Coming your way on Art Rocks, a conversation with self-taught Louisiana sculptor Russell Whiting.

I got a commission to do a life size bronze of Dr. Norman Francis.

That just blew me away, that I was selected to do this.

Also, I did a commission for Saint Landry Parish on Day Ardoin, who is a really famous and the father of Zydeco music, performed to bring a painter's masterpieces to life.

And the breathtaking athleticism of ballet.

These stories are next on Art Rocks West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LP, 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.

Hello and thank you for joining us for Art Rocks.

With me, James Fox Smith from Country Roads magazine.

Let's begin in the studio of acclaimed Louisiana steel sculptor Russell Whiting.

His body of work encompasses multiple subjects from the mythological to the religious to modern day characters, real and imagined.

Whiting opened up to talk about his creations and the processes behind them.

Pieces are made out of solid steel, and I'm carving them with an ox acetylene torch.

There's a huge scrapyard in New Iberia at the port, and I go by large pieces of steel there, usually like three or four inch thick pieces, say four foot by eight foot.

And it's all scrap.

They separate it there into different sizes, so it's easier to get it.

Whatever piece I'm making, I break it into silhouettes and I draw the outlines of those silhouettes on the steel.

And I use the torch with a straight tip.

And I cut those lines out and I get these big, thick silhouettes of the piece that I'm making, and I'll have to do multiple silhouettes and I'll put all those together and weld them together and make some steel block that I can then go back and carve with the torch and detail the pieces out.

This is a technique that I developed when I worked offshore.

I use the torch a lot to deconstruct these big oil rigs, and they would be past their prime, would cut them down and get them out of there.

I did a lot of that, and so I really got in tune with this torch.

So I'm using the torch with a special tip that's curved and it allows you to of kind of a convex shape into the metal.

I get the steel really hot, red hot, and then the oxygen in the torch will actually oxidize that metal and it just starts to slowly peel away like an onion in this layer in a way to get to the final shape.

But the other thing about steel is that if I go too far and I take too much off, I can easily weld it back, weld another piece on it and start all over again.

There's no way to really mess up.

Also, I like a lot of the mistakes that happened really look great.

And that's the good thing about this technique that I developed is that when you look at it, you're going to see the same textures, the same markings that you would see in any fabrication yard or shipyard or oil rig or whatever.

The very same textures, I'll leave all my steel to kind of mimic what's out there.

The largest piece I've ever made is that Southeast Louisiana University in Hammond, Louisiana, and it was a percent for the art commission for that school that is by there.

And these geology and school of nursing.

And the piece is 24 foot tall and it's three figures kind of standing in a totem like way.

And each one represents a different type of motion for the kinesiology part.

And the top figure is an angel with a wing and the wings represent nursing.

That is probably my biggest piece.

I've made another piece similar to that that went to the Sazerac company and Metairie, Louisiana, and then I've done some pieces for some private clients, like I've made this one arch that's 90 foot long over a lake, and there's a stainless steel figure standing in the center of it.

How that lady of the lake after the King Arthur and all that mythology and I've made several large scale buffaloes or build gold ring and I've made this rooster that was nine foot tall, it weighed 40 £500 and it went to California to the Gallo Winery there.

They just built a brand new corporate headquarters.

It's really beautiful.

And that piece is there.

I make quite a few big ones on a piece that weighs £2,000.

I might have £150 of Weld, and the strength of Weld is like £90,000 per cubic inch.

They're not coming apart.

They're super strong and they last forever.

Eternal peace is.

I like to play around with it a lot and show you the strength of the steel, the way the pieces are leaning forward or support themselves with just small little legs and then a huge mass above it.

For instance, I've made a buffalo before, so it's just for little bitty legs.

But then this massive piece of steel above it, they can weigh five, £6,000.

That's how I work.

The favorite piece I ever made was a piece called Icarus, and it's a life size figure.

It's on the historic bluff in Chattanooga, which is where the museums and everything is.

And it's like 100 feet above the Tennessee River.

And Icarus has the wing.

And so it's jumping off of the cliff only one foot is touching all this way to support it off of this one foot.

And it's got a big stainless steel wing on it.

And I did this piece back in the early 2000 and it's become iconic.

