Art defined by those who live it.

Being an artist is not a job.

It's a way of looking at the world and reacting to the world.

It's a deep dance with something out there that's personally inspiring The most important thing of all is to be able to actually say that from across the room.

That's mine.

From struggles to success.

Establish again.

Emerging artists are the focus of Louisiana artists.

Spotlight Welcome to Louisiana artist Spotlight.

I'm Tom Gregory, and we're here at the Contemporary Art Center, the cultural hub of New Orleans Vibrant Warehouse Art District.

As you can see, the cake is between shells, but the bare walls do demonstrate what would be missing from our lives without the defining beauty of the art of our time.

With Louisiana's colorful culture, its unique combination of music, food and art.

The difficult part of exploring it is trying to define it.

So instead, we shine a spotlight on a few of Louisiana's established and emerging artists who are translating our culture in the form in their own words.

Each artist shares their thoughts on creative influence and the power of their own work.

But first, how these creative talents have been inspired by the beauty and the beat of New Orleans and the great state of Louisiana.

People ask me if I'm from America.

I say, No, I'm from New Orleans.

You know, you're in a museum, and there's just this one painting, and you can't figure out why you have to go stand in front of it.

But their whole room is filled with several other masterpieces.

But there's that one piece I think New Orleans is that for me, New Orleans is a big place.

The great Italian influence of French influence, the Spanish influence, the African influence, Irish influence, you know, which is still we still retain today, you know, and it's something to be very proud of.

We are also a city that was born with a musical instrument in our hands.

So I think that the aspect of musicality and the organic nature of the city, the fact that we're surrounded by so much green All of it works for a interpretation that implies movement.

And I do feel like there's an energy from the river.

I think I'm connected to the water and the moisture and the atmosphere that is here on some level so deeply.

I used to walk down to the bayou, and when I approached the water, it had such a calming effect on me.

I thought to myself, if I could create this feeling in my paintings that would give my life the meaning that I'm searching for all of this energy coming down from all these other places Picking up things along the way.

And it gets here.

And it's always stimulating.

It's always exciting.

It's got that same natural, inherent energy that I just find really profound.

And while in New Orleans, I realize that there were certain things I really, truly missed, starting with the smell.

I found myself relating more and more to New Orleans because it's got a lot of tactile qualities.

I mean, you naturally walk in and you can you can see here feel, smell everything.

But that's not really the magic of New Orleans.

It's an accumulation of this unique secure that we all live among.

And that's what makes it special.

And I think that's what makes this artwork special.

We like the idea of giving thanks.

We are a city of gratitude.

So on some level, this is a marvelous religious exercise, the city of New Orleans.

It looks like to some people back canal, but in fact, it's a kind of religious work.

It's called ecstatic work.

In a sense.

It's the work toward liberation and through expression and celebration.

And I immediately found that to be very, very attractive.

So I'm going to tell part of the minestrone of of New Orleans you know, As you can tell, James Megalopolis is in love with New Orleans.

He's also in love with paint and color, space and light.

And in return for his love he has become a beloved and celebrated New Orleans artist who is recognized internationally by one name, megalopolis There is a great satisfaction to get engaged with something, to take a challenge to the boards and to bring it forward, to create something of great beauty, to realize something of beauty Partly, it's a question of awe.

Partly it's an opportunity to create something that is enjoyable for people and the world that it brings and live.

And then that brings it from brightness into the day, into a difficult world.

But a large part of it is really it's a very personal thing where it's a deep dance with something out there that's personally inspiring.

And and there's this challenge that you're in, where you're standing in front of something which moves you, and you're taken by it.

And you're you're confronted by your ability to effectively capture what you find inspirational.

And there is a great challenge there, you know, so there is an engagement with a thrilling possibility.

And there's the occasional complete victory or partial victory It requires a certain sort of immediacy in your looking and immediacy.

And looking is not something that's characterized take of life as we know it.

And general life moves ahead in a kind of drift.

When I think about what's interesting and what's exciting, I think of movement.

I think of movement through something, even when something's static.

When I'm looking for home, that's where I go.

I go into that movement and that's where I want to be, and it feels very natural for me to express it the way that I do.

So I loud that I ask the building in front of me, tell me where you want to go, and I'm your servant and and I let it fall forward.

So it's very simple.

The real prescription is to be alert to where you really are at any point in time and forget all the junk about who you're supposed to be and tell the truth.

