probably our biggest customer is our businesses because I think they get such a positive response to a PR.

We started developing the Xs line using the same philosophy.

Just pick out what people are proud about in Texas, The Longhorns, the Alamo.

My mom's actually from Texas.

I tell people I'm half Texans.

That's one of the reasons we do Texas cards.

I started out just wanting to be a watercolor artist.

I actually got really excited about being an artist when I was in high school.

That was when I started learning how to paint and was so interested in it.

That's how I spent all my spare time.

So people really responded to what I did.

I was selling things in high school doing commissions, pet portraits and landscapes and high schools.

I went to college in fine art.

Did not get a degree.

When an artist wants to develop, they really have a passion for it.

I really learned the most inspired painting when I decided I wanted to actually make a living from it.

I had to learn how to bring in different streams of income.

My dad is an architect and an artist and I learned architectural illustration from him.

The technique I use mostly for architectural rendering is ink line, and then for color, I'll use colored pencil.

And that's really because I'm trying to capture a more hand-drawn look.

I don't want them to look.

Computer generated and it's quicker when I'm doing an architectural illustration.

There's no photograph or anything to go by.

So usually they'll submit just the plans and the elevations that the architect drew.

So I'll start out with a pencil sketch and then I'll actually put tracing paper on top of that and I'll come back with ink lines, the shingles and everything.

It's just a matter of being patient.

I'll use a straight edge when I'm doing shingles or vertical lines.

We are truly a mom and pop business.

My wife and I run everything now.

My wife primarily is in charge of the greeting card business and I do the illustration and all the artwork.

The internet has become a really big part of our business.

It started off slow, but over the years it's gotten to be probably 75% of our business.

I generally work at least 10 hours a day and during the busiest time of the year, maybe 12 hours a day, seven days a week, maybe don't work as long on the weekend.

But we're working all the time just trying to keep up.

The most fun is actually doing the painting, but there's a lot of business paperwork that goes along with it.

I can't say that far.

It's fun.

Some people think that an artist is just having fun all the time and just doing what they want.

It's not that, but I do really enjoy what I do.

Louisiana is awash in opportunities to get to grips with the arts.

Here are just a few coming your way in the weeks to come.

For more on these exhibitions and others, consider Country Roads magazine available in print, online or by e-newsletter to see or to share any episode of Art Rocks again, visit LP Dawgs Art Drops.

There's also an archive of all our Louisiana segments.

Adele CBSE YouTube page.

Come with us now to Reno, Nevada, where more than four decades have passed since Don Arden's production.

Hello, Hollywood Hello, premiered at the MGM Grand Hotel.

The show became a huge hit, featured a cast gathered from all around the world and ultimately ran for 11 years.

Four years on, let's look back at this iconic show and the lasting impact that it made.

In 1978, when Don Arden's MGM, Hello, Hollywood Hello opened in Reno.

It was billed as the biggest show in the world, on the biggest stage in the world and the biggest little city in the world, which, of course, is Reno.

It was a big deal.

And that wasn't just hyperbole.

That was fact.

Stage was an acre big.

It had state of the art elevators.

It had a living curtain that came down full of dancers.

It had a pastoral air that went from one side of the stage to the other, high up in the air.

I mean, it was just it was groundbreaking back in the day.

So when I went to Las Vegas thinking I was signing up for a personal audition with the producer of this show, I walked into one of the biggest cattle calls I had ever seen, and the producer called me down and he says, We'd like you to come sing for us in Reno.

And I said, Great.

Is that are you offering a contract?

He says, Yes, we are.

And he shoved a contract across the table.

Looked great.

So I signed that contract.

I said, By the way, where is Reno?

I mean, when I flew in here and I saw this desert landscape with neon and one really tall building called the MGM Grand, everything else was this desert landscape.

And look at it now.

Look what we've got in downtown.

Hello, Hollywood.

Hello is a very important work of art.

Really?

And it ran for 11 years, twice nightly.

That's huge for a small town like Reno.

And it was really part of the evolution of the arts industry in Reno.

So just all the phenomenal talent that was brought to this area and who stayed here because this was what was wonderful.

So many people said, this is a great area.

So many of the dance studios and and, you know, the technicians and wardrobe people and musicians, they stayed in this area.

Some of them became dance teachers.

Some of them became directors of our town.

There are so many professions that the cast went into.

This will be my 22nd anniversary of purchasing the Hello Hollywood little costumes.

And so that's my passion.

Now that I lecture it, know schools and Truckee Mills, community colleges and universities, again of these costumes, telling the history of arts, culture and entertainment.

It definitely changed the culture of the art scene in Reno because of the quality of these performers from all over the world that settled here in Reno.

