>> Narrator: This week on Eye on the Arts.

>> Luke: I don't want my instruments to sit on the shelf and get dusty somewhere.

I want someone to play it, and then pass it onto their kid, and their child plays it, and then their child plays it.

That to me would be the best thing that could happen to my instruments, for them to be loved.

>> Mark: The experiments are really based on exploiting the qualities of watercolor, and just letting it do what it wants to do without trying to manipulate it too much, and when you do that, it does some explosively cool things that no other medium can even touch.

(upbeat music) >> You know, like a beautiful day like today, everybody enjoys the sun, but imagine if you're looking through a textured clear glass, or a texture purple glass, or glass that you can hardly see through.

To me it's all about changing the light.

>> Sunghee: It's not just about playing something right under your ears or your fingertips.

You really experience the whole sound fills this huge hall.

(guitar music) >> Narrator: Eye on the Arts is made possible in part by South Shore Arts, the Indiana Arts Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, and viewers like you, thank you.

Further support provided by the Legacy Foundation.

>> Narrator 2: Support for programming Lakeshore PBS comes in part from a generous bequest of the estate of Marjorie A.

Mills, whose remarkable contribution will help us keep viewers like you informed, inspired, and entertained for years to come.

>> Narrator 3: Doing as much as you can, as quickly as you can is important to me.

Life is short, and the earlier we get started helping our community, the better off our community will be.

>> Almost every single professor I've had, I'm on a first name basis.

By building that relationship with faculty, I was able to get involved with research.

It's one thing to read about an idea in a book, versus physically doing it and seeing the results.

(upbeat music) >> My parents let me take this job after school.

It was in a cabinet shop, and I started working there, and anything that was detailed and kind of immaculate, I really liked that kind of work.

Then I started at my brother-in-law's violin shop.

I just wanted something that would challenge me a little more, and repairing violins, and I did really well at it, and pretty quickly I was doing the majority of the repairs in the shop, and then I've been here now eight plus years doing this stuff, so.

I'm into violin making a lot more as an engineer than a performer, obviously.

I like music, but I like listening to music.

(chuckling) We're dealing in a margin of error that's a couple of points of a millimeter, so it's a lot more engineering than you might think.

You take this piece of wood, and figuring out what it's going to sound like at the end of crafting it into an instrument, you have to be very, very specific with your measurements.

For the most part, we're copying the greatest sounding violins on the planet.

The violin as we know it was made by Andrea Amati in the mid-1500s, and then the name that everybody knows, Antonio Stradivarius is kind of the one that perfected he violin.

Since Antonio Stradivarius, the violin really hasn't changed.

úThere are other makers that have made after Strad that are very, very good makers, but since he has that kind of label as the maker for royalty, he's kind of captured that title, and he was alive at a very important era for violin making.

His craftsmanship was very, very clean for the day.

He pushed the design of the violin to an extraordinary amount.

Antonio Stradivarius, they estimate made about a thousand instruments.

That is a very happening maker in today's terms.

(violin music) There are a lot of other really competent players here.

Every time I finish an instrument, the moment of truth is when you walk out in the main room, and have someone to play your instrument for the first time, and you string it up, all the varnish has dried, you hand it to this person.

(violin music) (violin playing) When I'm making an instrument, I am tapping on the pieces of wood and tuning them to certain notes.

I'm looking for sound travel through the wood to be very fast.

So we measure the speed of sound, how you make the arching, really, really affects how it's going to sound.

How much air mass you make inside the instrument is usually in relation to how big this instrument will sound, and there's not really one right thing, because I'll have a performer come in here, and they'll play 15, 20 different instruments before deciding what instrument they like.

Everyone's looking for something different, so it kind of works out, regardless of what you make, sooner or later, there's going to be someone that really connects with that instrument.

Some of the instruments I make are a commission.

Usually they'll show me pictures of something they've seen and say, "I want the color this or that."

More commonly than a commission job, I just make the instrument however I like, and I kind of like making the instrument just however I like, because it gives me full creative license, and I would say that's really what differentiates modern violins.

We're copying the outlines and the shapes of Stradivarius, but as far as the aesthetic, and as far as the carving you do on it, it's all in your hand, it's all up to you.

If there's no customer saying, "I want it specifically this way," I try to use my full creative license on instruments, pushing myself kind of to my limit on what I can do.

I don't want my instruments to sit on a shelf and get dusty somewhere.

I want someone to play it and then pass it onto their kid, and their child plays it, and then their child plays it.

That to me would be the best thing that could happen to my instruments.

I want them to be played, and I want them to be used, I want them to be loved.

If these instruments that I make are taken care of, they can last three, four, maybe more generations.

It does make me want to make my instruments very, very well, because you know that this is going to be cherished and loved by somebody, and maybe even for more than the fact that I made it, they might love it just because it's Grandpa's, and you want Grandpa's violin to be something special.

It's kind of an honor in a way.

I think there's something special about starting with raw chunks of wood, and by the end you have this intricately carved beautiful sounding, beautiful looking violin or instrument, and there's no substitute for that.

