- In this edition of Arteffects, dive into a world of creature design.

- [Sarah] I like, as I go along, adding certain things.

Oh wait a minute, let's put that what if we did that?

I could take it out if it doesn't work.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Nature as a source of inspiration.

- Being a person who finds so much solace in nature, the work kind of goes back to and reflects and deals with nature as this primary source.

- [Narrator] And paintings full of feeling.

- [Said] I always intentionally want my brushwork to create the kind of effect that, you know, brings emotion out.

- It's all ahead on this edition of Arteffects.

(gentle music) - [Announcer] Funding for Arteffects is made possible by Sandy Raffealli with Bill Pearce Motors, Meg and Dillard Myers, in memory of Sue McDowell, The Carol Franc Buck Foundation, Chris and Parky May, and by the annual contributions of PBS Reno members.

- Hello, I'm Beth McMillan and welcome to Arteffects.

For our first segment, meet artist, Sarah Renee.

Sarah creates fantastical art of creatures, big and small.

Each animal has extraordinary detail and maybe a few extra legs or eyes.

Let's meet some of these magical creatures and learn more about Sarah.

(upbeat music) - The kind of art I create, I would call it more creature-based or creature design.

(upbeat music) It definitely will come from a love of animals, I don't do a lot of animals as they are.

Maybe put a twist on them and what happens if I add another eye?

What happens if I give that bear antlers?

I don't know, just the, you know you're mixing and matching or just completely creating some Something that isn't part of this world, something completely different.

My name's Sarah.

I go by Sarah Renee and I do a lot of fantasy illustration design, both digital and acrylic mediums.

If we wanna go all the way back to childhood, you know, doing little doodles all the way up till now.

I've been doing it for majority of my life.

I was introduced to a lot of older fantasy films and one that had stood out for me was a movie called "The Dark Crystal".

You know, a lot of people thought, "Oh, this was, you know, this is scary.

What are these creatures?"

And I was fascinated, just absolutely fascinated.

And so ever since then, all those kind of things have really inspired me to kind of take a twist on normal everyday things, creatures, and make it maybe a little bit weird, a little bit more fantasy.

That was definitely like the one point where I realized, "Oh, this fantasy kind of thing definitely a part of me."

(gentle music) So for the longest time, I have stuck to acrylic.

Acrylic is my love.

More recently, within the last four or five years, I've gotten into digital medium and that has created almost a whole new style.

My acrylic paintings and my digital pieces are very different from each other.

With my digital, I like to do very heavy line work, very detailed, while the acrylic may be more blocky.

So the difference between, say, my acrylic paintings and the digital with the acrylic on canvas, it's right here physically in front of me.

With all my digital pieces, it's drawn essentially on a computer or any other device.

And I can upload that either directly to the internet or to website or print them out myself to be able to have copies that way.

I have this love for, you know, and it sounds very silly, the smell of canvas, the smell of paint, just the physical aspect of it, that really the digital can't compete with to me.

And that's just personal preference completely.

It kind of depends on what the end of goal is for me.

What am I looking to do?

Am I looking to hang in a gallery?

Am I looking to make stickers?

And you can still do either with both.

(upbeat music) I really enjoy creating the entire environment, providing a feel for the painting.

It can be that deep or sometimes it's just mindless.

Sometimes I just want to create there's no thought behind it (ch And just going for more emotion and feel.

I don't normally sketch out the entirety of the painting 'cause I want some things to evolve as they're being created.

And so I'll usually do one base color of what shape that subject is gonna be taking.

And from there I usually save that to last.

I will create kind of the environment, the world behind it, slowly, again, I'm gonna add those layers in bit by bit.

I like as I go along, adding certain things, oh wait a minute, let's put that, what if we did that?

I could take it out if it doesn't work.

And so that's half the fun, I think for sure.

