(bright music) (upbeat music) - [Matt] Paint a portrait with artist Carl Grauer, chat with children's book author and illustrator Matt McElligott, and catch a performance from The Bluebillies.

It's all ahead on this episode of "AHA!

A House for Arts".

- [Announcer] Funding for "AHA" has been provided by your contribution and by contributions to the WMHT Venture Fund.

Contributors include The Leo Cox Beach Philanthropic Foundation, Chet and Karen Opalka, Robert and Doris Fischer Malesardi, and The Robison Family Foundation.

- At M&T Bank, we understand that the vitality of our communities is crucial to our continued success.

That's why we take an active role in our community.

M&T Bank is pleased to support WMHT programming that highlights the arts, and we invite you to do the same.

(upbeat music) (graphics whooshing) - Hi, I'm Matt Rogowicz, and this is "AHA!

A House for Arts", a place for all things creative.

Today, we're heading down to Poughkeepsie to visit with painter Carl Grauer.

Take a look.

(serene music) - Most of my work is portraiture, but I also do a lot of fine art work on the border of surrealism with ideas and concepts that center around time, mortality and space.

(serene music) My parents always said I came out of the womb drawing, but I was also very much apt and had abilities for science and math and things like that.

So I was very much encouraged to go towards the sciences.

And so I ended up doing medical illustration for a long time.

And then about 2011, my brother passed away and that was something that kind of really shook me up and made me realize how short life is, and I needed to be doing the things that I always wanted to do.

And so I redirected myself and started focusing more towards painting.

I started my series of two-hour portraits so that I could quicken my pace, liven up my brushstrokes, that I could have something that would challenge me.

The way that I set it up was I wanted this moment to be a time where I shared a moment with my sitter.

So being present, making eye contact if we choose to, having the time to have conversation, getting to know someone, sharing a time and sharing space, and kind of having something at the end of it.

That was what was really important for me at the end.

It wasn't just about the image, it was about the time spent together.

I have a goal of doing 2,000 before I leave this planet.

At the moment, I have about 420 that I've painted to-date.

And so I've had people that have sat for me all over the world but I also really enjoy having people come and sit for me again multiple times because then it shows the growth in how people change over time but also how my practice and how my hands changes over time.

Besides my portraiture, I'm also very interested in conceptual-based work.

I was going through this thing called the Artist Way, and I don't know how many people are familiar with that, but I was doing this whole practice of restructuring my brain, restructuring how I looked at making art.

So I really wanted to focus on this kind of icon, or this talisman, or this guide, or this spiritual goddess, and that was Judy Garland.

And I was very interested in the synchronicities which was also very important for the artist's ways of looking at synchronicities.

I grew up in Kansas.

She was in a movie that took place in Kansas.

Her origins were in Kansas.

And then also her attachment to the queer culture.

We look towards Judy Garland and "The Wizard of Oz" and oftentimes as a sign or a signal or coding when you're in public with people back in the days before it was okay to be out, a way that you could find other people was like, "Are you a friend of Dorothy?"

And if you answered yes, then you were queer, right?

And so that was one way that I looked at it.

But also the day that Judy Garland died, there were three tornadoes that hit Kansas.

And also the day that her funeral took place was the same day that the Stonewall Riots erupted.

So I was very interested in that kind of idea surrounding my place in time, her place in time, and how we all kind of like had this mass consciousness or this mass kind of experience.

And so I looked at doing a portrait of Judy Garland as Dorothy, as this goddess, who guided me and other queer people through the world.

It has my hometown in Kansas, the tornado hitting, and then finally in the final panel, the Emerald City.

And then I did this whole series based on queer icons that I wanted to feature that were important to the education of where we are to this point pre-Stonewall.

The second series that I would like to talk about is "Fragments of Time and Space."

And "Fragments of Time and Space" was me sitting in my space, observing the passing of time during the pandemic.

And so I was looking outside and looking at how the seasons changed and I was painting 12x12 or 10x10 squares in different times and seasons as time passed.

And that kind of what brought me into the interior series called "A Quieter Interior".

And that was about instead of looking out, looking within, and everything has this kind of like central axis around light and how light moves through time and space.

And so I was looking at how light traveled through the room.

This was all a time period when my mother was living through Alzheimer's and the decline of her, I kind of matched with this series of work.

And so it was all about the light of my mother passing through the space, and how she was still with me, even though she wasn't necessarily with us.

It was a really lovely into the series because the day that my mother passed away and I didn't know she had passed away yet, but I was, we're leaving 'cause we'd go meet and have breakfast with my parents.

There's this one particular day where I was climbing down the back staircase from our bedroom downstairs and I turned around and the door was closed, and there was this beautiful light that was just going right through the sliver of the doorframe.

