Once again we are at the Judith Rock Gallery and Judith.

We're so thankful to see you and that you're willing to share another great exhibit with us.

Tell us about what this exhibit is.

It features a couple of different artists.

Yes.

What is it and why did you put this one together?

Well, Clifford came, and he was so persistent that I kind of looked and looked again and looked again.

And I decided that it would be a good show with Sarah.

His is brightened, colorful, and has this magic to it that, you know, you wouldn't believe.

He's almost 80 years old.

It's so full of life and energy.

And then Sarah lives on the lake and she has this peaceful calm.

And I thought the two would make a good, a good tear.

You know, you go in one room and you see all this color, and then you go in the other room and you see all this wonderful stillness, calm.

You really have an eye for pulling different works together and making a show out of it.

What was some of your thought process beyond that, that offsetting of different styles that brought this show together?

There are new artists for me, and I like to bring new people, because it's really hard to show your work in the community.

Although we have more and more galleries here in the area, which is really good.

But I've been here longer than anybody.

I hate to say it, but I'm old and and I have a background, you know, I work for the Art Expo and I have contemporary artists, but I also have Jasper Johns and and Christo.

And so I have things that are historical as well as contemporary things.

Yeah.

I love it about you that you really are passionate about bringing people to the forefront that don't have an audience yet, whether that's with train artisans get in their first show or it's with your outsider art fair, the fact that you love to take art that isn't yet a household name and bring it forward, that's really awesome.

Doing the outsider Art fair has been a revelation because people loved it, and I tried not to do it again and they wouldn't have it.

I got all these volunteers that are coming, and I'm hoping that it will go on without me, you know?

So.

It's really a labor of love for me, and I couldn't imagine not doing this.

The whole community is involved in the gallery, and I feel such a support system that it just makes me so happy that I could not do the gallery.

I'm trying to figure out a way to keep it going, and we're thankful for that, and we're going to make sure that we come back and give you a preview when the outsider Art fair is going to happen.

So you have a sense of what's going to be here so that you guys can be a part of it.

Now, today.

You were nice enough to bring the artists in so that we could talk to them.

And so we're going to have a chance to let each artist kind of tell their story and share with us their work.

Yes.

And you have to make sure that you get the whole story, because Clifford has a history and his wife does too, of artists.

They're both artists, and he's been an artist for a long time.

And Sarah.

Sarah.

So talented.

She or you'll have to talk to her about the the techniques she uses to make these paintings have real deaths.

Well, thank you so much for letting us know about this show.

And we look forward.

We're going to talk to the artist now.

And now I'm here with Clifford and Clifford.

Judith talked about that.

You've been doing art for a long time.

Kind of.

Tell us your story in an abbreviated version.

How did you get started in art and how long have you been doing it?

Well, I've been doing it since the last millennium.

I started out in the 60s, actually.

We had a neighbor and church member who was an artist, and I was very inspired by her work.

She showed me many, many works, and I took a whole bunch home one day.

And based upon looking at all these, I just started painting and drawing and haven't stopped since.

So what kind of art do you do?

And do you do a variety of mediums, or are you one kind of specific?

I in the last few years, almost everything I do is based upon drawing.

During the pandemic, I did probably well over 1000 drawings, and from some of these I arrived paintings that I either paint on canvas or on paper, or I put into a computer and do various transformations of the works.

So this exhibit tell us, does it have a name and what kind of works will we see here?

I think the overall exhibit we call is circling the square between Earth, sky and lake.

So circling implies the abstraction and the earth, sky and lake implies nature.

So I think I'm somewhere between abstraction and naturalistic painting.

And tell us about this piece that we're standing in front of.

This is a piece I did some years ago.

I have a barn where I work, and it's somewhat open.

And so as I was painting, butterflies would actually come in and land on a color that would be the flower they were hoping to find, like here or here.

And so I called this butterfly vision.

But it's part of a series in the scale that I just really let go and use big strokes, bold strokes and old color.

And it's a lot of fun and I hope people appreciate it for that.

There's another couple of works that you wanted to share with us.

Can we walk over there and see those?

Tell us about these.

I have a whole series of paintings that I call Braintree because of the form, the drone form of a. Neck or a trunk that becomes a head or the foliage of a tree.

So I wanted to do these very simply, but have a background that would give it some variety.

So I had splurged on a set of 100 different watercolor paintings by Senior and Fence, who provided paints for most of the well-known French painters of the 19th and 20th century.

And so I just went through the whole palette of paintings, made the squares, and then every other square area of the square.