For yourself.

Well, it's an interesting process to find your own voice, in a sense.

I think what you do is you suffer with rules and regulations and shoulds and whys and wherefores for quite a while until you get to a point where you're so frustrated that you throw your hands up and go I'll think I'll just do something that makes me feel good.

I'm really working for myself.

And that is the pure process.

That is the purest process.

Anything aside from that is a diversion of attention.

And so, yeah, I'm going there and I'm going there with all I got to in a free dance to find what is beautiful in this interaction.

And, you know, I find it very, very rewarding to come to that point where I'm personally satisfied with the piece and then hopefully to find that there are others in the world that that agree with me and take take pleasure in the and the piece with over 101 man shows and galleries and museums around the U.S. and showings in France and Russia.

Rolling Golden is a new Orleans native whose work is collected and admired around the world.

I don't ever remember not being with a pencil or something like that.

It started with me as a baby.

My my father was talented and ah, yeah, I would draw soldiers and sailors and things like that and horses whatever I could do.

And, and I enjoyed it very much.

And I spent all of my spare time drawing.

I got out of the Navy and 55 of them from 51 to 55 and I went to John McCoy High School for two years and I was anxious to get started.

And this place came up on our Wall Street and I was in there for ten years and I then I signed a contract with one of the better known organizations and worked with them for a number of years.

And then finally I just decided there was a need in my having the support of 50% of what I made with them anymore.

And the watercolor is definitely the hardest rated medium of the all from one thing it's hard to correct watercolor, you know, if you make a mistake and it you pretty well stuck by the look, you can figure out something to cover it up.

And that was something that, you know, you just wanted to be careful not to make any mistakes.

But for some reason I was strangely attracted to it and I got where I, when I would go home and after dinner and everything, I would work in watercolor and I got pretty good at watercolor.

You have to think of creative things on your mind.

I mean, you can't you can't just go and not have any thoughts in your mind and what you're going to do.

You have to think about what you're going to do ahead of time.

And I always do that.

I start out with a drawing, how to do what I'm going to do, all these paintings, and then I use that as a guide for the painting itself.

Most of these things you've seen in either made them up or saw them but they're not exactly what I saw.

And for the sake of composition, I was one thing that Mr. Mccrady was very, very strict about was composition.

Drawing and composition.

And he was of course, he was a great painter himself, and I will that's why I do my little line drawings or drawings beforehand.

To get established where I want things to be in the painting.

And even when I'm painting, I might change things.

Most things that you look at or not compose properly, so you have to change something in them to make them proper composition.

Because if you say something that's not composed, what is not going to look right or you know, maybe I know anything about art, but you'll know it doesn't look all right.

You want to try to do things that are creative but different as much as you can.

And that's what I try to do.

And I mean, I think my work looks like me.

You know, I'll, I'll maybe somebody thinks it looks like something else, but that's what I do.

It's exhilarating to pay, you know?

It really is.

And when you first start out, it's kind of monotonous because, you know, it's very simple.

But when you get more involved and creating shelves and things like that, it becomes pretty challenging.

So it's it's it's a difficult living, but it's also very interesting on born in Mobile Rain Bed, Seoul now calls New Orleans home.

Her work is included in the collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art.

And the South Carolina Museum of Art and featured in the Hollywood blockbuster series Twilight.

Picasso said that you spend the rest of your artistic life trying to get back to where you were when you were five.

That's kind of the pinnacle of creative development.

That was the beauty of raising children.

Oh, my goodness.

To watch their creativity and the way they think.

I used to actually use a lot of their drawings and writings in my work.

I would I would literally put them in the surface of sculptures or paintings But just watching their their process and encouraging that and being a part of that was so magical.

A five year old is completely unselfconscious.

And that's the place that you have to find when you're working on something and you know you've found it or that you've gotten plugged in to that creative source when you lose track of time, you don't think about where you are, where the world disappears, and it's just you and the piece interacting.

I had a very watery childhood.

Some of my work deals with rivers or branches on trees.

I you know, at every fork you make a decision that takes you on this journey.

The boats are metaphorical concept for the journey, but they're also sort of a physical one to kind of the personal journey and the universal journey that we all take.

We all sort of have to go around the world to get next door.

I guess I started early on with the boats because I had this dream about traveling In the dream, I was traveling in a small canoe.

