Next on Gallery America, a Dutch artist on a Pauls Valley horse farm once created abstract paintings Now she's turned to realism with embroidery paintings that capture small town life.

And I really wanted to challenge myself in in doing those pictures instead of making an abstract out of them.

I wanted to show my audience how beautiful Oklahoma is.

An artist making quirky folk art, and Florida actually stumbled upon one of her biggest ideas by accident.

one day I had a little scrap and I didn't want to waste it, and I just made it into a little oval and put eyes on it.

And suddenly there was my new friend.

In Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

A ceramicist finds extra emotion in her art comes from everyday objects.

My imagery has more to do with relatable objects or thing that people generally have some relationship to a bir or an ice cream, or a gift fo things that are commonplace.

Hello, Oklahoma.

Welcome to Gallery America, the show that brings you great artists from Oklahoma and around the nation.

Today we're in Pauls Valley, a town about an hour south of Oklahoma City that you can even get to by train.

And we're here to meet a local artist with a very distinct art style.

She calls it embroidery paintings, and she uses them to tell the story of small town Oklahoma life without forgetting for distant.

Meet Irmgard Guel My studio here is at the horse ranch.

It's perfect art studio.

You have inspiration all around you, and I have to space to enjoy my silence.

What I do in the morning.

I come here and go out and feed my horses and you talk to them and pat them and give them water and hang out with them .

Oh, good old hay.

So this is Wizkid's.

He is 29. in February he will be 30 and he's been with me all over the world.

And I have a coffee with the cat.

And read my Dutch newspaper, I think it's really important to treasure your your roots,.

I love to paint.

I live and breathe guard.

I can look at art every day, I can read about art I can listen to podcasts.

I've been like that my whole life.

Blaricum is kind of in the middle of the Netherlands.

It's an old farmers town to beautiful area, a very popular area for artistic people, painters, performers.

I always wanted to be artist has never been a doubt thatI wanted to be anything else.

My mother was like, Yeah, if you want to be an artist, you can be an artist.

What made me come to Oklahoma is horses.

An American quarter horse.

When it comes to running a quarter of a mile, a quarter of a thoroughbred, every time I.

Fell in love with America, a quarter horse bought a couple here, shipped them over.

And then I thought, Hey, we can do that and offer that service.

Yeah.

Before I know it was kind of a a full working ranch with important exports, trainin horses, buying and selling horses, racing horses.

I started the embroidery painting part, I started there.

I went home for Christmas to see my sister and my sister said, You know, I have all this stuff from my mother.

You need to pick some, too.

And I went through all the material.

She gave me this whole mountain of buttons, embroidery, thread, yarns, fabrics and while picking up all these things, I got all these memories, you know?

I was like, I'm going to do something with them.

The collage pieces are, in this case, Dutch tiles.

I had this old calendar wood from the Rex Museum in the Netherlands, and I had all these Dutch tiles and I knew I was going.

To do something with them.

Then I go over with I start sketching the flowers and the tulips.

I always felt I was not a good enough realistic painter.

I felt more comfortable in painting abstracts.

And I really wanted to challenge myself in in doing those pictures instead of making an abstract out of them.

I wanted to show my audience how beautiful Oklahoma is.

Like Pauls Valley, because it's, you know, quirky little town and it has the brick streets with kind of reminds me of home and I like that it's it has a community around me, so.

You can really be part of something here.

Come on back here.

Yeah, we sell appliances, we've got furniture over here, we got some mattresses.

If you need some help with electronic parts, plugs, cords, batteries, you know, stuff like that in there.

So we got thingamajig in there.

People don't come in looking for art in here, but I drag them over to show them my wife's art.

Yeah, that's my home.

And I remember showing her mattresses because I needed a couple of new mattresses out at the ranch.

I think that's the first time I really noticed her.

She had just turned 40.

I just turned 45 for our first date.

She's the best girlfriend I've ever.

I hope she can say I'm the best boyfriend.

I wanted to have kind of an uneven number of flowers in there to make it interesting and tulips are very hard to put in the face, so I want to kind of put it in this painting how difficult it is.

It's really strange, but my mother is always here.

Not everybody understands that.

I think she's loved and she tells me what color, what needle.

Sometimes I have to tell her to shut up, but it's no, she's pretty good.

She guides me a lot.

The color of the paper is very important because my embroidery threads will bring in bring tru that color.

The threat will bring that extra dimension like like it will come towards you.

My current exhibition, My Hometown's, is about that feeling like, yeah, I left home, but I'm home.

I really wanted to show what is for someone in the Netherlands.

You know, there are two legs there wouldn't shoes, there are windmills.

That's what people think about the Netherlands.

And I wanted to create the same my idea of what Oklahoma was for me.

So I really went back like the first time I got here is like, Oh, that guy with a cowboy hat!

The pumpjacks and rodeo's.