Everybody sees it.

There's a bridge right under it.

So every morning I have probably six or 700 people that see it.

And every evening it's a well known piece in Chattanooga.

I love that piece.

I've sold a lot of these Icarus type figures, the wing figures that are cantilevered out Cantilevered is when the weight is supported from point back here.

But all the weight is is out here.

It's got to have a counterbalance on the back end.

The bigger pieces are not that much more challenging except for the fact you got to go gather all the materials and shuffle around these big heavy pieces which can wear you out.

I like the small pieces because it's like you get the ink on the paper really fast so that it flows out of you faster and you get the mistakes and you create new things.

It doesn't take me long as you might think, to do a small piece.

I do.

I'm fairly fast.

This piece, actually, I did that in three days.

I get a lot of inspiration from the Egyptian, well, ancient artifacts.

I'd just skim through the books and look at them and say, I like that.

And it sets off an idea to make another piece.

And also, like other artist, I look at a lot of art from the older people that are gone now to people that are young and coming up I look at everybody's art and soak it in and let it ferment in my brain and then know however it comes out is great.

If you look at my body of work, you will see the majority of it is a figure that is standing straight with arms raised, probably with wings, and maybe the feet will be like they're starting to walk.

There's a little bit of a walking figure involved in it.

You have a jackhammer, you have the ancient Egyptian pieces.

They all stand with their feet like that.

That's kind of where all that came from.

And I've always had this fascination with angels.

Still will rust if it's not protected, but it's just a surface rust.

Usually they're coated in a wax, and so you can just recut the wax to protect it.

But I've had pieces outside for 25 years.

They look exactly like they did when I put them out there.

It's a big difference between a solid piece of steel and say, somebody that makes stuff out of thin metal.

That stuff can rust.

The brush would just penetrate.

But heavy pieces of steel, when they rust on the outside, they do tend to block the corrosion at that level.

The corrosion can't just keep digging in without access to the oxygen.

I have been working with bronze for about 30 years.

I got a commission to do a life size bronze of Dr. Norman Francis.

That just blew me away, that I was selected to do this.

Me and a guy that works with me now and then we built this foundry from the ground up.

We bought all of our clay fashioned a portrait of Dr. Francis, the full length out of clay.

And then we did a rubber mold of that.

The clay piece, and that allowed us to reproduce that in wax.

When I get the wax out, I'm able to go over that account to clean it up and make it right.

And then we cut the wax into pieces.

So I had this falling figure and I cut that into 11 different pieces, and we dipped those in a ceramic shell, which makes a coating around it.

And it's ceramic shell.

It's kind of like pottery.

When it gets hot, it gets really hard.

And so you get it hot.

The wax actually melts out of the ceramic shell piece and leaves a void in there that looks exactly like the piece that you coated and then you can take that and pour molten bronze into it.

And that gives you the 11 pieces back in the bronze figure and so you have to take all of these pieces and puzzle them together and weld all the seams out and then come back and clean all the seams to where everything just blends in perfectly.

That's how you make a bronze sculpture.

And I got to do the whole thing with one other guy helping then 14 of the piece to get the right colors.

It was very challenging to do the face of Dr. Francis.

I have an archive at Xavier with just a bunch of photographs.

I was able to pick out about 30 or 40.

That all kind of had a similarity to them.

As a matter of fact, the sculpture that I made is of a young Dr. Francis is only in his late twenties, and so I've got all these old photographs, but each one of them, he looks like a different man because it's a different day, different location, different lighting.

Everything's different about the photographs.

So when you put them all together, it almost looks like 30 different people that maybe they're related.

So my piece came out kind of like that, but I'm really proud of it.

It came out very good, and most people that see it say that's him.

Also, I did a commission for Saint Landry Parish on Monday, Ardoin, who is really famous and the father of Zydeco, and they wanted a statue because of his story.

And so I made one.

And it's on our 49 where the Saint Landry Parish Visitor Center is.

The statue is their palm steel statue.

It's one of my favorite statues.

It's kind of impressionistic and he's holding a lemon in his hand.

That's significance of that is that he always kept a lemon in his pocket.

He was stuck on it to keep his voice because he was a singer and a accordion player.