There are a lot of very good makers that have poured time into me, and that's part of what makes me to the level I'm at today.

I started this when I was 16 years old.

I would like to make instruments that have never been seen before, especially in their aesthetic and their sound.

Now that I'm into violin making, I want to be one of the best, (chuckling) so the pursuit is going to be make a lot of instruments, get my name out there, get my instruments out there.

(violin music) (upbeat music) >> Got a job offer while I was still in college, and I was down on Michigan Avenue, doing advertising, absolutely awful.

So I quit after one year, and I've not worked for anyone since.

Because I didn't get that deep into advertising.

I became more of an illustrator, and that's the path that found me, I suppose.

I always went to current events so that it would have to be something that couldn't be replaced by stock images.

You know, it would have to be some new story that had to be illustrated, and that has helped me a lot.

Luckily for me, my background was in design, and so I can design logos, and I ended up doing lots of billboards and ads and collateral material, and I really enjoy it.

If I didn't do all that stuff, I wouldn't have survived.

Be it teaching, designing posters, illustrating, or selling commissioned work, you know, fine art paintings, all of those things contribute to my income.

If I just focused on one, would it blossom?

I don't know.

(chuckling) It's the risk I'd probably take.

My favorite stuff that's commercial is certainly like the Jewish Review of Books that for like nine years now, I've been doing the covers.

It's important editorial work.

I feel good about it.

It sort of bridges the gap between fine art and illustration.

It's always topical, and it's been an ink and watercolor, and I enjoy that, and I get paid well for it.

I'm not one of those guys that someone would hire for my style and say, "That's a one of a kind style guy."

I'm the guy that has twenty styles.

I approach every scenario like a new project.

Oftentimes my favorite work is when I have no subject matter at all.

That is kind of expressionistic, but it's also, the experiments are really based on exploiting the qualities of watercolor, and just letting it do what it wants to do without trying to manipulate it too much, and when you do that, it does some explosively cool things that no other medium can even touch.

My favorite pieces are when the watercolor did something really cool, and I just had to sort of coax it, and not overdo I, and leave it alone, and tilt the paper a little bit, and let it do something cool.

That's always cooler than anything I've ever painted.

I like the spontaneity of watercolor, and the ability to just experiment to no end with different, you know, the salt, and spritzing water, and mixing it with acrylic inks where they repel each other, and create this sort of granular effect.

It's really cool, all the textures and stuff you can get out of watercolor.

Get to know it a little bit, and then it's so fun, and it's a transparent medium, so you can see everything that you've done.

You can't erase.

You can't paint over something in watercolor.

Make the most out of a mistake is what it is.

I mean if you can just think about it really simply like, okay you want me to do a portrait of you?

Okay, you want it to look like you, you know?

So I've already got some really strict rules.

When you've got those stipulations, it's hard to stay loose, and watercolor, when it's used boldly yet loosely is when it explodes.

If somebody's timid when they're singing a song, it's like "Uhhh."

♪ I like the way it smells in the country ♪ If you're painting with that same hesitation, it's going to look like that.

It's a strange thing.

Yeah, what does artistic life bring me?

It feeds me in a lot of damn ways, you know?

And if all I had was a paycheck, like a lot of people, like I was like , I don't care about money that much, you know?

Like, I don't want to freeze to death in, you know, living in a cardboard box.

It's, yeah, I don't know.

You gotta do it.

You get through life the way you get through life.

♪ Only good days sing two of the two ♪ ♪ Oh, let's go down to Lake Geo ♪ Certainly my goal is the next twenty years, to just paint a lot, see where it see where it, call me in fifteen.

♪ Just as soon as I can break free ♪ ♪ from the lights of the city ♪ ♪ I guess I'm going to the countryside ♪ (upbeat music) >> I do a variety of things in stained glass, a lot of designing, in fact, that's really the part that I like the best.

Then I also have a large kiln in another workspace, so I do a lot of having fun with glass, fusing, slumping, painting on glass.

Most of my work is done commission now.

I have a lot of really great clients, and some of them have been waiting several years for me to catch up.

I will usually meet with the client, and then come back, you know, after listening to them, and submit maybe six, eight designs and say, you know, "What do you like about this one?

What do you like about that one?"

Listening to people, seeing what they like, telling me what colors, finding out what, if it's going into a home, finding out what direction it is, and kind of from that, you know, we kind of cull, you know, the parts that they like the best, and then at that point we start choosing colors.

Like this one I'm working on right now is one of my favorites, because it's an abstract window, and I really design what I feel talking to the people, what they want.

A lot of them will give me free rein.

Others will hand me like a bunch of things they've cut out and said, you know, "Would you execute something like this for me?"

So they have to fall in love with the design, you know, before I would ever start cutting glass.

(piano music) I fell in love with trying to make dimensional glass, and so I started with the food, because I bought this wasser glass, and I thought, "Oh, look, it's a perfect taco shell.

It's a perfect piece of pepperoni.

It's you cut it in an olive.

You can cut it in an onion," 'cause they had like green and white, so it looked like green onions, and so I started with that, and then I got into faces.