And I looked at it and I was like, "Interesting."

This was the only picture that I painted from a photo.

So I turned around and I snapped the photo, and it was this beautiful sliver of light and the door was closed, so it was like the last painting from the series, and I went over to my parents' house and my mom had passed away that day.

So it was like, "What..." It was a really kind of wonderful bookend to this particular series of work.

When I make art, it's important for me to be a part of the conversation, to have a voice, to express the voice, but also to listen.

A lot of it is about listening, to be present.

It's about being alive for me.

(serene music) - Matt McElligott is the author and illustrator of several humorous children's books.

His titles include "The Mad Scientist Academy" series, the "Benjamin Franklinstein Series," and "Even Monsters Need Haircuts".

Jade Warrick sat down with Matt to learn more.

- Hi Matt, welcome to "AHA" today.

- Hi, Jade, I'm so happy to be here.

- So I've been dabbling in your books- - [Matt] Mm-hmm.

- And looking at your illustrations and showing it to my nieces and nephews, - [Matt] Mm-hmm.

- And I realize that you have a heavy theme of like monsters and pirates- - Mm-hmm.

- And like weird little creatures.

- [Matt] Yeah.

- And I wanted to know, why that style with your illustrations for your children's books?

- I think there's a couple reasons.

One is because when you're creating an imaginary creature like a monster, you know, that monster doesn't have to have a gender or an age or a skin color, right?

- Mm-hmm.

- And that means that for a reader, they can connect with, they can see themselves in that character in a different way because it's less specific.

You know, I think this is why "Sesame Street" is full of muppets.

- Yeah.

(chuckles) - Right?

Kids can relate to an Ernie or a Bert, or an Oscar the Grouch or a Grover in a way that they might not be able to connect with a real person.

- Mm.

- The other advantage, of course, is that when you're drawing monsters, it's hard to draw them wrong.

So, you know, if you put the nose on the wrong side of the head or you draw too many eyeballs or whatever, it still works.

- So how do you choose your themes for your books, and what's your process look like?

- I get this question a lot about, you know, like where do ideas come from, where do themes come from?

You know, ideas can come from anywhere.

So it might be something I read or something I saw in a museum, or wherever.

It could be just something that someone said.

Like I did a book, I did a couple books about this hairy pirate named "Backbeard."

(Jade chuckles) The hairiest pirate who ever lived.

And that came about one day, I was out, it was a summer day, it was out swimming at a lake with some friends.

And my friend's dad was there and he was paddling around in the canoe, and he was pretending to be a pirate.

And he's a very, he's a magnificently hairy man.

(Jade chuckles) And someone shouted out, "Hey, black beard!"

I was in the water behind the canoe.

And what I heard was, "Hey, back beard!"

I looked up, I saw his hairy back.

I thought they said, "Hey, back beard!"

I thought it was the funniest, it's still the funniest joke I ever heard that no one ever said, and I thought this was so great.

I raced back to shore, I wrote it down, "Backbeard Hairiest Pirate," ever thought, "This has got to be a book."

And so I sat down and I came up with a story about this hairy pirate, imagining what kind of trouble a hairy pirate might get into.

But it wasn't until I was done with those books that I really realized what they were about.

- Mm.

- So it didn't start with a theme, it started with a dumb joke.

(Jade chuckles) Right?

And in the end, I realized that what the stories were about were about friendship, they were about identity, about feeling comfortable, expressing who you really are.

Those were not things I intended to do.

And I think a lot of writers will say the same thing.

We don't really know what it is we've written until it's done.

- Mm.

- And that can be a wonderful, great surprise.

- That is, and I love the joke (laughs) "Backbeard."

(Matt chuckles) And then creating such an amazing story behind just a silly little joke.

- Mm.

- I love that.

So why children's books?

- That's a good question.

You know, I think as an illustrator, children's books are a wonderful opportunity to draw the kinds of things that I love to draw.

But also I think, I don't know what this says about me, but the children's books, middle grade books, a lot of these are stories about the things that I want to read even as an adult.

- [Jade] Mm.

- I'm interested to know the story of a hairy pirate, or what would happen if Benjamin Franklin came back to life.

So I never think of it really as writing for children.

I think of it as writing stories that I would want read that just happened to be for kids.

- And do you think that's like the secret sauce to your success?

It's like not writing for children, not really dumbing it down, but truly writing for yourself and then in terms it just is attractive to young audiences?

- Yeah, I think that's the case with so many things.

I think the best children's books don't write down to kids.

You know, Maurice Sendak, "Where the Wild Things Are" is a book that we would call a children's book.

But the themes in that are very, very real.

And he was- - Yes.

- Never, never writing down.

You can tell when somebody is talking down to a child.

- You can.

- Kids can tell when adults are talking down to them, and it never works.