We took advantage of the fact that we had imported wonderful talent from all edges of the globe, and that can't help but change the community a little bit.

I don't think Reno would have been exposed to quite as much art if it wasn't for Hollywood.

We had a big 40th reunion on the last day.

We had the mayor of Reno calm and she proclaimed that June 24 was going to be hollow.

Hollywood Day.

Do you know what was so special for her was that her mother was one of the photography girls in the showroom when she was a little girl.

So really.

Hello, Hollywood.

Hello.

Affected everybody's life in Reno.

Hello, Hollywood.

Hello.

With this micro international community of dancers that was dropped into the Reno community and we became a family.

When we all came over here, we were young.

We were from all over the world.

We didn't have a family.

So we formed our own family.

And even now, my Christmas and Thanksgiving and New Year's are spent with my friends slash family from Hello, Hollywood.

Hello.

Our children are like cousins.

We all know the show deeply affected us.

You you don't feel the full impact of that until you go through a 40th anniversary and you have all these people come back together and we're still family.

Every last one of us feels the same way.

Reno may just seem like the biggest little city in the world, but it's really history like this.

And people like us who have stayed.

And we've really been a key part of the vibrant art scene that you see today.

We're going over to Delray Beach, Florida, now to the Cornell Art Museum for a glimpse at a hugely popular immersive exhibition entitled Seven Solos.

As the name suggests, this show incorporates site specific works by seven different contemporary artists, and it's been a hit with visitors.

So let's find out why.

When I curated this show, seven Solos at the Museum, I went about it a different way than I normally do.

I usually start with the artwork, but in this case I started with the artist.

I'm Melanie Johansen, the museum director and curator here at the Cornell Art Museum in Delray Beach.

I had never shown their artwork in this magnitude before, and it was exciting to be able to give them a space and say, okay, imagine what could you do with this one gallery, this one space?

A lot of them are actually from South Florida.

One is from New York and one from South Korea.

I'm sure a lot of your viewers have seen these immersive art exhibitions that are popping up all over the world.

And I wanted to kind of bring that to Delray Beach.

I knew that we had art artists in our own backyard, artists that I'd worked with prior that could do this.

And so that was kind of the inspiration of doing this immersive kind of show.

MIA And so she created these short hangings with ocean waves on them.

And then there's a painting on the wall that's called Waves Becoming My.

This room also has two big pieces that are created from metal with gold on top of it, which actually represent two different types of moons.

She's very in tune and inspired by nature.

She comes from a Buddhist background, and so going in this room is very calming and different from a lot of the other galleries.

That takes me to ebb and flow.

An installation actually created in collaboration with two artists.

Giannina does a lot around South Florida with salt sculpture, and Freddie created a loop of video that plays Miami scenes and the mangrove, and he's kind of commenting on the fast paced city and she's commenting on the ocean, the tides, the calmness.

So it works really well together.

Schindler Keng is an artist that I've become familiar with.

She has done outdoor installations all around the world.

And that same piece that you see in the gallery is the same piece that has traveled the globe.

She installs in different places, and then every place she installs the work, she'll add another section of fabric.

She was saying it's supposed to feel safe, like a mother's womb if the visitor sits on the bench inside of that swirling fabric.

The Janis Project by Frank Hightower.

He wanted to show these Janis pieces all around the world.

It's kind of like a pop up.

And so it was my idea to kind of fill this space with Janis heads, but I really wanted them to glow from within so that when you go in there, it's like this overwhelming sense of, like, eyes on you.

Janis is a Roman god of balance and you smell that.

Janis Jay And you ask, and it's a male.

But in this exhibition and he spells it.

Jay And I said that it doesn't have a gender, so.

BURKHART John Paul creates these pieces where he uses a one way mirror to kind of throw the viewer off and create this feel for infinity.

And in his artist's statement, he says that he's creating something that's really only viewable through the mind of the person looking at the piece.

This one is called a clear Vision of the Thing to Come.

And when you look into this piece, you don't see yourself.

This gallery is created by an artist named Jacob Fisher, and he creates work using reflective string and light.

Each thread represents the memory and the light.

Dancing on the thread is kind of like the fleeting nature of those memories.

And there's no way you can be in here and not contemplate something.

I think the artist also created the projector mapping of the light, and so the light will never touch a part of the room that doesn't have string or isn't intentional.

Or the atrium was done by an artist out of Miami.

Alex Jimeno It's 26 feet high from floor to ceiling.

There's a little bit of her Colombian heritage in there.

A women's group in Columbia are supporting themselves by creating those crocheted pieces.

We are in 100 year old building with contemporary art inside.

