- In this edition of "ARTEFFECTS."

The artistic adventure of Carol & Penny.

(bright music) - [Penny] Every time we take one workshop or we do one project, it leaps into a, "What if?"

And, "Why not?"

And, "I wonder."

- [Beth] A Florida Landmark makes an impact on the arts.

- It's just exciting to be able to help other artists the way that they helped me in the beginning.

And that's really what I'm looking forward to, is expanding, helping local artists.

- [Beth] Unique marble objects.

- It's a great example of a material, in this case, marble being transformed into not what we would often think about as a marble sculpture.

(bright music) - [Beth] And see how a local artist creates a sense of magical realism with her unique vision of the Sierra Nevada.

- For me, I get something from being on location that's vital to my process.

- It's all ahead on this edition of "ARTEFFECTS."

(bright music) - [Narrator] Funding for ARTEFFECTS is made possible by Sandy Raffealli with Bill Pearce Motors.

Heidemarie Rochlin.

(bright music) In memory of Sue McDowell.

(bright music) The Carol Franc Buck Foundation.

(bright music) And by the annual contributions of PBS Reno members.

(bright music) - Hello, I'm Beth MacMillan, and welcome to "ARTEFFECTS."

When Carol J. Neel and Penny Pemberton met decades ago, they found they had a lot in common.

One of those commonalities was a love of creating art.

In that moment, a beautiful relationship was formed.

They decided to adventure together and learn different art forms, lead workshops, and share a life of nature and creativity.

(bright music) - After retiring from nursing, Penny and I decided to pursue watercolors.

We both have an insatiable appetite to learn.

- From watercolor, we went into glass.

Glass fusion, stained glass, mosaics.

And then we went into printmaking, I believe.

(bright music) And we've done repose, we've done polymer clay bookmaking, of course.

And our next adventure is gonna be in bead making.

Every time we take one workshop or we do one project, it leaps into a, "What if?"

And, "Why not?"

And, "I wonder."

We bounce it off of each other and we get so many different ideas.

- To just stick with one medium would be suppressing that little voice that wants to jump out and explore and be playful.

The biggest part of our relationship is the playfulness that we have together because if I get an idea and I tell Penny, she'll say, "Yes, and then we can do this and this and this."

And then we'll say, "Well, how can we learn to do that?"

And then we start a whole exploration.

It's like we have our own university here.

(laughs) (bright music) - [Penny] Everything that we do leads to something else that's exciting.

(playful music) - I did an abstract acrylic art painting.

As I was looking at it, that little question creeps in.

What if I could take this painting and make a multi-block print out of it?

So today, I am going to be working on one of the blocks that required learning yet another new technique, which is lino block etching.

We did multiple experiments to learn how to get the lino to print in a very diffuse way that's not cutting.

(playful music) I like the idea that I could repeat it, that I could play with different colors if I wanted to as I did with the Goose Lake print.

The original key block was going to be black over color.

And actually, I have to give credit to Penny because red is her favorite color.

And she said, "What if you print the key block in red?

How would that look?"

So I said, "Well, let's try it."

When I changed the key block to red, it just kind of, it erupted.

It just, our eyes just said, "Oh, that red's gotta stay.

Forget the black."

And that's one of the differences in printmaking, you can play around more than you can with watercolor.

(playful music) - We approach a project a little bit differently from one another, but it always ends up the same.

For example, if I'm making a book, most people will put the glue on the book with a brush very precisely.

I put a glove in the middle and I rub it on with my fingers.

My fingers are my best friend.

That's how I do it.

To make a book, you buy book board, it takes three sheets to make eight signatures, and a signature is a folded, like a portfolio of three pieces.

Then I glue down the cover paper, I make the edges, and I do that by coming in like this and pushing it.

That'll make one edge.

After that, you start binding.

This one, I've started particularly has bead work.

I punch the holes in here to match the holes that I make in the cover, and I start to bind.

And that's how the binding ends up.

Then I decorate.

(playful music) From there, we start journaling.

We start sketching.

- Wherever we go, we take our journals and we document what we're doing, the date, where we are, and we always do some kind of a sketch.

- [Penny] That's where all of our favorite memories are stored.

Journaling has become a really important part of our lives.

(playful music) (bright music) - How the combining of the artwork happens.

We were invited to go take a book making workshop, which we did.

But it just so happens at the same time, we had finished doing some reduction lino prints, and we had also just finished fusing some glass beads.

So I said to Penny, "Why don't we take our prints and use the art prints as the decorative cover rather than store-bought decorative paper?

- So then you say, "Well, how can I incorporate my glass into this?"

So we started making books with inserts of our glass fusion projects.

That became exciting.

- We took the glass beads that we made and we incorporated them into the binding.

So it starts off, we're gonna learn to make a book, but we can cover it with our prints and we can decorate the spine with our beads that we made.

- Then we embarked on doing a series of paintings in watercolor and then doing the very same painting in printmaking.

- [Carol] And so everything just kind of ends up fusing together into one final project.

- It becomes an adventure that we share, and we bring our own personalities to it and our own thoughts and ideas.