(upbeat music) (gentle music) It is my absolute favorite thing to be doing because I still do, you know, our nine to five job and whether I am getting ready for a show and you know, I'm planning to bring those paintings with me to potentially sell.

That is not like a job to me sitting there in paintings.

Sometimes I will treat paintings as if it were a sketchbook where you're just hashing them o and you wanna see what comes out, get ideas.

It brings me the utmost joy.

(gentle music) The responses I'll get from my artwork are, they can be mixed.

Usually nothing necessarily negative.

One of my bigger pieces was a snake with 10 eyes and blue roses.

And for some people that's, "What is that?"

I remember they were whispering, "Why does it have 10 eyes?"

I'm like, "Just because it can, just because it does."

And so sometimes it'll be responses like that, "that's kind of weird."

Or people are like, "Oh my gosh, this looks like this."

Or like, "How did you think of that?"

I'm like, "I have no idea, it is what it is."

And so it's really exciting to talk to some people when I do show my pieces locally and actually get to meet face to face with some people.

And we kind of talk about like what that reminds them of or what they think it is.

And that's one of the best parts for me, is what they interpret it as.

And it's usually something I never thought of.

And I love to hear what they are.

I enjoy the fact that my paintings and what I hope it does for people is challenge imagination just a little bit 'cause I like to stretch that imagination just ever so much.

(gentle music) - To see more from Sarah, visit her website, SarahRArt.com.

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

"'The Dark Crystal' is a 1982 dark fantasy film directed by Jim Henson and Frank Oz.

This unique film and its characters still inspire artists of all types today.

But what was it that made the 'Dark Crystal' so unique?"

Is the answer A?

"It was the first live action movie that included no human actors.

B, "It took six performers to control some of the animatronic creatures?"

C. "It was Frank Oz's first directing job?"

or D, "All of the above?"

Stay tuned for the answer.

Now let's visit New Mexico and meet artist, Danielle Rae Miller.

When seeing Miller's work, it is clear that nature is her source of inspiration as she evokes the many species that thrive outdoors.

(gentle music) - Nature has been really important in my life.

I remember when I was really young, some of the first moments of being very aware of the natural world and laying in my backyard and an early summer day and just looking up through the trees, seeing the spaces of blue sky between branches and green leaves.

Just sort of having this awe, fo - Is that what inspired your "Dryades" series?

- I've come back to trees at various moments throughout my life, but that series definitely kind of came from that.

For me trees are, they're kind of like, almost like creatures.

It's sort of a silly thing maybe but I kind of think of them as like these ancient beings that are just kind of rooted to the ground and they have this kind of very, very slow movement.

And even something like a heartbeat where water kind of pumps up through the roots into the trees.

- In some of your work, there's sort of a tension between the different species or subjects.

Is there a mythological or narrative aspect?

- Stories are one of the kind of key things for me.

So the "Dryades" series is named after wood nymphs in Greek culture.

And the paintings are all named after different Greek stories where a person or creature of some kind was transformed into a tree.

- I know in your "Hungering" series you also feature, there's a lot of snakes.

- (chuckles) Yes.

- Snakes, which freaks me out a little.

Freaks out a lot of people actually.

- Yes, it does, yes.

- But they play a lot of roles in mythology.

- There are stories across culture that deal with animals of different kinds, birds, snakes.

Snakes, just, yeah, they, we seem to have some kind of human reaction to snakes.

It starts in the "Hungering" series for sure.

In that series I was just first experience in motherhood.

And so I think that is one of those places where the interconnectedness of me to broader structures really starts to become solid and obvious.

So there's mothering a child, the child that grows inside you, and then how that child is part of a larger community and all that sort of stuff.

But then there's just kind of the neediness of the child and your parent and you have to kind of deal with that neediness.

So I built this series around that idea of that, just kind of like that interacti between parent and child or human to human, that sort of need.

But I was doing it symbolically.