You come into the museum, you kind of get a feel for the old, a feel for the new.

You are able to see the exhibition in about an hour at the most, which I think is refreshing, though It's definitely a different a different vibe than your usual museum.

And finally, a visit to the workspace where the great American sculptor Daniel Chester French, plied his craft in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

French named the site, which includes a home, a studio and a garden.

Chester Wood.

Today, visitors to Chester would learn the significance of French's carefully crafted working environment while experiencing some of the sculptures that he created There.

We begin in Stockbridge, at the home of famed American sculptor Daniel Chester French.

He created the Abraham Lincoln statue at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

But he didn't just create beauty.

He wanted to be surrounded by it on a hillside in scenic Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

You'll find the home of Daniel Chester French, a New England born artist who carved out a reputation as one of the premier American sculptors of the 19th and 20th centuries.

His outsize creations range from the minute man statue in Concord to his ultimate masterwork, a seated Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial.

When you tour his studio, you see these models for all these many sculptures that appeared all over the country.

Michael Lynch heads the advisory council at Chester Wood, the home studio, and Gardens, where a friend spent some 30 summers sculpting and soaking up nature.

He would come from New York City, escape the hubbub and just relax and then work 10 to 12 hours a day.

He was a driven artist.

French purchased the property in 1896 and redesigned the barn as a studio.

With the help of Henry Bacon, his long time friend and artistic collaborator who ultimately became the architect of the Lincoln Memorial, the studio and adjacent residents became French's home away from home, where he created some of his most monumental works.

Flanked by the natural beauty of the Berkshires, where you can virtually hear the sound of chisels in your ear as you're watching and looking at these models and listening to the dose and explain how the various pieces were created.

We're standing in Daniel Chester French's studio, which he built in 1897.

Donna hassler is the executive director of Chester Wood in this studio.

She points out a treasure trove of original sculptures, molds and references for some of his most iconic works The winged spirit of Life, designed for a public park in Saratoga Springs, New York.

The plaster reliefs of the doors he designed for the Boston Public Library.

There's even a bronze maquette of this George Washington statue, which once reached the 26 foot high ceilings of French's studio.

When the work grew too large, French placed it on customers, lined railroad tracks and wheeled it outside.

He could push a flat car manually outside and continue to work on his sculpture in the light of the day, as well as walk down the hill and get the perspective.

A highlight of the studio and indeed, French's career.

The models he created for the Lincoln Memorial in 1917, the Lincoln Monument Association commissioned French and his friend Bacon to create a memorial to the slain president on the National Mall in Washington, D.C..

They were a natural choice.

French had already collaborated with bacon on a standing Lincoln for the Nebraska State Capitol.

The D.C. Memorial took eight years to create, resulting in a towering 19 foot tall statue to create something that big French had to start small.

Donahue I would venture to say, know this monument better than most.

What can you tell us about it?

Even though we think we know it, that we wouldn't necessarily realize?

It's interesting to see the physical work on this scale because you can get up close and you also see the tool marks in the plaster.

You see a smaller model.

He would start small and then continue to expand and enhance the figure and you see some changes.

Whereas the leg, yeah, it's a difference.

Fans, the hands are a little bit different, the head is downcast, so he's working his ideas in three dimension.

When his daily studio work was done, French retired to his home and gardens only a few steps away.

This is the French family residence.

Most people who walk into this space, they will say, I could live here, which is wonderful.

It's very intimate.

The family residence is preserved as it was.

He it turns out, was also something of an interior designer.

The hallway features hand-painted wallpaper that French chose to bring the natural world inside.

It's all original from the sideboard he found at a flea market for $8 to the typewriter on his desk, to the books on his shelves.

He was about creating beauty in his own life, sharing that beauty with others in his work, and also in the gardens that he planted here.

For French, his gardens were a palate cleanser and another outlet for his creative potential.

If he had enough clay or a stone does, he could come out here and walk through the garden.

The landscape provided a quiet and serene escape for one of the nation's most prolific sculptors.

Today, it gives visitors a chance to experience the art and landscape, as French did, to come to a studio where the work was actually created and to see the process.

You get a real sense of the immediacy of this is where it actually happened and where the man made monuments.

There was no way to get to it at all.

And so and that is that for this edition of Art runs.

But remember, there are always more episodes of the show to be found at LP B Dawgs Rocks.

And if you can't get enough culture.

Country Roads Magazine makes a useful guide to what's happening in the arts events and that destinations all across the state.

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

West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LPI be offering diverse exhibitions throughout the year and programs that showcase art, history, music and more.

West Baton Rouge Museum Culture Cultivated Art rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.