- Hello everyone, I'm Matthew Ozanich, and welcome to another installment of Destination Michigan.

You know the power and beauty of art touches our lives in so many ways.

It has the ability to transport us, inspire us, and connect with our emotions and experiences in a very profound way.

And on today's episode, we'll meet a few people who exemplify the power of art and creativity.

First off, we're gonna meet Stephanie Schlatter, a gifted plein-air painter who captures the essence of Michigan's stunning landscapes in her beautiful paintings.

Then we'll visit Devil's Rope Studio where sculptor, Jeff Best, transforms barbed wire into stunning one-of-a-kind creations.

We'll also introduce you to Adrian Bradley, a photographer who ventures into the darkest corners of Michigan to capture breathtaking images of the night sky.

And finally, we'll be heading to Eisenhower Dance Detroit to witness the power of performance firsthand with Marc Brew, a renowned choreographer that's teaching students about the transformative nature of dance.

All of these stories are coming your way on this episode of Destination Michigan.

(bright uplifting music) Michigan's natural splendor is truly awe-inspiring, from the majestic meeting of the horizon and the water, to the vibrant pops of color found in the fields and the forests.

The lush landscape of the Great Lake state has captured the heart of one artist who finds herself being swept away by the beauty of nature with each stroke of her paintbrush.

Stefanie Mills now introduces us to Stephanie Schlatter.

- I think places are like people.

As someone who's traveled extensively abroad since I was able to afford my first plane ticket, I've resonated with places.

Some feel like home, and Northern Michigan is one of those places.

It just fits.

I feel like I'm somewhere when I'm up there, and I don't have to think about where I want to go, because I'm already there.

- [Stefanie] Stephanie Schlatter's studio is not in Northern Michigan, but once you step inside it, you quickly feel like you're there.

Familiar scenes like Sleeping Bear Dunes, Frankfurt, and Lake Michigan, they pop out at you right away as you take in her very unique works of art.

- There's a painting of Point Betsie behind you, but you can set 10 different artists up in front of Point Betsie, and they're each gonna have their own perspective, and all 10 paintings are gonna be unique, because you're looking at a blank canvas, that I'm the only person making something with it.

So it's a conversation between me and the canvas.

- [Stefanie] Now, while Stephanie has a studio, you won't actually find her there much.

Her craft, plein-air painting, takes her outside where she paints the landscape in front of her.

The definition of plein-air literally means to paint outside, now which of course is only a touch more difficult than just taking a photo of it on your phone.

(bright uplifting music) - Plein-air was developed by the Impressionists, because for the first time, artists had tube paint.

Now there's tube paints, and you can take those out into nature, and what artists found was that there's nothing like standing in nature.

Think of the last really beautiful place you were at.

Now imagine you get to stand there for two hours and interact with it through a canvas.

So it's really about the lifestyle, but it's also about that, as artists, our eyes develop before our skill does.

Plein-air painting helps your skill develop, because a photograph can never be what nature is.

Shadows are the most obvious example.

A shadow in a photograph looks black.

In nature, it is all kinds of shades of beautiful.

And you develop more as an artist doing that, so you have the advantage of it's a beautiful lifestyle, it's soul food, to be out there in nature, and it makes you a better painter.

- [Stefanie] While Stephanie works to capture the moments around her, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which can create its own set of limitations.

- In the creation of art, your eye always moves ahead of your skills.

So even people who are just art appreciators will find that their own eye develops.

The quality of art that they like and appreciate grows to be a higher quality.

So you're always chasing that.

And you're chasing nature, which can't really be beat.

So you see something that takes your breath away, and you're stuck with the burden of trying to make a 2D canvas as beautiful as what your experiencing.

- [Stefanie] As is evident in her art, Stephanie spends a lot of her time up north.

But as you can imagine, winter makes it challenging to paint outside.

Now, during our visit, she was working on this piece, a painting of a photo she took.

So she may not be up north in her happy place, but it's never far from her mind or her heart.

- Yeah, like it's pure joy.

I can't believe I get to do this, and at the same time, there are parts of it that are incredibly hard, and I think that's when you know you're doing what you're supposed to be doing, that the amount of difficult things that you have to do aren't insurmountable to you.

You don't think about them, per se, so much, because it's your calling.

- [Stefanie] Given Stephanie's meticulous attention to detail, and her creative eye, no painting is ever done until it's out the door.

Time and experience can not only change the scene, but the artists themselves.

- It's a big debate within the art community of when is a painting finished, and some people say it's not.

You just pause at interesting places.

And I tend to be in that camp, because as we're talking about the eye developing, if a painting comes back to me after two years, I'm not the same artist I was when I created it, so there is a temptation, and sometimes I give in to that temptation and change it up.