My body, I was laying down the small canoe and sort of left an imprint on it.

And it was a revolutionary sort of dream where I was told some things and that vessel just stayed with me.

You know, it's like the metaphor of the boat for your journey through life.

You we each are on a certain path and nothing is superfluous, I think, in that path.

You know, they all, even the dead ends, lead us to something where where we're supposed to be going, like meditation the goal is to lose yourself, I think, is the goal of making art writing.

Whatever thing you do that you try to lose yourself and become the peace, because it's never about the product, you know, I mean, it's it's that moment of being one with the peace making it.

It's just it's just in here where it counts, you know?

And that's what makes me love what I do.

I feel like the luckiest person on earth to come in here and be able to make stuff that's like kindergarten every day.

Trained as a biologist, Alison Stewart has gained national recognition for her paintings, expressing the complex and disturbing dialog between man and nature.

Her work has become the visual diary upon which she records her responses to the threatened landscape.

Alison Stewart, in her own words, Being an artist is not a job.

It's a way of looking at the world and reacting to the world.

And it doesn't stop at 5:00 and I go home at 7:00 or whatever it is.

It's a way of, for me, expressing how I feel about the world around me.

And it is constant.

We all have a style.

Any time an artist, you know, puts her life to it, she develops a style, a habit of making marks, developing a language, a visual language, using colors in a certain way that is not like any other person who uses color in that same way.

And it's it's a matter over time.

I'm a gestural painter.

I don't stay in the lines.

I don't have a plan beforehand that I work from.

I take hundreds of photographs and I do sketches, and I do a lot of collages.

But then when I face that white canvas, it's it's the mystery.

And it's a it's a frightening blank stare that I make.

And I just I start in.

My first job is to mess up that white canvas, and that's where I start.

Most of the work is done on the floor.

It's I bend over.

I stand and bend over and that gets that gets tiring.

But it also is enervating because I work around the painting, and I don't start with top being top.

That also comes out of the process.

So my goal is to allow the materials to paint the painting.

And I just want to step away and through that process and through the experimentation and trying new things, I'm hoping to come up with new imagery somewhere in the process.

As I'm putting the paint on and layering up the canvas.

An image will come mainly an organic image, usually a flower or a plant part, not the whole plant.

And then that gives me a door to walk into to expand on the organic nature.

The forms arrive on the canvas out of that process.

And most of my forms have floating aspects to them because we live in such a watery atmosphere and a watery environment.

There are no fixed boundaries in Louisiana.

If you've noticed, you look out on the horizon and it just fades in the distance, primarily because of the humidity.

And that that humidity in the water diffuses all the edges.

So those hard edges don't exist in New Orleans for me.

So my world just floats and it disappears and things come out of the the the up to the surface and things recede.

And it's a give and take process.

So my work is about, for me, beauty and fragility, vulnerability.

So I like to make works that are not necessarily landscapes, not necessarily abstract, but somewhere in that middle zone that fall on that fence.

So you can read them either way.

And that that makes me able to push either direction.

The points that I would like to have people go away with are the points about the importance of beauty and the feelings of fragility or vulnerability.

And just that awareness is enough for me.

That that would be the essence of it.

We live in in beauty.

We want to keep that as much as we can.

We don't want to manipulate it more than we have to.

And we want to I think we want to leave a light footprint Alison Stewart's belief in the transformative power of art is evident in her co-founding the nonprofit Kids Smart with her husband, Campbell Hutchinson.

Also an accomplished artist, a Louisiana native who once practiced law.

Hutchinson is an expressionist painter with an ability to capture the spirit of his subjects.

Art grabs you or else it does it to you.

It's a very visceral reaction I have to art to tell you what it is.

It's something in the gut.

Someone sees a painting of mine and says what they like about it that reminds them of something.

That always thrills me because I feel like I've reached that person and not so much of a message, but a feeling.

I've lived in Louisiana all my life.

Born and raised in North Louisiana.

I love the countryside.

A lot of the animals I know, I think trace back to my early, early years, petted a number of pictures with a string of cows in front of a fence because I've seen so many like that and they don't want to be fenced in.

They want to get out they want to break that fence down.

And animals are very much like people.

And they have the they have the same traits and manifestations.

And I feel like I'm trying to find the character in that animal or that person The landscapes that I paint are generally in the wilderness.

They whether it's Western or Southern or whatever, it's it's out in the wild and so much.