- Hmm, and that makes sense because some of my favorite books as a kid are like, "Amelia Bedelia", - Mm-hmm.

- "Stinky Cheese Man", - Yeah.

- "Where the Wild Things Are".

- Sure.

- And my mom loved reading those to me.

- [Matt] Mm-hmm.

- And as an adult, reading them to my nieces and nephews, it's having me understand like, "Oh, they're, it's like kind of like how Pixar does."

You know, it's like they write it- - Exactly.

- For adults.

- Yeah.

- But it also has, and they write it for children, but it also has some adult themes, you know, interwoven within it.

So therefore- - Mm-hmm.

- It's enjoyable for all audiences- - [Matt] Exactly.

- And not specifically written just for young audiences.

So I think that's awesome.

- So well said.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, yeah.

Mm.

- So have you ever dabbled in any more, I guess, serious or adult illustrations or books in your past or future or present?

- Well, I'm working on, I've got a middle grade novel that I've been working on- - Mm.

- That's with my agent right now.

And I'm very excited about that, 'cause that gives me a chance to do more character development and to explore some other themes that don't really fit in like a 32-page picture book.

- Mm.

- I've also really enjoyed.

Lately, I've been working on writing musicals with a couple of co-writers with my friend Larry and Michael, who's also a professor at Sage.

And that's been really, really interesting.

We've been taking some of these stories, "Backbeard" and Benjamin Franklinstein* and adapting them to the stage.

And that's a whole different way of writing and thinking about characters and thinking about how a plot moves along.

That's been very exciting to do.

- Well, that is really fun.

- Yeah.

- I know all artists, we love to expand our- - Oh, yeah.

- Surroundings and our horizons artistically.

So I'm super excited to even see that from you.

I know you work in education, - Mm-hmm.

- And I want to hear a little bit about that.

Like what do you do in education and why does it bring you joy?

- Mm.

I've been a professor at Russell Sage in the visual and performing arts department for...

It's over 25 years now.

- Wow.

(chuckles) - And I feel so blessed to have that job because not only do I get to work with a bunch of really interesting, inspiring artists and talk shop all day, but I also get to work with some amazing students.

And I think anybody who teaches will tell you that there's no better way to learn something than to try and teach it to someone else.

- Mm-hmm.

- And so I look at those 25 years as that's been an amazing education for me.

I've learned so much, sometimes directly from my students who give me feedback that had never occurred to me before.

Or even just the way that I have to clarify something in my mind- - Mm.

- In order to present it to the students.

- So what's coming up next for you?

What do you have on the books that you think the audience should know about new upcoming books?

I know you mentioned your plate.

- [Matt] Mm-hmm.

- Do you have conferences, panels, anything like that book as well?

- Well, the big one is I've got a couple proposals out with my agent for some new books that I'm very excited about.

One is a series and the other is this novel.

We're bringing "Benjamin Franklinstein" lives back to the Theater Institute at Sage.

That'll be this November.

And I'm very proud of that show.

I think the actors are amazing.

The music came out great, really excited about that.

And then we're working on a new musical that we're hoping will be done in time for next season, next year.

- Oh, I am excited for Russell Sage, right?

- Yeah, this will be at the Theater Institute at Sage.

- Awesome.

Well, I'm excited.

Well, thank you Matt, for coming to chat today.

And folks, check out his books- - Mm-hmm.

- And thank you.

- Thank you, Jade.

I really appreciate it.

- [Jade] Appreciate you, too.

- Please welcome The Bluebillies.