It has an enormous impact to to live in a different country.

I think it really makes you grow and grow as an artist because moving to a different place and seeing different cultures.

I cannot imagine where I say, Hey, what?

I would have been in the Netherlands if I stay there.

Now I make embroidery paintings and work with a thread, but, you know, I can really tell in ten years what I'm doing, I hope someone else, something else inspires me.

No, I'm pretty happy with how.

I like adventure.

I like new things.

I cannot drive the same route every day to the ranch.

So that's my character and that's how I time I got, I think, to do so many things in my life.

This is the Vault and Paul's Valley and active Oklahoma art gallery that supports Oklahoma artists including irmgard geul, as you may have seen in our piece.

If you'd like to see more of our armed guards art, go to our website.

irmgardguel.com and follow her on Instagram at irmgard guel next for keeping this thread going, literally by meeting a Florida artist who uses embroidery and recycled sweatshirts to create her own fun brand of folk art.

Meet Heidi Wineland.

My father was a painter and an advertising executive.

My mother was a professional seamstress and very much a folk artist and a needle worker herself, and so I grew up just with everything all around all the time that it was just free to use.

And I also had a really good arts program in the school system where I was.

And so now that I'm an art teacher in the public schools, I'm really geared towards making sure my students have as much experience with as many materials as possible.

I'm Heidi Wineland and I am a folk artist.

I make rag baskets.

I make something called knit Higgins, which are made their little creatures made from recycled sweaters, and they were made from knit fabrics.

So they were knit and now they are knit again.

I make a lot of jewelry, I do some painting, I do a lot of embroidery, I'm very much into needlework and I'm always experimenting, trying new things.

Years ago, I was doing craft fairs and I've always had a lot of odds and ends and different things, but really struggling to find, you know, the thing.

And there were a lot of people at that time who were knitting and felting, and that seemed really interesting.

But I didn't want to take the time to knit.

So I just went to the goodwill and just bought the sweaters and filtered those, and I was making bags and hats.

But then one day I had a little scrap and I didn't want to waste it, and I just made it into a little oval and put eyes on it.

And suddenly there was my new friend and that took off as soon as I started selling those.

I just couldn't keep them in stock, even though they all have the same basic shape and they all have these, you know, very simple circle eyes.

They all have their own personalities and people are really strangely drawn to them.

I love seeing kids, adults, families, everyone sees her pieces.

They turn a corner and a smile just hits their face.

For 30 years, I've been working on a project I call the Academy Award.

Action figures, which are miniature replicas of Oscar fashion.

I've always been interested in film history, but I'm also very interested in fashion and the cult of celebrity.

And then one night I couldn't sleep, and I had this idea that I could make these dresses in miniature.

Now, I'm not a dull person, didn't play with Barbies, didn't have any dolls.

The dolls are really just hangers for the clothes.

So I only do the Academy Awards because the Academy Awards is the highest pinnacle of celebrity.

What you wear to the Academy Awards.

That photograph is the photograph that's going to be published over and over again.

It's the dress that people recognize the celebrity.

And so it's for me, it's both a critical commentary on the cult of celebrity and how we make idols of movie stars.

And, you know, want to emulate what they wear.

And at the same time, I actually am making idols.

Do you know celebrities?

So this I don't sell.

This is just for me.

So the net begins in the Oscar dolls are really the two things I spend the most time on and they seem very different, but they're both examples of they're strange.

They're small.

I make them because they make me happy and I really pride myself on using scraps, leftover materials, for instance, for the dolls.

I never.

Other than that, that first one that I tried, I never buy new dolls.

So if you look closely, a lot of them have, you know, chewed on hands or, you know, some of them have stains on them.

It's just a matter of looking at something and seeing new lif in it.

I've had the opportunity to have, you know, an actual away from home art studio before, and it's always seem so appealing, but then I think I would never go there.

I really like to work on my lap.

I like to work in small, comfortable spaces.

I like to watch television while I work.

And I think that's a reflection of how folk art has always been made.

It's always been made while you're rocking the baby or, well, dinner is cooking.

I think folk art is more relevant today than it's ever been because the world is so complex Folk art brings us back to something simple.

It's very simple.

It's very nostalgic.

It's something that we can process pretty easily and and beauty to our life.

As an artist and as a teacher, I am really invested in the idea that art is not just painting and drawing, and I've been teaching primarily adults for years, and I encounter people all the time who say, Oh, you made that?

I wish I could be an artist.

And I said, Well, of course you can.

It doesn't have to be oil painting on canvas.

It could be a doll, a basket, a quilt and to come to realize that they're really doing this already.

You know, even if it's cooking or decorating that there's something in us that wants to make our surroundings nicer, more comfortable, more visually appealing.

And I want people, especially my students, to realize that's within their power.

Wow.

I must confess, I never knew there were Academy Award action figures.

