(light pulsing music) >> Tina: I wanted to create something that was a safe space and conducive to other artists.

And that's all I want is to help other artists grow and have an environment where people can be comfortable coming in here, because this isn't your typical tattoo shop.

>> Peter: There is in terms of figuring out how you're gonna hook everything together.

I mean, you can draw it one way, and then in trying to figure out how to make it, you have to make changes along the way.

>> Andrea: I really want people to have a really profound experience of the world around them.

That's my hope and goal with most of the work is to get people outside and be like, "This is an amazing place.

I am just gonna sit under this apple tree.

I'm not gonna pull my phone out."

(laughs) >> George: Connie was my boss.

She was the artist in charge or whatever, and I came in as a photographer to be her assistant and stuff, and been my boss ever since.

>> Connie: Yeah, I've been bossing him around.

>> Narrator 1: 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.

>> Student 1: I have a very strong connection to other students.

Everyone makes an effort to help each other.

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

(energetic music) >> Narrator 2: Support for programming at 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.

(breezy upbeat music) >> Reporter: "Eye On The Arts" is made possible in part by South Shore Arts, the Indiana Arts Commission, and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.

Additional support for Lakeshore PBS and "Eye On The Arts" is provided by viewers like you.

Thank you.

(soft chill music) >> So I enlisted in the Army National Guard when I was 17.

I did my basic training when I was done with my junior year of high school.

My peers there would like my drawings though, and they would really compliment me, saying like, "Oh my gosh, I love your artwork.

Would you be down for helping me design my next tattoo?"

I feel like society at the time was still probably you have to go to college, you have to find a good paying job, blah, blah, blah.

You can't find work as an artist.

So I just didn't really think about it.

It was more of a hobby.

But when that happened, I'm just like, "Oh, I could be doing the tattooing."

As soon as I was done with my job training, I came back home and I did get my first tattoo.

And after that happened, I was like, "Oh no, this is it."

So I specialize in realism, both black and gray and color, fine line tattoos and coverups.

I love doing coverups.

It's hard to find an artist that will do that.

It's just a little niche style that takes a little bit of different thinking, and I feel like I am a little unorthodox.

So honestly when I do coverups, it's like a fun challenge for me, and I love doing those.

And honestly, I love the confidence that I give my clients.

They go years with these tattoos that they just hate and they trust me to help them give them something that they love.

It's honestly a great feeling to see how much their confidence is boosted from that one tattoo.

I think in the early 2000s, with all of the TV shows hitting mainstream media, tattooing was brought to light as more of an everyday thing, not so much you have to be rebellious or whoever to get a tattoo.

With it being more mainstream, then people who had more professional jobs were feeling more inclined to get tattoos.

And the more people got them and the more progressive our communities got, I want to say that tattoos were definitely becoming more and more accepted.

You're finding lawyers, you're finding doctors, teachers, all professions, A lot of people are getting tattoos, and a majority of the workplaces don't even mind anymore.

It's not against their policies or things like that.

And it's just because the times are changing.

When we were looking into buying property in Highland, we had found out that they want to create more of an arts district in the downtown.

And when I found out there was a tattoo ban, I just thought that was very counterintuitive because tattoo artists and people who get tattooed are typically more creative.

If they're trying to build a community full of artists and creatives, I don't think they should be banning tattooing because it's another form of art.

So when I found out about the ordinance, I just felt like that needs to change.

That ordinance was in place for more than 20 years.

And I mean, upon hearing about the ordinance, I felt like that wasn't right and I just wanted to change that.

I don't know, I didn't imagine myself wanting the struggle.

But when the challenge was presented to me, I wasn't afraid to take it on.

I think the ultimate goal for Nephilim Studios is to have a very strong community.

I want to have very strong artists.

I want to grow everyone's clientele.

I want to have everyone become established if they aren't already.

I just want Nephilim Studios to be the go-to place.

I want it to be the go-to place for families.

I want it to be the go-to place to get your tattoos, your piercings.

I want it to be the go-to place for artists and piercers alike to have a conducive environment to work.

So I've only been tattooing for seven years, and so it happened a lot sooner than I had originally thought.

'Cause things just kind of happened in life that drove me to start this journey, because I wanted to create something that was a safe space and conducive to other artists.

And that's all I want is to help other artists grow and have an environment where people can be comfortable coming in here.

Because this isn't your typical tattoo shop.

>> Crowd: Three, two, one!

♪ Ah ♪ (light tranquil music) >> I've had several artists in the family.

I've had an uncle who was an artist during World War II, flew bombers and did watercolors, war scenes and southeast Asian landscapes.

And then I have another uncle who was in public relations in advertising on Madison Avenue, and he got me really started in art by giving me stone, pieces of stone and carving tools.

So right from the start, I've always been involved.

And then my grandfather had a farm in New Jersey, so we were always handy with tools and fixing things and cutting and grinding and whatever else had to be done.

Junior high, high school, took a lot of art classes and was at the Delaware Art Institute for a while.