I want that to be preserved.

So my paintings relate a lot to that.

But current paintings, too.

And I want my grandchildren to have the same thing that I had growing up.

And that's access to it.

You know, there's a beauty about the wilderness that's hard to describe unless you're out there and doing it.

We have these creatures that are so much like us and a lot of what I do is personify the animals and their features and their what they do.

And it's hard to explain your art because so much of it is just totally intuitive.

I don't set out, you know, I have a purpose or goal.

I just paint.

And it's very a lot of it's very subconscious.

And one of the things happens when you're painting is that time flies.

You don't know what time it is.

It's just you can be there for hours and have no idea how long you've been there.

If I never showed another piece of my work to anyone else, I would continue to paint because that's what I do.

That's what I love.

A dancer who once performed with the New Orleans Ballet Company, Melissa Bonin, is widely recognized as a leading contemporary Louisiana landscape painter, born of French and Acadian descent.

She lives in Lafayette and has a gallery here in New Orleans.

What drives my art today is nature and things that bring me peace, Joy.

Those two things peace and joy, mostly, and affirming life.

I used to walk down to the bayou, and when I approached the water, it had such a calming effect on me.

I thought to myself, if I could create this feeling in my paintings that would give my life the meaning that I'm searching for.

And so I began to paint those backyard experiences that helped me through that time in my life.

I still love the southern landscape and the area that I'm cellular really connected to.

And so that's what I focus on, those things that stop me and make me pause And then I know it's something worth painting.

I'm kind of a sensory painter.

I feel the moisture, the dew on my skin.

I feel the sunlight and how my pupils contract.

And and I just take note of all the feeling experiences I'm having through my body.

I discovered this style, this technique, just by following whatever gave me joy in my studio.

And I realized that when I was painting and scrubbing the canvas and moving things around like a dancer, I was happier.

So I gave up the idea of painting every leaf and drawing.

That's not me.

That's not who I am.

I definitely focus on atmosphere.

Atmosphere changes.

I don't want detail in my painting.

I want the essence.

Like how can I hone down to the minimal and it still be Louisiana or it still be that thing that I'm trying to capture.

I I have been experimenting with everything from wax to spray paints to water pieces, squash to just I'm trying it all because I know there is something there that will give me great pleasure when I find it.

And maybe it hasn't been done, so I haven't seen it before, but I'm searching for it.

Creating art is a strange living.

Creature of its own itself.

It has energy, and it it just art resonates that thing.

It speaks beyond what we can imagine.

Since his first solo exhibition in 1953, New Orleans native and now Slidell resident, George Dunbar's artwork has been displayed in museums, galleries and exhibits around the world.

In 2008, he received the Governor's Lifetime Achievement Award for contributions to art and culture in Louisiana.

I've often told people that I feel that the most important thing of all in being an artist is to be able to actually say that from across the room that's mine.

And for having have other people feel the same way that your work is recognizably yours.

There are too many people today that can teach someone how to paint like them.

And I think I think the individual idea of having a thumbprint on your work to me is one of the most important aspects of art.

And I think if you really think about it, there's no really important artist that we think of as being important that isn't recognizable across the room.

Surface has always been an important my work.

You can look at even the even the hard edge pieces, and you can tell that the surfaces I'll sandblast some I'll do various things to the stress of having been shot and shot, bird shot and sculpture to patina it.

And so so surface is very important to me.

Action painting was giving up control and using your whole arm in some cases to do a brush stroke.

It really was a form of calligraphy you created an entirely different brushstroke than if you were painting just with your hand, your fingers by using your whole arm.

You you were creating a much more vigorous stroke.

You were giving up control.

But at the same time, you, you were gaining this, this energy that you get in a big stroke, that you get in calligraphy.

There are many disadvantages to being as old as I am in this business, but there are many advantages to and the advantages is that you do learn from experience as well.

And so as you fairly find an old artist most probably then rely more and more on experience.

Giving up control is something that a mature artist learns to do all the time.

Sometimes giving up a certain amount of control really gives you an opportunity to do something better than you would do if you had the control.

Things happen, and the thing that's interesting about it is that you have to be ready to seize that when it does happen.

You have to be willing to say it because you're so intent on something else happening that this thing that you did prepared to have happen.

When it happens, you have to not only see it, but then be able to implement it into the work you're doing.