- As we continue our artistic adventure today, our next stop is gonna bring us just outside the city of Clare, where we're gonna step inside the walls of Devil's Rope Studio.

It's here that sculptor Jeff Best works his magic, recreating stunning and lifelike forms found in nature, using a most unlikely and prickly medium.

(upbeat music) - As a kid, I guess, I loved the outdoors.

You know, nature has just always been part of me, and then through high school, I won a couple competitions with painting, and that kind of stuff.

But other than maybe every once in a while getting out a pencil and sketching, it was just not something that really, that I did.

- [Matthew] Jeff Best of Devil's Rope Studio in Clare never really thought of himself as an artist.

Despite growing up in a very artistic home, he had always assumed that building his life around a creative passion just wasn't in the cards.

But the spark was lit in Jeff when one day one of his kids asked for his help with a school project.

- When you have kids, they have show and tell, and so one day, and I don't know why, I picked up a pair of needle nose pliers and took some hangers out of my wife's closet, and just started twisting them up, and of course the first thing I made was a whitetail deer.

The kids took it to school for show and tell for several years, and that was the first thing I ever made.

And in my mind, I always thought it'd be kind of cool to do a large life size deer head, but I just knew that I wasn't gonna do it with coat hangers, because it was so, you know, coat hangers are pretty stout, or they used to be, anyways.

Pretty stout.

And I thought well, I'll find something someday.

And that was always in the back of my mind.

- [Matthew] And the key to what would turn that initial idea into what we see today was found in a rather unexpected way.

- We bought some property, and it was 40 acres, and mostly wooded, and I was walking the property one day, and I walked up on it, and here's this barbed wire, all rusted barbed wire laying there.

And I mean, instantly I thought, now that would be cool, the use of the barbed wire for a deer head.

Threw it in the barn and it laid in the barn for, I would say, three or four years.

And I came across that barbed wire again I said, you know, this winter I'm gonna do that.

And so that's what happened.

I used that, and I still have that deer head today.

It's actually hanging over my mailbox here.

- [Matthew] With his first barbed wire creation finished, Jeff would continue working on piece after piece, along the way, honing his skills along with his creative style.

- Every new sculpture that I do scares me.

I've always said that I've never been stumped, but doesn't mean that I don't agonize over it before I do it.

This ram has been a challenge, from the standpoint of its horns.

You know, they curve around, and they have a certain pattern how they curve around.

This is my third iteration here (laughing) of horns, and I'm still not completely satisfied with them, but that's pretty much the same, that I deal with it.

I never have a piece go out of here that I'm totally satisfied.

People say, well I strive for perfection.

Well, if you really could achieve perfection, it wouldn't look like the animal, because I say you have to have some imperfection to make it look real.

I try to perfect imperfections in my work so it looks real.

If you look at whitetail deer, that one antler is typically smaller than the other antler.

And just because this one's got four points doesn't meant that this side's got four points.

But I still struggle on putting those imperfections in because my nature is I want it to look perfect.

I want four on this side, and four on that side, and I want them the same length.

But then I keep on telling myself, no, it can't, you don't want them to be that way.

They won't look exactly real.

- [Matthew] Jeff's drive to perfect the imperfect did help drive his creative passions forward.

But the real turning point for him came when he was able to see how his creations could touch people in a personal and profound way.

- When you get done, and they see it, and they go wow, that is awesome.

You're going, phew.

I know the first time that really hit me was when I did a Friesian horse.

And that was a large, large horse.

I don't know if you're familiar with Friesian but they have long, flowing manes, and they're like the Fabio of the horse world, you know?

Very athletic, very strong, muscular, and very graceful.

And this gentleman asked me to make one, and he says I need it to look like Oliver.

- [Matthew] Meet Oliver, a champion Friesian horse owned by Mary and Paul Alexander of Mount Pleasant.

This time, Jeff would be able to meet his muse face to face.

- To that point, a horse was a horse to me.

You do a horse head, you put legs and hooves on it, you're making a horse.

You're not making a specific horse.

And so that was a challenge.

And we delivered it, actually, on Christmas morning.

It was freezing cold.

Put it on a trailer, wrapped it up with a white tarp, and then he had to coax his wife out of the house.

It was like, I don't know, it was 20 degrees or less, and freezing cold, so she wasn't even really excited about going outside.

And then she went outside, and we pulled that off, and she said Oliver.

I hate to see things go out my door, because I'm typically doing commission stuff.

I make them, and they're gone.

And then I'm onto the next thing.

On the other side, if I know where they're going, and where they're gonna be, so I can maybe drive by them, that always helps a lot for me, when they end up in some really cool places.

For me, that's been the legacy of what I'd done, and when I'm gone, that that stuff will still be there is really important to me.

- Undoubtedly, one of the biggest events for art lovers in Michigan is Grand Rapids' Annual Art Prize.