Then when I was in the service, I learned some welding in the Army, and then more welding at a Jet Propulsion Lab.

And in '90, 1994 at the Evanston Arts Center here in Illinois, I took course in sculptural welding, as opposed to functional welding, and in 2004 started my own studio right here doing sculpture, painting with metal on it.

A lot of my work at that time was all science based, and then that's blossomed ever since to the point where now I do sculpture about half the time.

And now I work with a series of decorators and designers making custom steel furniture and furnishings and solving problems for decorators.

(saw whirring) There is, in terms of figuring out how you're gonna hook everything together.

I mean, you can draw it one way, and then in trying to figure out how to make it, you have to make changes along the way.

Usually I have a really good idea of what I want it to look like at the end.

I don't do drawings on computers, so it's, well, if this fits here, then we'll weld it here and see what the next piece is gonna do.

My sculpture is only in just regular carbon steel.

What you wind up with are pretty basic cutters, grinders, what's known as a chop saw, which is just a big grit disc that can cut through six inches of metal, and then grinders, polisher, sanders, just routine machines.

And then I have an ancient mig welder that's stood the test of time.

Let's see, I've had it probably 15 years from a guy that retired, and he had it another 20 years.

I think it's probably from the '60s or '70s.

Just keeps going.

I've done pieces that are totally interpreted differently by the observer, and both are good observations.

They don't necessarily have to be my observations.

On my scientific derived pieces, I want them to just stop and think and either ask questions or go look up questions or think about science in general as something positive.

So you just never know.

The piece I use as my primary piece for recognition is an early piece, which many people look at as a ladder, a ladder to heaven or whatever.

But it's actually a DNA with a mutation in it.

And as soon as you say that, they go, "Oh yeah, I can see that."

But it takes...

Sometimes people see it right away and some people... As long as they just think, I don't care what they think about, but it's something that they take away with it.

(light magical music) >> Reporter: Andrea Peterson is the paper side of Hook Pottery Paper.

Walking side by side in nature with her husband, Andrea strives to keep a connection to the land she hopes to share through her work.

>> Andrea: That's what I want humans to have in nature is that magical connection that there's so much out there that they need to recycle, they need to respect, they need to feel really a part of it because they are a part of it.

They are affecting it so much.

We are such about what's around us.

The human relationship to the environment, I mean, that's where everything stems from.

And part of my own passion is living with a space where I'm really reducing our carbon impact.

So this line of papers that I created are really about fibers that are either one, a byproduct from the agricultural industry, or I'm growing them myself.

I like that.

I like having a serious connection to everything that I touch just because it seems to have much more impact for me.

It has meaning.

(grass rustling) Drawing has led me to everything that I do.

It's the basis of where everything comes from.

When you pick up that pencil and put it to paper, that's where you can actually have those ideas pour out.

I work in many different forms.

I'm a print artist, I make paper art, which is a form of using pulp as a drawing medium.

I do a little bit of painting.

The idea dictates where the work is going to go.

I've been doing this a long time.

I think when your creative process starts, you start to understand it through the years, and you're like, "This is what I like, this is what I don't like.

This is where I see this going, and it's gonna be easy, or it's gonna be interesting for me."

Not necessarily, I don't mean it to sound easy.

It's not that it's easy, it's what you want to do.

So it seems easy 'cause it's like, that's where I wanna go with this.

So it seems natural.

When I started this series of prints on botanical ideas, they were gonna be prints because they needed to have this rigid shape, they needed to have this individuality that comes with print making.

So when I look at what the subject matter is and how I want people to really take it in, if I want them to have an intimate experience, I'll make it into a book.

This should be taken individually, and it really should be something, one person looks at a time, and then closes, and then the next person can approach it.

Or this needs to be shown on a wall with a huge panel, and it should go beyond your periphery.

In the arts field, besides making paper to work on as a substrate, there's also using the pulp itself as a drawing medium, and it really just takes a mastery of the material.

It's just a different look, and it's also a different method process.

It's kind of a cross between drawing and painting.

It's very fluid like paint maybe, but it's also very graphic in the way that it appears.

And you also are almost one step away from that material because you're using a plastic spoon and you're using a squeeze bottle, and some of those tools aren't very comfortable.

I mean, most of us use a squeeze bottle with ketchup and mustard, and that's about as good as we are as putting it on our hot dog.

So when you're trying to actually make a, a flower or an image, it can be tricky.

So it's a medium though that I really, I really love because of those characteristics, because it's so fluid.

(gentle music) I wanna be outside because that's what brings my ideas.

That's where...

When I'm outside, I wanna be wholeheartedly exposed to what's going on because I think that's the best place to learn.

I think it's the best place to discover because that's what's happened for me.

I mean I can, I seem to think, I think everybody thinks clearer when they're out digging potatoes.

But I think just being there makes us see things that we hadn't seen before.

I really want people to have a really profound experience of the world around them.

I want them to... That's my hope and goal with most of the work is to get people outside and be like, "This is an amazing place.

I am just gonna sit under this apple tree.