Well, I would fit in perfectly with this place.

The iconic toy and action figure museum Paul's Valley, which features over 13,000 figures, including this guy Oklahoma.

Chuck Norris looks like he's having a bad day.

Last, we're going to check with a local ceramicist in Bato Rouge who uses popsicles as a theme for artwork.

Have a look for.

And for me, the emotive quality comes through the touch and being able to hand sculpt something, I feel like my imagery has more to do with relatable objects.

So things that people generally have some relationship to a bird or an ice cream or a gift bow, things that are commonplace and that through that making and touch, there's something unusual or unique or more poetic about the form itself that draws people in and allows them to feel something slightly different.

Maybe questioning why would this be handmade as opposed to being slip cast or made from a prefabricated mold for clay?

There's such a range of possibility, not that other mediums don't provide that, but I feel like what I've found in clay is both high touch.

It's tactile.

I can touch it.

I can sculpt with basically starting with a lump, which people have done throughout time.

But it also provides the ability to say something new and a long cultural continuum for me, that containment has more to do with that spiritual or psychological or emotional realm, so that the idea of a sculpture or a form as a container for something ephemeral, the small form, there's a relationship.

And maybe it relates to toys or dolls or objects for the table, or it has some bodily or domestic association.

And I find through making a lot of small forms, what I can do is is compose with them.

So the idea of moving objects around in relationship to one another is fun for me in the way that maybe words would do that for a poet, I feel like images are a way to do that.

So, for instance, putting an ice cream cone with a bird, it starts to play some sort of new symbolism.

And I think by working small, there's a greater ability to do that.

The American dream is a wall meant to resemble the ice cream cones that you might get at Disney World, which to me is the sort of iconic American experience or a slice of Americana that's commonplace and recognizable.

I thought to myself, Why are they all just white?

And so I wanted to kind of make a range of tones that might represent just what any child going to Disney World might find and and might relate to.

So they were meant to sort of be literally they are a blend.

I start with a very, very dark clay.

And as I cast each one, I'm re adding amounts of either a lighter tone clay or a white clay, and that range begins to lighten as each one is cast.

So there is a conceptual level to that, but it's also very readable, very accessible.

And then all of them have the same kind of chocolate dipped ice cream quality to them.

The popsicles gave me a chance sort of a blank slate to work with color dynamically and figure out different patterns and things that people who work to get to do on a flat surface.

I was doing on a three dimensional surface the work that I feel the most strongly about is having work that might go in a specific place.

I felt really pleased with the outcome of the our lady of the Lake Children's Hospital, in part because I felt like it was a culmination of imagery I've been working with for a long time, and yet it was placed in a new way.

And it was also working with someone and working with a client really closely to really figure something out that would work well for children, for adults, for a long time.

I did a couple of series of hands.

one was a series of hands that were both my hands, my daughter's hands and then the hands of some different primates throughout the spectrum.

And I cast them in a series from the center being the largest to the smallest, actually being my daughter's hands, and that they were all done in these sort of metallic tones like you would do with a baby shoe or a copper.

They were meant to be a sort of metallic tone that was called kin and kind.

It was in a series that I also did that was looking at animal imagery in general and in particular, I've always had a predilection for the primates as a conservation.

The gift bows were all handmade.

I constructed them using sort of ribbons of clay.

Their glazed was a way to sort of generate gratitude.

And people could come and choose a bow to them, take home with them.

And some of the bows were sold and all the money went to benefit the Baton Rouge gallery.

So it was sort of a way to give back.

And also, the gift bow image is such a universal, simple, strong image of gift and generosity.

My grace palette is very intentional.

Most of the time, sometimes there are happy accidents, but I feel like colo and the use of color is a way to kind of evoke joy and a sense of celebration with some of the forms, while the subject matter might be a little bit on the more challenging side.

So I think sometimes color is a way to pull people in.

I do develop my own glazes and then I use some commercial glazes.

It's a bit of a play between blot things and things that have been made in my studio, but I feel like color is also a way to bring out sort of the painter in me.

I really enjoy color theory and color design, and I think it's a way to just play with some of those optics within the work.

I see my work as having more of a universal appeal so that children relate to it.

Teenagers, adults, it's a tough territory to try to appeal on a universal level.

But I feel like when I find a symbol such as an ice cream cone, it has really ability to a lot of people.

Well, that's all the time we have for Pauls Valley, we hope you've enjoyed it as much as we have.

And if you've not been, you should come check out the art, the action figures and definitely a meal here at Bob's pig shop.

Meanwhile, watch past Gallery America episodes at our robust archives at oeta Dot TV Slash Gallery America and please call Gallery America online for additional art features and news on Facebook and Instagram at oeta Gallery.

The pig sandwich, thank you.

Thanks so much for joining us.

Until next time, stay arty Oklahoma.