And nine times out of 10, our thoughts will be in synchronicity.

I much prefer creating art with Carol because it's always a very loving, exciting relationship.

- The end product becomes both of us.

It's very gratifying to work on it together.

(light music) - The Shady Palm Art Gallery is a staple in the Florida Keys.

In addition to featuring the work of over 50 local artists, the gallery hosts a variety of art classes and events.

We visit Marathon, Florida to learn more.

(bright music) - Every day is a new palette outside in our environment.

The colors change every single day.

The water is a different color every single day.

The colors are just spectacular.

Our sunrises and our sunsets are amazing.

Colors underneath the waters of our fish, our birds, our skies.

And it shows in all of our artists' work, and that's where they get their inspiration from.

(calm music) Janice Nagel, and I am an artist and the owner of Shady Palm Art Gallery and live in a local color art gallery.

They're both located in this same building.

(lively music) So Shady Palm has been around for quite a while, and I had my artwork here at Shady Palm Art Gallery, and when the owner decided to retire, she came to me and said, "Janice, do you wanna buy Shady Palm Art Gallery?"

So here I am, and it is a dream come true.

It's just exciting to be able to help other artists the way that they helped me in the beginning, and that's really what I'm looking forward to, is expanding, helping local artists.

(lively music) This was actually the first piece that I've ever painted.

It was out of boredom after Hurricane Irma.

This was a photograph that I took of my husband's charter boat.

And I found a tin with my grandmother's paints and the photo on the floor of my garage after cleaning up a little bit.

And my grandma spoke to me and said, "Paint."

So I did.

So that was originally the first painting that I started and ultimately finished after a while.

And this is where all of this began.

All the local artists just said, "Don't stop painting, keep going."

And I did.

(lively music) I tried different mediums.

I started with acrylic, then I went to watercolors and batik, and I just kept going.

So, and it's really been a lot of fun for me and fun watching myself grow.

And that's what I wanna instill on other artists here, is watching them grow and giving them the opportunity too, to just become wonderful artists.

And that's why I'm here.

(lively music) We have 57 local Florida Keys artists.

Everybody is here in the Keys.

So everything has originated here.

We have a wide variety of artists.

We have metal artists, we have multimedia recycling artists, we have acrylics, we have wood artists.

Some of our artists work with oils and acrylics, and it's just a large display of art that we have here.

And everyone is just a little bit different.

(lively music) Our visitors spend a lot of time here.

We have our classroom.

We repainted the outside.

We've added about 1,000 square feet to the art section of the gallery.

We've moved our custom frame shop and we added my art gallery live in a local color here as well.

So we're really two beautiful galleries for our visitors and locals to explore.

(techno music) We're trying to bring more attention to Marathon for the art community.

We wanna expand on those art classes.

And we're inviting, you know, artists from the Keys, not just our art gallery, to come and do classes for us as well.

We wanna do some events and also let everybody know that our artists are here and to support the local art because it's really important.

They're one of the smallest businesses.

And they do so much from their heart that they deserve that attention.

(excited music) - Find out more at shadypalmartgallery.com.

And now, it's time for this week's art quiz.

Carol J. Neel, an artist featured in the first segment, found inspiration in the work of Gustave Baumann.

His signature art form led her to explore a new creative direction.

Which art form was it?

Is the answer, a multi-block printing, B, woodcarving marionette dolls, C, oil painting, or D, writing and illustrating his own books.

And the answer is A, multi-block printing.

As part of their permanent collection, the American Folk Art Museum in New York City holds an assortment of marble objects.

For the exhibit material witness, several were highlighted.

Made by unknown artists and varied in subject matter, these objects demonstrate a love for the material.

Take a look.

- I'm Brooke Wyatt and I'm the loose assistant curator at the American Folk Art Museum.

This is Material Witness, folk and self-taught artists at work.

Material Witness focuses on the materials and the substances like clay, wood, rock, stone, metal, that artists work with to make the objects that are in this museum's collection.

This group was really fun to think about including in this show, because it's a great example of a material, in this case, marble, being transformed into not what we would often think about as a marble sculpture, say a portrait bust or a figure on horseback or something.

(lively music) Here we have a slab of marble turned into, for example, a marble book where the stone mason has incised on the book's spine, the title marble book.

Similarly, there is a big slab of marble that was possibly not being enough to be a tombstone, may have been carved by a memorial mason, however, using the scraps of marble to create humorous objects like a washboard made out of marble.

So if you could imagine doing the already difficult work of hand laundering using a washboard made of wood, typically.

But this one in marble takes on this added humor.

(lively music) This collection of objects also conveys a lot of poignancy as well.

There's a figure of a recumbent lamb.

I was visiting Greenwood Cemetery recently and saw many of these lambs.

During the garden cemetery movement in the mid 19th-century, there was a movement in the establishment of cemeteries just outside of city centers.

And these objects date from that time period.

And if you go to Greenwood or a cemetery from that period, and you will see recumbent lambs like this one, often on the graves of children, as the lambs signify innocence and conveys a sense of mourning.