So I chose carnivorous plants, snakes, I used baby bird mouths as kind of the key elements to kind of get across that sense of like, things are really hungry in this world.

And I'd packed the compositions and really densely, 'cause it was overwhelming, you know, overwhelming to kind of deal with another human being's needs And as I worked on the series over years, more snakes came in and (Megan and Danielle chuckles), and in part they broke up the composition, but in part they just became these characters in a story, like a narrative story.

And the snakes would interact with the carnivorous plants.

There's one where the snake starts to kind of peek into a pitcher plant and it's curious about what's in there, but then the pitcher plant itself sort of sitting there.

But is it dangerous?

Is it gonna provide food?

Is it, you know, what really is going on between these?

And I started thinking about co-evolution, interaction between species, which then sort of becomes symbolic for kind of overpopulation in general.

Just like the way that we are so packed onto this planet now and this kind of competition for resources across the board, the way resources are sort of being limited, which then goes back to motherhood, right?

So it gets real complicated.

Being a person who finds so much solace in nature.

The work kind of goes back to, and reflects and deals with nature as this primary source.

And as we experience that kind of source in nature, like there does become the fear of its loss, right?

So we can see even in New Mexico how hot it is, how little rain we've had this season, and what that will mean for even just the things that grow in my own yard.

What it means for the Bosque, what it means for the Rio Grande River, what it means for, you know, every other thing that's connected to that.

(gentle music) - [Megan] Can you talk about how you used patterns in "Vivarium"?

Why that was important?

- As I started to kind of look at the images and the species and the elements that I wanted to use, I was just noticing like these layers of things that were so similar.

So the similarity between the snake skin and the dragonfly wing, and the veins and the leaf, those images are layered together on the two sides of a sort of transparent vellum.

And looking at those patterns sort of interweave became just fascinating to me and delightful, you know, both visually delightful but then kind of tying back into that idea of symbolism, the way that ties us all together, the human bone patterns or the, you know, the veins and arteries that move through the human heart and how they're connected to or look like root systems under the ground.

I think that's really key.

Like I want the work to be non-verbal representation of that kind of interconnectedness.

I wanted it to feel like interconnectedness, maybe even some ways that we can't immediately verbalize.

- [Megan] Why are symbols in mythology is important?

- It ties us to something that is older than we are, that's older than this moment, that connects to other cultures, to other ways of thinking about things, seeing things, understanding them.

And I think rather than looking at something from a purely maybe scientific way where we analyze and break it apart and separate from it, I think what happens with symbolism is we find more layered meaning to it and more kind of connection and more magic too for me.

I've always loved stories.

So those stories and the symbols of those stories then kind of reflected into objects or materials give for me artwork like an additional meaning.

(gentle music) And it's calling on a large structure of past experiences and past knowledge, past images, sort of layers of experience, braiding it all together and hoping to kind of ask questions, you know, and not spec, like I don't think I have specific questions in mind, but I would hope that it leaves people with questions rather than answers.

I find that to be maybe more useful for humans.

- Find out more at DanielleRaeMiller.net.

And now let's review this week's art quiz.

"'The Dark Crystal' is a 1982 dark fantasy film directed by Jim Henson and Frank Oz.

This unique film and its characters still inspire artists of all types today.

But what was it that made 'The Dark Crystal' so unique?"

Is the answer A?

"It was the first live action movie that included no human actors?"

B, "It took six performers to control some of the animatronic creature C, "It was Frank Oz's first directing job?"

or D, "All of the above?"

And the answer is D, "All of the above."

From an early age painter, Said Oladejo Lawal has been creating art.

A life journey that brought him from Nigeria to Columbus, Ohio.

Today, one can find him creating colorful works that overflow with motion and feeling.

- Generally inspiration to be an artist came from my dad.

My dad was a painter.

We painted houses, which will include interior decoration, cutting stencils, doing freezes, you know, borders and stuff.