(light country music) ♪ Working hard each week day ♪ ♪ Dragging home each night ♪ ♪ Putting up with bosses ♪ ♪ And people so uptight ♪ ♪ So pretty when you left here ♪ ♪ Scary coming back ♪ ♪ Sorry that you work so hard now ♪ ♪ Sorry sometimes things look bad ♪ ♪ You and me in our blue heaven ♪ ♪ With troubles all around ♪ ♪ Just when we think we're flying ♪ ♪ That's when we hit the ground ♪ ♪ The hurtful words are sometimes spoken ♪ ♪ And dreams go up in smoke ♪ ♪ We're always gonna be all right ♪ ♪ 'Cause I'm the willow, you're the oak ♪ ♪ I'm the willow that leans to you ♪ ♪ And away from troubles past ♪ ♪ You're the oak tree so resilient ♪ ♪ Standing tall against the wind ♪ ♪ And I'll let you in on something ♪ ♪ Can I tell you, it's no joke ♪ ♪ We're always gonna be all right ♪ ♪ 'Cause I'm the willow you're the oak ♪ (light country music) (light country music continues) ♪ I'm the willow that leans to you ♪ ♪ And away from troubles hand ♪ ♪ You're the oak tree so resilient ♪ ♪ Standing tall against the wind ♪ ♪ And I'll let you in on something ♪ ♪ Can I tell you it's no joke ♪ ♪ We're always gonna be all right ♪ ♪ 'Cause I'm the willow you're the oak ♪ ♪ Yes, we're always gonna be in love ♪ ♪ I'm the willow you're the oak ♪ (light country music) ♪ I changed my brother's diaper ♪ ♪ In a bar outside of Elko ♪ ♪ And we slept there on the table ♪ ♪ And it smelled like tears and whiskey ♪ (light country music) ♪ Mama stole a car in Black Oak Indiana ♪ ♪ And threw me in the backseat, me and baby brother ♪ ♪ And she drove for 19 hours in the deserts of Nevada ♪ ♪ She was trying to find my Daddy ♪ ♪ To see if she still loved her ♪ ♪ Got my father gun in Black Oak Indiana ♪ ♪ She slipped it in her pocket ♪ ♪ She thought I didn't see it ♪ ♪ It was Harrington & Richardson ♪ ♪ Uh-huh, 22 revolver ♪ ♪ It fits her hand just perfect ♪ ♪ And she knew how to use it ♪ ♪ You better run ♪ ♪ Daddy run ♪ ♪ Mama's got a gun ♪ ♪ You better run ♪ ♪ You better run ♪ ♪ Daddy run ♪ (light country music) ♪ He was playing booze for money ♪ ♪ In the deserts of Nevada ♪ ♪ But we never ever saw a penny ♪ ♪ Not me and not for Mama ♪ ♪ He spent it all on fast cars ♪ ♪ He spent it on fast women ♪ ♪ Mama started drinking whiskey ♪ ♪ And wondering if he loved her ♪ ♪ But if she ever ask me ♪ ♪ I know I could have told her ♪ ♪ That he never get of nothing ♪ ♪ Except for her and me and Mama ♪ ♪ And that Harrington & Richardson ♪ ♪ Uh-huh, 22 revolver ♪ ♪ It fits her hand just perfect ♪ ♪ And she knew how to use it ♪ ♪ You better run ♪ ♪ Daddy run ♪ ♪ Mama's got a gun ♪ ♪ You better run ♪ ♪ You better run ♪ ♪ Daddy run ♪ (light country music) ♪ Car ran out of gas ♪ ♪ About a mile outside of Elko ♪ ♪ We rolled it toward the blue light ♪ ♪ Of a tavern on the roadside ♪ ♪ Mama left us there, me and baby brother ♪ ♪ But she search the streets of Elko ♪ ♪ To see if he still loved her ♪ ♪ And I changed my brother's diaper ♪ ♪ In the bar outside of Elko ♪ ♪ And we slept there on the table ♪ ♪ And it smelled like tears and whiskey ♪ (light country music) (light country music continues) ♪ She missed him by two hours ♪ ♪ He was on a bus to Reno ♪ ♪ They said he had a woman ♪ ♪ He met at the casino ♪ ♪ So I swept the floors for breakfast ♪ ♪ And Mama attended bar for money ♪ ♪ And we brought three gray hail tickets ♪ ♪ Back to Black Gold Indiana ♪ ♪ And Mama slept there in the backseat ♪ ♪ To the darkness of Nevada ♪ ♪ And she mumble in her seat ♪ ♪ Still wondering if he loved her ♪ ♪ But if she ever ask me ♪ ♪ I know I could have told her ♪ ♪ That he never did love nothing ♪ ♪ Except for her and me, and Mama ♪ ♪ And then Harrington & Richardson ♪ ♪ Uh-huh, 22 revolver ♪ ♪ It fits my hand just perfect ♪ ♪ And I know how to use it ♪ ♪ You better run, Daddy run ♪ ♪ Now I've got the gun, you better run ♪ ♪ You better run ♪ ♪ Daddy run ♪ (light country music) ♪ Change my brother's diaper ♪ ♪ In that bar outside of Elko ♪ ♪ And we slept there on the table ♪ ♪ And it smelled like tears and whiskey ♪ (light country music) (bright music) - Thanks for joining us.

For more arts, visit whmt.org/aha and be sure to connect with us on social.

I'm Matt Rogowicz.

Thanks for watching.

(chill upbeat music) - [Announcer] Funding for "AHA" has been provided by your contribution and by contributions to the WMHT Venture Fund.

Contributors include The Leo Cox Beach Philanthropic Foundation, Chet and Karen Opalka, Robert and Doris Fischer Malesardi, and The Robison Family Foundation.

- At M&T Bank, we understand that the vitality of our communities is crucial to our continued success.

That's why we take an active role in our community.

M&T Bank is pleased to support WMHT programming that highlights the arts, and we invite you to do the same.