The international art competition was first launched in 2009 as an initiative to encourage public engagement with contemporary art.

Art Prize invites artists from around the world to submit their work, and winners are selected through a combination of public voting and jury panel.

It is a great opportunity for artists to gain visibility and exposure for their work, but it's also become an important cultural event in Grand Rapids, with thousands of visitors coming from near and far to experience the excitement.

And Art Prize allows visitors to engage in the artistic process, with art inspired events happening all over the city.

Here on Destination Michigan, we know a thing or two about how cameras work, and understand the importance of light in creating stunning images.

While most photographers wait for the perfect light to capture their shots, night scape photographer, Adrian Bradley, prefers the complete opposite.

He seeks out the darkest skies possible, where light pollution is at a minimum, in order to create his breathtaking compositions.

(soft music) - I'm Adrian, an amateur astronomer, and night scape photographer.

Look at a starry night sky, and it just stops you.

It's just one of those like, wow.

Almost like when you see the night sky, it stops you.

- [Matthew] Adrian remembers looking up in awe at the age of seven, and falling in love with the stars.

A few years later, he caught a glimpse of the Milky Way on a clear night, and his attraction was renewed.

That experience led him to an open house.

- And then go to the low brow astronomer open house, and those gentlemen were real kind.

They showed me stuff through the telescope.

I had $30 in my pocket, and I handed it to him on the spot and said I wanna become a member.

- [Matthew] Joining that club strengthened Adrian's desire to spend more time with the night sky, and a kind gesture from a coworker put in motion a newfound passion.

- A gentleman at my job handed me a Canon 30D and said here, see if you can get some night photography with it.

He was an avid photographer, and he had upgraded.

So I said, sure.

DSLR.

I knew a little about it, but a couple years prior, I'm learning about the growing world of astrophotography, and how some of the guys get pictures of objects in the night sky.

So I just try it out.

Trial and error.

And start taking pictures with it.

- [Matthew] Armed with his new to him camera, and newfound inspiration, Adrian sought out to capture what he was seeing at night, and as his talent grew, so did his need to update his camera technology.

- This little thing, this little tracker.

So what this does is it turns ever so slightly, and it follows the night sky, cancels out the Earth's rotation.

If you're gonna do a composite photo, and get a long enough image for all of this starlight to come in, this tracker keeps those stars nice and round.

It follows the sky.

Because the sky does move.

- [Matthew] Adrian's images demonstrate his understanding of weather patterns, astronomy, and his photography tools, though his real talents are knowing how to pick the right spot to capture a night scape.

His favorite location is the Dark Sky Lodge and Tavern in Port Austin.

- The uniqueness of this place really stems from the area that we're in, specifically the Port Crescent State Park behind us.

Our property actually butts up right against acres of hiking trails.

The recent designation of the Dark Sky Park makes this place spectacular, especially at night.

What that designation means is that it leaves you plenty of room to observe the night sky, and there's no light pollution within X amount of miles.

There are certain parameters that the park has to follow, and the local air has to follow to make sure that the unobstructed view of the night sky remains.

- Generally get two or three days for your shot to line up, if you want the Milky Way to be somewhere.

The sky's not stationary.

And you can get up and say I'm just gonna take pictures of the sky tonight, and not know what part of the sky's gonna be visible.

The whole thing rolls over, and something that was over here at nine o'clock is now way over here at one or two in the morning.

So you come out, and I want this to be here, you've gotta plan to be there at the time that it's gonna reach.

I thought this would be a really good indication of how dark it was at Dark Sky Lodge and Tavern.

The composition of all that it was, I wanted, the Milky Way was pointing straight up and down here, so I have it running through in alignment with the side.

I try to make an image that reminds me of what I'm seeing.

So the river's here.

The Milky Way is this wispy thing that's over here, but I know that there's more there.

And so I want to bring that out, and I want to bring all the stars out, but I want the land to look the way that if you stay there long enough, your eyes get adapted.

You'd see all the stuff out there.

- [Matthew] Passion and dedication are traits that benefit Adrian and his work.

He scouts and visualizes an image during the daytime hours, envisioning worthy objects he intends to capture will line up, and conceptualizes his composition.

Then he heads back out at nightfall to create his art.

- As one astronomer told me, your images make people want to go out and see the night sky for themselves, and if that's what my images do, that's as good a goal as any.

It's not about there's Adrian, the greatest imager that ever lived.

Would I love to hear it?

Yeah.

You know, if someone says this image makes me want to go to Dark Sky Lodge and Tavern and see for myself how these skies look, that's a greater feeling.

- And for our final story today, we're gonna change our gaze from the twinkling stars in the night sky to the bright lights of the stage.

Performing artists are known for their creativity, vision, and the ability to share their experiences with an audience.