Renegade Rebel and Renaissance Man Tony Green is an accomplished artist, musician, and independent thinker.

His muse is the colorful cultures of his hometown, New Orleans, and Venice, Italy.

The other city he calls home, Tony Green, in his own words, I got introduced in Europe to music called Gypsy Jazz, The Music of Django Reinhart and I changed from being a rockabilly dude to being a gypsy jazz dude.

And then I met the right teacher and I changed from being a bad ass abstract expressionist to being, you know, coming from the school of honest observation.

I guess I was blessed.

I don't know.

At an early age, I, you know, I was always looking for the truth that's a bit of a cliché, but the phenomena of nature and I was born with an aptitude to draw and paint.

And so what I want to convey with my work is I want to come from a place of strength.

What does that mean?

That means that, you know, I'm well-versed in in human anatomy, in drawing composition, color theory, and that when I'm doing a painting, it has an uplifting effect on people, you know, and ideally a healing effect.

And the same with the music I've got my murals which adorn the city here that I'm very proud of.

And I'm looking to do more murals, you know, because I love painting big murals because it's like writing a novel and putting all the characters in and creating a composition and then a story, you know, a story about humanity.

Here at the top, I have a very large painting, which is actually the Petit Palais in Paris.

But, you know, I'm very attracted to traditional figures, especially the female figure, because the female figure is something that always speaks of the triumph of humanity.

The speaks for harmony, for balance, for the arts, for justice, This is me balancing two careers, you know, art and music.

And but the setting is the French Quarter.

I threw in my flannel carriage, but these are actually gypsies.

So combination of the two.

And there's my mom over here, you know, cheering me on as Django Reinhart with his guitar, one of the great influences in my music.

OK, so it's sort of a amalgams of all the things I love.

I love flannel careers.

And if I can sum up what my paintings are all about, Lisa, what I'm trying to achieve here is a celebration of humanity.

You know, humans are great, man.

We're awesome.

We're made of stardust.

We're the extraterrestrials.

And every day we're bombarded with these negative messages about how bad we are.

That religion is bad, that race is bad, that nationalities bad.

Your neighbor is bad.

I'm bad, you're bad.

We're all bad.

Well, I disagree abstract artist Mallory Page is best known for her large scale monochromatic paintings.

She's a self-taught painter who in her own words, is charged with documenting the intangibles.

Her gallery is here in New Orleans.

Abstraction and the way inspiration for abstraction comes about is so very mystical to me.

I think there's something between your tangible paints and then your final masterpiece.

Whatever goes on in between there, I'm not really sure, but it's it's something that's indescribable.

Whatever you're thinking and envisioning when you start is never what comes out in the end.

I've had to let go of intentions and let what's going to come out, come out.

So usually when I start a piece, I kind of just like I let let myself understand that it's going to go where it's going to go.

And at the end of it, it's going to be something beautiful.

Regardless of whether or not it's what I intended to begin with in the first place.

There's a large element of the layered process in my work because I'm sending down several hundreds of layers of paintings, and through that some of them start really rough and then smooth out, and then some of them have pieces of the roughness still in it.

I think the process is about letting little bits of every layer come through, and I think that's what makes the work as a whole move.

I would say that happens a lot with color as well because I'll be focusing on what's going on and digesting and and you know, you take that self-awareness and that so that what's fascinating you at the time and for some reason simultaneously for me, a color arrives with it.

And so I turn that into, OK, this is going to be this sensory process and this is going to be what sensory this person absorbs.

And I think having the color along with it really helps to give it that extra punch.

And that's why I paint monochromatic so that it is this one sensory, this one thought, this one emotion.

I mean, the process is all about documenting the intangible.

So it's really, really difficult to describe it.

When you when you get into that, you can create it, but then you have to let go of what you've made so that the person viewing it can interpret it for themselves.

It's like musicians set out to create their art, but they want people to interpret it in their own way.

And I think that my paintings are very similar to that.

I want people to come in and interact with it on their own level.

This kind of career, this luck, this good fortune takes a lot of work and a lot of your time and a lot of your energy.

But I also think it's something that is well, it's follows you and find you.

It makes you do it.

It doesn't give you a choice.

I've had such a fun experience with my work.

I determine success based upon today.

I want to make this, and every day I feel like I get to do that and I get to seek out projects that I really love and when I want to make a bigger piece and when I want to grow bigger, they get bigger.