And so I did the statue there where he's actually standing on top of an accordion.

I was carving wood and stone and drawing and painting way before I ever did any welding.

I started drawing when I was a kid in grade school, not seriously just playing around.

When I was 18, I really started getting into drawing and painting.

I'd done an art show in Baton Rouge at the group Artists and one guy there, he had some pieces that were cut out of steel.

I was thinking, Why don't I do that?

I went out and bought a torch and I just started doing and right off the bat I knew I'd really come across something that was exciting and new to me.

And there was just a wide open what I could do with it.

From that point on.

I was doing these outdoor art shows around the country and my work started selling like crazy.

Eventually I started meeting these gallery owners at these R shows, and after I got two or three of these to connect with, I could get away from the oil field stuff and just stay home, make art.

These galleries work hard for you.

They know the right people.

They developed a list of of clients and they can match you up with the people that are interested in the work that you do.

A lot of their clients could not afford everything that I do because some of my work is really expensive, but they have the clients that can afford it.

River Gallery That's the oldest one that I've been with, and I started when they first started that gallery in Chattanooga, back when Chattanooga was a disaster area, which now, of course, it's a gem.

It's a beautiful place of one of my favorite cities.

They take real good care of everything and they have a outdoor sculpture garden, which is very unusual for a gallery to have such a nice sculpture garden.

And they've got stuff like Frank Stella Pomodoro.

They've got these big name artist pieces in this collection, and I've got my work right there with all these big name stuff, so that's pretty nice.

The favorite part of my work is when I finish a piece and get the place it and some incredible place that I could never even conceive of having a piece of art there.

When that happens, and it's happened with many of my pieces or or if I get to go into somebody's home that has one of these and see where they put the piece, that that to me is I really enjoy that.

Louisiana is alive with ways to get to grips with the arts, if only you know where to look.

So here are a few of our favorites coming your way in the weeks to come.

For more on these exhibits and many others, pick up a copy of Country Roads magazine.

To watch or to rewatch any episode of Art Rocks, just visit LP dot org slash art rock.

You'll also find all of the Louisiana segments on LP's YouTube page.

Will leave Louisiana behind for a moment for a trip to Colorado to see how the Denver Art Museum is bringing fine art and history to life with music.

Claude Monet's impressionist paintings are at the heart of this museum's music and Monet collaboration.

So let's watch and listen.

You know, the art said the time.

Sort of the cross-pollination.

Same time with the impressionist movement happening.

There were impressionistic tendency in poetry and so in music.

So artists at the time were not in a vacuum.

And the music, because it responds to the same sort of stylistic tendency.

We do believe that it helps our visitors immerse more in in a time and go back in time.

My name is Angelica Daniel.

I am chief curator and curator of European art.

Before 1900 at the Denver Art Museum, as we often do in exhibition, we actually include music throughout our galleries, and we did the same this time with our Claude Monet exhibition.

We listen to music of the time and trying to find the right rhythm for certain paintings.

You might have something that is very slow and and sort of with a slower cadence, which doesn't go well with the scenes of era, which are an explosion of colors and an explosion of brilliance.

So we do look at the paintings and we do listening to the music.

And like any visitors, really try to look.

What does this help me when I look at this painting?

My name is Laurence Golden and I'm a symphony orchestra conductor and I'm the music director of the Denver Philharmonic Orchestra.

We have this wonderful partnership with the Denver Art Museum.

The partnership revolves around the Monet exhibit.

Obviously, they'll be having many wonderful paintings by the great French impressionistic painter Claude Monet.

And we will be playing this French impressionist concert.

The impressionist movement in music took place.

Prima's early in France around the turn of the last century, so around 1900.

One thing the impressionist composers were very concerned with was what is the emotion that the listener will feel?

Debussy's Prelude to the afternoon of the fun is perhaps the quintessential impressionistic piece.

It starts out with just flute solo by itself, with no accompaniment and even the notes that Debussy chose for that opening solo are very chromatic, meaning it doesn't establish a key, it doesn't establish any one note as being more prominent.

It just sort of meanders around through through different notes.

That is emblematic of impressionism, both in music and in art, where we're not exactly sure what we're looking at or what we're listening to.

It sounds very nice, but what exactly is that?