I thought about, I don't want to make men.

I don't want to make women.

I don't want to make something that they say, "Oh, that looks like so-and-so."

So I started and I made clay molds, and I had a friend fire them, and here's a piece of flat glass, you take it up 250 an hour until maybe 1250.13, and it molds around the mask.

I think when I work on my faces, I don't want a complete face.

I want a partial face.

I want people to use their imagination, and in their mind put together probably what they think the face should look like.

The idea of taking stained glass from the craft of doing glass to the art of doing something with stained glass, because I think that's so important that you stretch your imagination when you're doing glass.

(piano music) To me, it's all about changing the light, you know?

Like a beautiful day like today, everybody enjoys the sun, but imagine if you're looking through a textured clear glass, or a textured purple glass, or glass that you can hardly see through.

The lady who's behind me, I bought that red and clear glass that is her clothing, and I fell in love with the piece of glass.

In fact, a lot of pieces I have around here I bought, and I don't want to cut them, because it's like a piece of art all by itself, and I don't want to take any piece of that away.

(piano music) You know, I just keep fooling around and trying to figure new ways to do things.

I want to keep people guessing, so that's what I do with my faces, that's what I do with my food, and I think that's what I do with my abstract designs.

As an artist, you want to motivate people to think about your piece.

You know, let the viewer decide does this look like a man or does this look like a woman.

To me, the piece probably will mean something entirely different than what it means to the general public.

They can like it, or they don't have to like it, but at least it starts them thinking about art, and thinking about, you know, that stained glass that doesn't look like stained glass.

(piano music) Passion always comes from within, and if you find something that you really love doing, I mean, you hear it when you hear a lot of famous baseball players interviewed, you know, "I love this game," and that's what happens.

You kind of fall in love with glass, and you see that your possibilities are endless in what you can do.

(piano music) (organ music) >> Narrator: Located in the Chapel of the Resurrection on the campus of Valparaiso University, the Reddel Memorial Organ is a sight and sound to behold.

Originally installed in 1959 and expanded in 1996, the instrument exists in harmony with the chapel, both architecturally and sonically.

Organist Sunghee Kim was kind enough to share her talents, and demonstrate this magnificent instrument.

(organ playing) >> There is not single exactly same organ in the world.

Because the pipe organs are designed based on their space, all the organs are different.

Even though you see the same name of the instrument, which is called the stop on the organ, they sound differently.

As you can see, these is a giant instrument with a massive sound.

It has four different keyboards, and also the pedal board that's the fifth keyboard on this organ.

Each keyboard has its own set of pipes, so you can make different sounds, and also for the pedal, so you're feet playing some kind of melody lines or baselines, and your ten fingers are also playing the music on the keyboard.

Several thousand years ago, they used the water power to create a pressure.

Nowadays, the organ has the wind chest and blower.

Once you press the key, the pipe valve is opened, then air comes through, and it creates those sound, and you will hear very different colors, and the texture, different textures from all these different pipes.

(organ playing) This is a mini orchestra.

What I'm saying, mini is one person's orchestra, so one person with ten fingers and two feet, the one person controls all the instruments.

Moog and synthesizer, you have only one keyboard, and in organ's case, you can have one, two, three, four five synthesizers in this case.

There are many buttons.

One button is one instrument.

The fascinating thing about the organ is this instrument is so powerful and always so humble, so you can have the full orchestra on this organ to support like 2000 congregation with powerful sound, and sometimes you have only one instrument, not overpowering anyone, but it's supporting singing voices.

(organ playing) This is the largest collegiate temple in the U.S., and I believe this is also the second largest collegiate temple in the world, so playing this instrument in this large space is really something special.

The acoustic is quite alive in this hall, so it's not just about playing something right under your ears, or your fingertips, you really experience the whole sound fills this huge hall.

Playing this organ begins from coming up through the spiral staircase.

In early morning and early afternoon, you receive the direct sunlight from the organ console, and it reflects all the beautiful colors through the stained glasses, and when you are playing, it's not just about playing music.

You can enjoy all the beautiful pieces of this single corner and beautiful artworks.

I am so blessed and I'm so thankful to have a chance to play on this organ and to spend my personal times on this organ.

>> Narrator: Eye on the Arts is made possible in part by South Shore Arts, the Indiana Arts Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, and viewers like you, thank you.

Further support provided by the Legacy Foundation.

>> Narrator 4: Support for programming Lakeshore PBS comes in part from a generous bequest of the estate of Marjorie A.

Mills, whose remarkable contribution will help us keep viewers like you informed, inspired, and entertained for years to come.

>> Narrator 3: Doing as much as you can as quickly as you can is important to me.

Life is short, and the earlier we get started helping our community, the better off our community will be.

>> I have a very strong connection to other students.

Everyone makes an effort to help each other.

I remember the feeling of being here, the feeling that I was a part of a family.

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Did you know that you can find all your favorite Lakeshore PBS shows online?

By visiting video.LakeshorePBS.org.

You can stream a large selection of shows, including Eye on the Arts.

>> To me it's always about the music.

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(upbeat music)