My dad, he has this writing desk and then that thing had drawers where he stashed all his drawing and stencils and you know, and when I am in the house and you know, I would go through the drawers and just look at things and just look at the cuts, the drawings and the color swatches.

It had all these color charts new, you know, they were accordion folded type and you would look, I would look and look and look color.

So color started registering that early.

You wouldn't think it's gonna be useful later in life, who knew?

(chuckles) So color started registering very early.

I paint with bright colors, intentionally, you know, with bright colors.

There's a school that, in artistry that I liked, they call them the Fauvists, they just love painting with colors in their original hues.

They can pick a yellow and just slap it there, red, blue.

So they grade those colors according to their strength and you know, the light and shade yellow becomes the lightest, blue, ultra-marine or cobalt becomes the darkest, and the reds might be in the middle with the orange and stuff.

So marks you would think that some artist would not retain because I think it's a mistake and paint over those I leave there, and they make the most impact because they trick your mind into thinking the action is still on and on and on and on and on.

Sometimes I do paint in such a way that say, I'm mostly use flat brushes, which are like chisel heads.

When you make a mark with them, they have a square angular feel to them.

I can make those angles into rectangles and squares that can be patches that make up a face or make up a painting.

And you sort of see different swatches of squares and you're like, but where you stand back, everything merges and form the picture.

And there are also sometimes I'm listening to say, "Vivaldi" which is my, one of my favorite Four Seasons, and your are painting and it feels as if the, your hand has been moved by the violin.

Maybe, maybe not, but it works, you know?

And I have my phone doing that.

I always intentionally want my brushwork to create the kind of effect that, you know, brings emotion out.

I take inspiration from life.

I like music, I don't play any instruments but I like music.

And I always felt that, life even landscape, even general day-to-Day things that we do, there is music behind it, there' a rhythm, there's a rhyme, there's balance, there's everything in there.

But then when you look at the painting which is a two dimensional thing, you are wondering how do you fit music into that other than painting the picture of a musician, right?

So I started playing around with how to present sound.

I always liked to make paintings that you stand in front of it and you're like, you can feel movement, you can feel depth.

You can just sort of be like you're in a concert listening to whatever the picture is saying.

(gentle music) In Nigeria, it's a lot of dance.

Technically we have party for everything.

There's always a reason to dance Weddings in Nigeria, wow, I miss that.

Colors, you see the women dress, you see the young ladies dance, it's beautiful.

I wanted to present the joyful feeling that you find in an environment where people are dancing and celebrating.

And there's some certain culture when they dance in Nigeria, they hold handkerchiefs and that handkerchief moves with their body, their arms.

And that handkerchief sort of, it's like a conductor conducting a classical piece.

You know, you follow the conductor's hand, you follow the beat, the redeem and everything.

So I wanted to show all that, but at the same time, be able to show that you know, in life there are celebrations.

And when the time to celebrate is here, make the most of it.

There are times there are no reasons to celebrate.

But who would know if you choose to celebrate even though there are no reasons to celebrate?

Who would really, really fault you for it, really?

I mean, people might think it's awkward and out of place, but that's what you might need for your sanity.

Your world is your world.

What you make of it is yours.

If you choose to have it all blue and sad, it's still yours.

But if you choose to just, yes, in spite of everything, break forth and be the joy, you know, for yourself and for others, it affect others.

It's like a reaction that just multiplies.

Gandhi was the one who said that "Be the change that you hope to see."

My painting is one of my ways of being the change and presenting the change.

(gentle music) - To see more, go to LawalSaid.com.

And that wraps it up for this edition of Arteffects.

If you want to watch new Arteffects 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.

- [Announcer] Funding for Arteffects is made possible by, Sandy Raffealli with Bill Pearce Motors, Meg and Dillard Myers, in memory of Sue McDowell, The Carol Franc Buck Foundation, Chris and Parky May and by the annual contributions of PBS Reno members.

(soft upbeat music)