And when I, I think that is the luckiest thing as an artist, to be able to do.

I don't think it gets any better than that.

Born in Mississippi, Jason Horton moved to New Orleans at 17, where his creativity and authentic nature rose to the surface.

His paintings, with their innovative texture techniques are collected throughout the United States.

I love to color as a small child, you know, I would get rewarded with crayons and paint supplies and whatnot.

And then I guess in middle school and early high school, my friends would pay me to finish their assignments and art class that they couldn't finish.

So I learned early that you could actually make a living and make some money out of holding crayons and getting stuff done on paper.

A lot of it was just memories of with my family being out fishing for catfish or whatnot.

As a kid, you know, you're it's kind of ingrained with you, those beautiful, warm sunsets over the water and whatnot and the sounds and the lilies and everything else that's occupied in the water, experimenting with taking something very old and bringing it into the, you know, into the modern, which is what I kind of feel is what I'm still doing.

I'm taking, you know, elements of nature, different animals and species and kind of modernizing them with my own technique and whatnot.

And a lot of times I'll find photographs that really just they just grab you.

Like, that's stunning.

And nature has this funny way.

It's got its own imagination that I like.

How is that real?

And so I try to do my best to either capture that or, you know, find a good base and then elaborate on it and change it and, you know, make it more interesting or whatever you come up with in your own mind.

So I mostly paint with translucent colors that overlap.

You can go from a deep violet to a blue and then add different nuances to change the color.

By the end of it, you have a completely wonderful color that's made of hundreds of different colors and elements.

Each piece takes about 30 days.

And so I usually try to put on a couple of layers a day.

There's usually a drying period of about 646 hours in between.

And so you get this wonderful it changes every day right in front of your eyes.

So I think that's the most fascinating thing about art is just working with it and getting creative problem solving essentially.

So you create these interesting things that you hadn't thought about before because you hadn't hit that problem yet, or what was dissatisfying about it before.

Mostly it's just you'll see a piece and then it's, it's the strangest thing.

So it's like looking at a blank piece of paper in the image.

It's just there.

I don't know how to explain it, but you already know what it's supposed to be, and then you just kind of work around the elements to get it done and, and you make it suitable or you please yourself with it.

So to me, I look back and I've made some major progressions and I hope to make a lot more within the next ten years.

And it's just an undying dream, you know, it's a wonderful painting and doing artwork is a wonderful thing and it's just nice to see you know how far you can stretch your creativity, how, how much you can, you know, perfect your craft and push yourself constantly and see where see how far it goes.

Because it never really stops until you do regarded as one of the greatest colorist of all time, John Slonim was captivated by Louisiana's Broad Palette when he attended Tulane in the 1970s since then, the New York City artist has had more than 350 exhibitions at prestigious galleries and museums all around the world.

He's also returned to Louisiana to restore and to reside part time at the Albanian plantation along the bayou.

Tash, it's here that we found on Slonim in his own words.

I mean, I'm a painter.

It's not considered the hip as the world to be.

I can't help doing what I do.

I'm just housing all this imagery.

You know, I love the word exotic, which basically means the unknown.

To be a computer.

I choose it to be exotic out.

That's only been seen by the guy who bulldozes the one acre of land that it lives on in the middle of the rain forest and no one will ever know about or identify.

You know, I thought to be a painter was a wonderful thing.

Art is self driven.

Sometimes you have these breakthrough moments.

I just attack you know, I'm in a place they've all my materials ready to go set up, and I just attack this white surface.

I paint all day when I'm in the studio.

I love to paint at night when nobody's around.

It's like giving birth, you know?

That's the old comparison, you know, it has this wonderful moments, and then it's hard work, and sometimes they're divided into sections and go on for six months.

Sometimes I do very I do what I call warm up paintings and figure out that term from.

And so often I start with little ten by eight paintings, which I have prepared the night before.

And I start my day with these little today.

They're usually rabbits like on the wall here.

And I collect the frames of flea markets and from pickers and whatnot.

It's kind of wonderful the way my life has been, the vision so that I'm traveling and giving lectures some different houses.

And then I have this intense moment of creativity.

I was always as a child, fascinated by Picasso's filling up these great chateaus and seemingly leaving them full and just buying the next one and filling that up.

And that was portrayed a lot in the fifties.

I love the idea of the aged artists like George.

OK, Keef and Picasso and you know, the 19 year old painter seems like kind of stupid for painters to not live to nine.