I'm not gonna pull my phone out."

(laughs) We are a product of our environment.

We are part of it, and I don't think we're separate.

So I think we have so much to learn from it.

I feel like I've spent my childhood, like most kids do, I think, understanding how to sit well and not talk out loud and do all these proper things, but not really engage in the world about us as much as we could, and I feel like that's what I'm trying to unlearn.

>> So we were married 53, 54 years ago in June.

>> Connie: Actually we say we met in the dark room.

We actually got to know each other in the dark room.

>> Connie was my boss.

She was the artist in charge or whatever, and I came in as a photographer to be her assistant and stuff, and been my boss ever since.

>> Connie: Yeah, I've been bossing him around since.

>> My parents gave me a gift of a Brownie camera.

I immediately took a liking to it and started taking pictures of things around the house.

And I just kept up with that, got more and more interested, taught myself how to do things.

I never really had any formal training in it, but I kept up my interest and I just kept going with it.

And it wasn't until the late '80s that, Connie was taking some classes over to IUN, I finally learned how to do some stuff that I've been...

When you learn on your own, you tend to skip things, and then all of a sudden you're up against a wall 'cause you don't understand something.

So I learned a lot about working on a theme and developing the whole thing and having a write up along with the pictures, and I learned some color technology I didn't know about.

I'm very interested in the dunes region around the southern shore of Lake Michigan.

I am fascinated by the fragile beauty of the area and I see a certain radiance to it.

But I'm also interested in the incursion by man-made structures and that visual tension that can develop between those things and the natural environment.

I mean, if you go out there now, it's harder and harder to find an area that's what you might call pristine.

There's always a parking lot there or a light pole or a garbage can or something.

So I finally stopped trying to eliminate those.

I don't know if I'd classify some of that work as social, but it's 'cause I'm not really promoting a point of view other than for people to be aware of this and maybe think about it.

>> I was lucky because my mother did some artwork, did some sculpture, took some classes in college.

So it's been running in the family.

So I had that emotional support for it right away.

They were very good about encouraging me.

And then went on to college and studied painting at a bachelor's level, and then later on at a master's level.

I was fortunate to meet somebody when we moved here to Long Beach.

Her name was Gertrude Harbart, and she taught me all kinds of techniques 'cause I was used to doing things realistically.

She would have all the students try experimenting with all kinds of new abstract things because she was a ground breaker herself.

But then somewhere along the line, I wanted more meaning.

I didn't wanna just know technique, technique and skills.

And a friend recommended Dave Clayman's class over at IUN.

So he's a conceptual artist, and that was very good for me there.

There's a lot of emotional content in my artwork 'cause I've had some dramatic experiences and near death experience that really affected what I was painting about.

I was about nine years old.

I was walking down the back lane of the farm and I was trying to imagine how I looked to someone else and I found myself looking down on the top of my head.

So I went back and, of course, this was... Told my Presbyterian mother about it, and she's kinda like, "Mm, sure.

(laughs) when are we gonna cart her off to the funny farm?"

But that was in the 1950s, and it wasn't, the out of body experience wasn't even heard of then.

So later on when those things began to come into the culture, I could cope with them better.

But I would take all these things, all these experiences that were running into each other head long and work it out in the artwork.

It was my art therapy I guess.

>> I often ask Connie for her opinion about something I'm doing if I'm having trouble, especially if I'm having trouble deciding, is it better this way or this way, or am I getting the thing across?

And then Connie gives me her opinion about it, and I'll either use it or not.

But I mean, that extra opinion helps.

So we compliment each other's work by collaborating that way, talking about the concept and getting opinions about things.

>> I think I'm very influenced by George.

I hadn't really realized it, but he's been working in black and white for a couple of years, and so now I find myself doing charcoal, working in black and white all the time.

We do this parallel play.

I don't know if you've ever heard of that.

When a child's developing, there's a certain time period where they do a parallel play where they, they watch each other and learn from each other, but they don't really interact, but they influence each other, just go along side by side.

And I think we do that a lot, and we talk a lot about art and critique a lot of artwork.

They were having an exhibit that was related to region women, and somehow we were in, I was invited or whatever to put some artwork in this exhibit.

>> George: And I happened to have connections because of my involvement with the fire department here and the Red Cross and things, EMS, of knowing a lot of, knowing several women who were involved in this.

I thought, well maybe we could do something with that.

So we had three volunteer women that we did this piece, actually nine separate little pieces that fit together.

>> Connie: George had taken portraits of them, and then from the portraits that he took, I worked on the head.

>> In a way, our artwork seems to... We try to add light to the situation, and this was our way of shining some light on the people.

>> Yeah.

>> Narrator 1: 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.

>> Student: 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.

>> Narrator 2: Support for programming at 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.

>> Reporter: "Eye On The Arts" is made possible in part by South Shore Arts, the Indiana Arts Commission, and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.

Additional support for Lakeshore PBS and "Eye On The Arts" is provided by viewers like you.

Thank you.

(light pulsing music) (flourishing music)