Our last stop on this palette of artists takes us to Blue Field Hills, home of Eisenhower Dance Detroit, where dancers are learning more than just technique.

- Eisenhower Dance Detroit is a professional contemporary dance company.

Contemporary dance is a form of artistic expression.

It's an abstract discipline that comes from the creative process.

Being a repertory company, we bring in choreographers from all over.

Every choreographer that I bring in I feel like has a story to share.

When I saw Marc's work, I didn't know who Marc was.

It just happened to be that we were at a dance conference.

When the curtain went down, I was just blown away, how well-crafted the work was.

I was so moved by it.

I just thought to myself, I have to have this choreographer work with my dancers.

- [Chris] Now is a good time to introduce you to Marc Brew.

But who is he?

He is a dancer.

He is a choreographer, and often, he is not what people expect from those professional titles.

- I'm originally from Australia.

I grew up in a very small village called Jerilderie in New South Wales, and I started doing jazz ballet once a week at the local town hall, and I used to think it was like going to Fame.

It was like the Fame school.

So I had a very traditional training.

I have classical ballet, contemporary dance, jazz, tap, and then I went to focus on classical ballet and contemporary dance.

I then went to South Africa, and joined Pact Ballet, which is the national dance company in South Africa.

And while I was there, I was involved in a car crash, and I had a spinal cord injury at C67, and I was told by the doctor I'd never walk again.

Yeah, I'm sure as you can imagine, being a dancer, my whole life was my body, and being physical, and being able to express myself through movement.

It was my worst nightmare.

But I want to dance.

That feeling was still within me, that I wanted to be able to move, and express myself, and I think that's when I realized I had to change my own perception around what a dancer was, and what it meant to me to dance, and that's when I realized that dance was about expressing myself through movement.

And I could still do that.

It was just different.

And I had to find different ways than what I was used to, and that I was trained, and brought up, to look at the way that I could dance.

- [Chris] But where to start?

How do you reclaim the thing in your life that brings you happiness and joy and is your source of passion?

- I didn't know of other disabled dancers, or other dancers who were using chairs.

At the time, I didn't have any role models.

But it just so happened that two of my friends who I trained with were in America in New York City doing class at American Ballet Theater.

And this woman had wheeled in in her wheelchair, and her name was Kitty Lunn.

And they pretty much jumped on her, and said oh our friend's just had an accident.

He needs to know that he can continue to dance.

And I think for me that was the starting point of looking at that there are opportunities out there, or that I could make opportunities, that there was someone similar to me, that I wasn't alone, because I thought I was alone.

- [Chris] And Marc certainly hasn't been alone.

Immersed in the collaborative process, Marc has deeply invested in the creative exchange with the dancers he works with.

- You know, I work with Eisenhower Dance Detroit, it's been amazing experience.

They're very open, and curious, which I love, and there's a real respect, and a wonderful exchange that's happening everyday between us.

And it really does feel like we're building this work together.

- I'm really hoping that this space is bigger than Eisenhower Dance Detroit, and is more about other artists finding their voice here as well.

Artistic people, creative people, want to be around other creative people.

I just feel like there's this connection that we feel like we need to be together.

To me, dance is a vehicle to help make an impact on humanity.

I feel like Marc takes it to another level.

And the way he sees, and the way he interacts with the dancers, he's a really special person, inside and out.

He has a sixth sense.

He sees dance in a way that I think choreographers with abled bodies don't have.

And to me, that was the real message, that I want to open our doors to everyone.

I want everybody in our space to share their artistic expression, whatever that is.

- [Chris] Even with Marc's successes, he's aware that he's going to be changing people's perspectives on and off the stage.

- You know, when I first acquired my disability, it's interesting how people judge me, and made their own decisions, judgment, based on visually seeing me.

And now what they saw was not Marc Brew as a person, as a human.

What they saw was my wheelchair.

And what they saw was oh, something's wrong.

He's not normal.

And then when I say to them, oh I'm a dancer, I'm a choreographer, it's amazing in the beginning, the sort of faces I would get.

And I could tell straightaway, they would just look at me and go like, oh.

The poor guy.

He thinks he's a dancer.

Oh, isn't that nice?

And I think that's where, for me, I've been able to hopefully have an effect, and hopefully change people's perceptions around their own thoughts and ideas about what a dancer is, is through my work, is through my practice.

Is from seeing me perform, or seeing other people perform, or people's, witnessing and experiencing the work that I make with other dancers.

And I hope that that will influence their own minds, and to then be open to possibilities as they interact with other people.

- And just like that, this episode of Destination Michigan comes to a close.

We've had such a great time today exploring the passion and creativity of some wonderful Michigan artists.

And we certainly hope you will join us for more adventures on the next Destination Michigan.

But for now, from everyone here, thank you so much for watching, and we'll catch you next time.

(upbeat music)