And in a slightly later example, that's also part of this group is from 1935, and it's an anatomical relief.

And again, it may have been carved by a tombstone carver or a memorial mason.

We don't know the artist's identity.

We see their initials HD carved on the face.

This group was a great opportunity to showcase how artisans who worked with a material like marble day in day out also chose to keep working in that material after their workday, was done, creating these end of day objects that could have been given as tokens of friendship for example.

I really appreciated how this group ranges from humor to poignancy.

(bright music) - Find out more at folkartmuseum.org.

Artist Phyllis Shafer is a plain air landscape painter who lives and works in the Sierra Nevada mountains and great basin area.

Let's take a journey with her through beautiful vistas into Reno's own Reno Gallery to see how she engages with her surrounding environments to create a sense of magical realism that is unique to her work.

(gentle music) - My name's Phyllis Shafer, and I'm a landscape painter, and I work plenaire, out of doors here in the Sierra Nevada mountains, painting the landscapes around us.

When you look at my paintings, I want you to know in what peak you're looking at or if you're in a Sierra Nevada meadow or on the coast.

So there's certainly an interest in describing a sense of place and honoring that sense of place.

You can see from looking at my work that there's a lot of stylizing and tweaking and sort of distorting that's going on in order to what I think of as creating more of a narrative.

I think that the brush is my vehicle for getting the forms and the rhythm and the energy that I'm trying to describe in a certain landscape.

You have to really be engaged in process as an artist because it's a very long haul from the beginning of an idea to the completed piece.

When I start a painting, that definitely happens when I'm out hiking, driving, just standing in nature.

And finding a place that speaks to me in some way.

And I think it's kind of like a crystallization of an idea.

And if you can hang onto that idea, then the labor part comes in by bringing all my gear out there, carrying it, and setting myself up with an easel, the paint, the canvas.

And I like to work "large" by plenaire standards.

I think my favorite size is usually in 30 to 40 inch range or thereabouts.

It gives me the range that feels most comfortable for me.

So there's a lot of labor involved in getting your equipment outside, but for me, that gets something from being on location that's vital to my process.

(gentle music) So I begin the paintings very loose, very gestural, trying to pay attention to the essential gesture or the essential feeling or rhythm or idea that stuck with me when I first found a place.

And then it's a process of layering and developing and really utilizing the medium and the brush stroke and color.

Color is very, very important to me.

I'm always working warm against cool colors, high contrast, low contrast, light and dark, and the sensations of having colors sitting side by side that creates this kind of vibration and energy that we respond to when we're out in nature.

(bright music) I have shown my paintings for 30 plus years in lots of different venues, but when I met Turkey Stremmel and everyone at the Stremmel Gallery, I found a home and someone who would be an advocate for my work.

That has really changed my relationship to the community.

I get a lot of feedback now by showing here at the Stremmel Gallery.

And many people come up to me who have bought a painting.

And they've got tears in their eyes because they feel like this painting expresses something that they've experienced in the landscape.

(bright music) - Even if it's a painting that I've never seen, I'm intrigued to think of maybe I would love to go and possibly find that location.

There's always something interesting.

Slightly magical sometimes, inner landscapes.

I think she brings the outdoors to you so you can have it indoors.

You know, we all work hard and you know, some of us get beat up during the day, I mean, all day long.

And if you go home and you've got something to look forward to and say, "Okay, I had a tough day but I can look at this landscape and it'll transport me into another place for at least maybe five, 10 minutes, two minutes."

But you know, maybe it just is a really good thing for you to have in your own soul, in your own heart, that you've got a chunk of nature that just feels good when you leave it in the morning and you come home to see it in the evening.

(bright music) - Hopefully, one of the ways in which people can connect to my paintings is that I'm talking about something that is a shared human experience.

And even though there's no figures in my paintings.

There's very much a sense of self.

And for me, I think it's a subtle thing.

And I don't want it to be a ham-fisted allegory, me in the world.

So much as it is looking to nature and using it as a way to be okay with this process of aging and loving and losing and fighting and caring and trying.

And there's something about nature that is a lesson.

Because there's always something new being born and something old dying off.

And it makes me feel like it's gonna be okay to die, that everything has a cycle and you're part of that cycle.

So maybe that's what I'm getting at with my paintings, is this is just a way for me to figure out why I'm here and to be okay with it.

(bright music) - To find out more, visit phyllisshafer.com.

And that wraps it up for this edition of "ARTEFFECTS."

If you want to watch new artifact segments early, make sure you subscribe to the PBS Reno YouTube channel, and don't forget to keep visiting pbsreno.org to watch complete episodes of "ARTEFFECTS."

Until next week, I'm Beth MacMillan.

Thanks for watching.

- [Narrator] Funding for ARTEFFECTS is made possible by Sandy Raffealli with Bill Pearce Motors.

Heidemarie Rochlin.

(bright music) In memory of Sue McDowell.

(bright music) The Carol Franc Buck Foundation.

(bright music) And by the annual contributions of PBS Reno members.

(bright music) (bright music continues)