I made a form that could be the tree or a human head, and put them together as a diptych, so that they could be shown either together or individually.

I mentioned the Braintree series.

This is an example of one from the series, because you have these lines that create circles and eventually larger shapes.

And you can imagine it as either a face or a tree, and I call it the queen bee of trees.

So it's a beautiful painting and representative of works in the entire series, the Braintree series.

What is this that we're looking at?

This is a metal piece done by McKinley Wells.

He's another artist at the gallery here, whom I met through Judith and one of her artists.

He has taken shapes from a very small part of some of my paintings, and translated into metal pieces by cutting metal by hand and by computer controlled cutter.

He set them out from the panel to give them dimensionality and relief and then apply to finish.

So I'm very pleased to have these images working with Nick, and we plan to do many more.

Is there a place that people can find your work when you're not here in the gallery?

I don't have a large online presence.

I may expand that, but we have a studio between Laporte and Rolling Prairie called Talion or Park, and if people can find me there, I'd be glad to show them more works.

And what has it meant for you to have a space like this that Judith has put together to show your work?

Well, I think it's mainly been the discipline of putting the show together, because I have hundreds and thousands of works.

And Judith told me I had a space for 14, so I had to go through a process with some simulation and guidance from her as to how to create a show.

And if you come to the show, she designed it.

So you come in and you go around it counterclockwise, and there is a logic and a sequence to it that I myself would not have created.

But thanks to Judith in her inst well, thank you so much for sharing your work with us.

We we look forward to seeing the rest of it.

Great.

Thank you.

Okay, so Sarah, tell us your story.

How did you get started in the world of art?

Well, I was actually trained as a classicist and I was a Latin teacher for many, many years.

And I started taking workshops, mostly in printmaking.

And I found that I became more and more obsessed with printmaking and less and less obsessed with tiki Latin, and the rest has become history.

So you have an exhibit here.

Explain.

What is this exhibit?

Does it have a theme?

And what kind of art are we going to see here?

Well, it the theme is the lake which has been which I've lived next to or very close to for much of my life.

And, and the various moods that the lake has and evokes in me and the media are.

It's two different kind of media.

I worked in collage, which this is an example of, and then the other style in this particular show are encounter paintings, which are pigmented wax paintings, and they sort of reflect different moods and and very different styles of work.

Tell us about this piece.

So this is an example of one of my collages.

And I think because I started out as a printmaker, I was working with these beautiful Japanese papers, and I realized I just couldn't stand once you'd made a print to put it behind glass.

So I was trying to figure out a way of working with these papers and not having and freeing them from the frame and the glass.

And so I started collaging with them.

And so these are layers and layers of very, very thin Japanese washi papers and, and other tissue papers and hand-painted papers.

And I layer them on and I work very fast and sort of free.

I'm only allowed.

I have a rule that I can only tear the paper, so the only straight lines are the lines that came from the like the beautiful decal edge of one of the pages.

And I'm always sort of putting things down and then realizing I've made a mistake and tearing things back.

And, you know, that can be heartbreaking.

This painting actually probably took about two years because I had some start and it wasn't working, and I kept on working at it and it wasn't working in fun, and I just tore it all down.

And of course, it's so exciting because it just ended up telling me what to do.

It became something very different.

And you get this kind of wonderful palimpsest effect that I couldn't have created intentionally.

So that's, that's that there's another work over here.

That shows another mood of the lake, a more wintry, stormy version of the lake.

One of the things that I get that so inspires me about this lake is the various colors that it has every day.

So these are very representative of my my lived experience on the lake.

And this one you can see is this came faster.

You can see it has a lot more movement and gesture.

And it was feels more less controlled, freer.

And by contrast I'll take you over to the painting and this work.

Also builds slowly, it's layer by layer by layer of beeswax and then layers of of pink pigmented beeswax.

And the process is kind of very zen.

You need to really work slowly and get your breath down so that it's smooth and, you know, builds up very, very slowly.

And I still want it to have a kind of organic flow at the end.

But that's that's a gesture that kind of has to come when I'm in a really peaceful state.

So there it's a very kind of a different mood to make this kind of work.

What does it mean for you to have a gallery space like this for you to show your work?

Judith's space is so beautiful.

The light is so beautiful.

The feeling of the building is so beautiful.

And Judith's taste and arrangement is so incredible.

In the heart of this place is.

It's just a dream for me to be able to actually see my work up on in one room in a well, beautifully lit space.

So it means everything.

It's it's.

Well, thank you so much for sharing your work with us.

We appreciate it.

Thanks.