They, you know, it's just part of the evolution To New Orleans banker Cleveland Powell.

The universe extends beyond executive and nonprofit boardrooms and to the intense beauty of the natural landscape of southern Louisiana and its coast.

His paintings have been featured in Louisiana cultural publications and many local galleries You get outside himself, you get outside what you were doing, and you can see the universe when you get out of five in the morning and start coming up.

That's Godspell.

That's Godspell.

And to be able to try to recreate that, you really are.

I really do.

Can outside my own universe And it's not when I sit there and I see art, Mother Nature and I take a picture I bring it back and draw one created in my mind where I use the camera a lot When I first got started and I studied the camera a lot of it's in my head.

I don't do playing.

I don't go like a that that's been a.

Never done that.

I think what I saw what somebody else has done that a painting like that, I that is well, I have a passion for wildlife.

I have a passion for nature.

And most of our work is landscape.

It's what I see on a hunting trip.

Five in the morning, the sun comes up.

But what I see on a fishing trip with all these animals, it's all beautiful.

And I try to recreate it on what does from.

A lot of the joy comes in and work it up the next morning, drive It's like a kid on Christmas morning wake up and it's the same thought.

It looks like it's that kind of world.

It's just something that you have done and created and changed it and modified it.

It's also stuck.

And then for having somebody else appreciate Not many professionals come back and say, I've been fortunate in my profession to have that, but it is to me that ten times more over.

So it's it's a lot of fun.

You know, for instance, self-actualization as well.

Scientists turned artist Richard Swanson is known for his metal sculptures made of found unaltered objects His works have been shown at the Louisiana Art and Science Museum in Baton Rouge and Longview House and Gardens in New Orleans.

My friends were animals when you lived on the prairie, you really don't have friends to play with and you don't have time to play anywhere.

So as a young boy, nine years old, I drove or hit a horses all day long.

After the war, then we were able to get a tractor and join the industrial society.

And you can imagine my admiration for a tractor having sat behind four horses all day long with only a four horsepower So I was very addicted to tractors, and I took and collected John Deere tractors.

And I actually restored 64 of them to my collection, and I got that done.

I needed something else to do.

And so I just started picking up all scrap parts from these tractors and sticking together, and I made animals with them.

OK, I went back to the business of the Primus out of nature, which is a very principle theme.

I want to make the contrast between the industrial society and the primacy of nature.

Those connections are essential in the art that I do.

That's the message I try to get across.

How can I symbolize that in these animals?

How do I how can I make you recognize that that this is just a bunch of junk or this is an animal how can I get a message to you that we need to respect the primacy of nature?

Here's the key this is a piston and a connector on all your engines.

And cars are made with these things.

Some people don't even know what this at any rate, in the beginning, all they could do is push in one direction.

OK, bring it back.

Push.

Some guy came up with this notion of a connecting rod for all of a sudden we were able to make linear motion go into circular motion and talk and once we got that, then the industrial revolution really took off.

We got steam engines and propellers and gears and police and and belts and all sorts of things that would alleviate muscle.

OK, so here's the key.

This connects the industrial society to the primacy of nature, in my view.

And I don't expect anybody walking up to a piece of art and seeing all this connecting rods all over it.

To, to recognize that connection.

But it's important to me, OK, I want to plant that connection in there.

I want to try to express that conflict of a background, OK?

I want to regurgitate my subconsciousness I made these animals the way I see them.

I didn't go and get a picture because I didn't want to do that.

I wanted to make the horse what I think the horse looks like.

OK, so I exaggerate and I make it abstract.

I bring out the character of the animals much as I can even be constrained by the pieces of junk I can find.

OK, but the reason I do it is I enjoy it it's satisfying to me and gives me something to do.

And then I try to give this message of this connection between our background and nature and where we're going now and this.

And I do it by trying to connect them together with a connecting or but I also do it because I get enjoyment out of people looking at it like that's why I have art in public places, because it actually gives them some enjoyment.

And so I like that.

That's my reward.

To paraphrase another Louisiana artist, Louis Armstrong, if you have to ask what art is, you'll never know.

Well, we hope you know a little more about the artists who are making Louisiana one of the most vital and innovative art scenes in the nation.

From the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans, I'm Tom Gregory.

Thank you for joining us.

And thank you for turning on Louisiana artist Spotlight.