With the French impressionistic painters.

Similarly, they weren't trying to be very realistic with them.

They were.

It was more like alluding to an image.

The painting behind my back is that a capuchin by Monet painted around 1873.

And it has all the qualities of this particular movement.

And Monet does it with great effect.

So giving really the impression of a busy street.

It doesn't define every single top hat.

It doesn't define every single gown and petticoat.

And so this was the criticism from the intellectuals.

They were favoring the academy.

They said the critic, Louis LaRussa, who was the one that gave the term the derogatory term impressionism, really criticized this this black figures.

In fact, he called them black tongue la kings.

This was looked unfinished.

It looked too sketchy, but this was not the point of the impressionist.

They wanted to give the impression, the feeling of that scene in that moment that has translated into the music in a similar way.

You get the impression of a certain structure or of a certain harmony, but it's not crystal clear.

When nowadays we visit exhibitions, we are seeing paintings that were not intended to be shown together in a in an exhibition space.

And so we are mindful of creating some sort of context.

We try to allow discretely ourselves to immerse into a different era that had different perspectives and different experiences.

So that will give a glimpse for a visitor into the time, into what have been the Paris that Monet in particular would have known in Paris at this time.

The musicians would read the poems of the poets and they would go to the art exhibits of the painters and and vice versa.

So they were very much integrated.

There's connection between art at the museum, between music at the hall and in our entire community.

We're all connected in many ways.

And in this case, specifically through the arts, ballet dancers glide across the stage with movements so graceful and effortless, it's easy to overlook the athletic prowess required to pull them off.

We visit the Cleveland Ballet to find out really what it takes to be a great dancer.

If I've been dancing professionally, like I'm dancing all day, every day, my body doesn't feel young.

The amount of stress you put on your body day in and day out, the amount of agility and stamina.

I don't If that's not an athlete, I don't know what you call it.

Most people's basic understanding of ballet is pointe shoes in tutus.

But ballet dancers want audiences to know there's so much more.

Our job is to make it look easy on stage, and we're not supposed to show that it's difficult.

This season is the first year the Cleveland Ballet is partnering with the sports medicine department at University Hospitals, which will allow the dancers to receive more preventive care.

The physical therapists who work with the dancers know how to treat the artists.

As athletes.

Our bodies are instrument.

Those are our tools.

That's the same as football players.

They're using their bodies as an instrument, as a tool to get where they need to be in the game.

I'll wake up one morning and I'm in so much pain.

It's like, my gosh, I can't do dance or I can't do this today.

And then I go to physical therapy and I'll be like almost 100% better right after.

And I'm like, wait, I can't do this.

I think that if I keep on going to physical therapy, the life of my dance career will be a lot longer.

It's Marlo, India's first season as professional dancer.

Her mom, Lady of Guadalupe, is the artistic director for the Cleveland Ballet.

Guadalupe had to retire after an injury, and she thinks it could have been prevented.

The career of a dancer is very short, but if you take care of your body now in that professional environment and with professionals in the in the medical field that understand the wear and tear and how to prevent.

They could have careers up to 45 or 50.

Why not that?

And that's what we want.

Dr. James Lewis of UAH oversees the partnership and he's also the sports medicine physician for the Cleveland Browns.

He says taking care of an athlete's body is important for football players and dancers, both professional and in training.

This is particularly close to me having having young dancers at home contact athletes such as football players and our performing artists such as ballet dancers for an incredible force on their body day in and day out, that that force to jump and maintain poise and posture day in and day out puts an incredible stress on the body.

While you may be moving more gracefully in ballet, the stresses on the body are very significant.

And so the ability to maintain flexibility to to put together a preventative program is just as important in most sports.

Guadalupe says it takes months to put something on stage as a production, but it takes decades for a dancer to be trained.

I don't think people understand.

They just see the beauty.

The curtain goes up and they just see the end product.

They don't see the sweat and the hard work.

And that's my hope that as much as I will like the audience to enjoy, which they do enjoy the performance, that they understand what this artist goes through and respect the profession.

And that's that for this edition of Art Rocks.

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 great resource for finding out what's happening in the arts events and at destinations all around the state.

So until next week I've been James Fox Smith and thank 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.