Coming up on Art Rocks, an artist who painted Louisiana as he found it when he stepped off a ship here 150 years ago.

He is so precise with his style.

I think this is what makes him so important for us today.

We made a sculptor who expresses shapes of nature in stone.

My drawings are pathetic sometimes because I see it, but I can't put it on paper.

That's not my medium.

Chisel and stone is my medium.

And here, from the woman behind a semi-autobiographical musical feast.

My take on them is probably a little twisted.

It also makes fun of musicals at the same time.

And a group of musicians who are making stringed instruments sing to a whole new tune.

It's the arts, so it ain't easy.

But I do think that we are stronger together than we ever were or would have been separately.

It's all ahead on this edition of Art Rough.

Art Rocks is made.

Possible.

By the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana.

Public.

Broadcasting and by viewers like you.

Hello and thanks for joining us for Art Rock.

I'm James Fox Smith, publisher of Country Roads magazine.

Now, many historians believe that art plays a vital role in chronicling the way people lived in years gone by.

Marie Adrianne Percy, vivid depictions of Louisiana as he saw it in the mid 1800s, illustrate why art from pre photographic times serves as a vital resource for the study of history.

He is a French horn artist, photographer, photographer, art teacher, civil engineer and architect.

His real results mean he is so precise with his style.

I think this is what makes him so important for us today is the fact that you see the surviving plantation mansion, but you don't usually see all of the accompanying fences and outbuildings and the kind of gardens that they actually had.

Well, these are the kinds of things that Mr. Press records.

Mary Adrienne Percy emigrated to Louisiana from France at about the age of 20 and spent the remaining three decades of his life chronicling the southern way of life.

Percy is well known for his depiction of the French opera house that opened in New Orleans in 1859 and was destroyed by fire in 1919.

He is also highly regarded for making the only known painting of an opulent, antebellum steamship before the Civil War.

Though this piece is only 17 inches wide, Percy focused obsessively on every detail.

It is the absolutely the only one.

It was done on the eve of the Civil War, just as though he knew something was going to happen.

And of course, they didn't have a terrible event.

And so this is literally your only painting of the interior, the Mississippi River steamboat in color on the painting of the princess.

There's a table in the foreground.

It has a little note on it.

It looks just like scribble.

If you put a magnifying glass on that, it says passengers are allowed to pay in office and the offices to the left again.

So he simply does not miss.

About the painter appears to have devoted more time to capturing life on plantations than anything else.

His work opens a window revealing how men and women dressed the relationships between farmers and livestock and how various animals shed spaces in what was at that time, largely an agricultural society.

It gives me a perfectly good view of what the South was up to the 1860, 1861, before the War of Northern Aggression.

As we as we're prone to call it here.

So I get it.

I get a rapid, quick fire view of what this region looked like on the plantation road or on the river or wherever it happened to be, of what something of what life was at a very elevated level, as well as the character of the times and the style of the times, the way people lived, the way they interacted with one another or with their own animals or with their own occupations.

I see perfectly.

It's interesting to compare 20 large posters that advertised real estate available for sale in the 1860s.

Some of these listings were created by draftsmen or illustrators.

Others were painted and drawn by person.

The advertisements were preserved in the notarial records of New Orleans.

It is clear that illustrators tried to make their offerings look attractive, but there is no depth.

And then there are the persons brimming with enticing detail, inviting sunlight, begging a buyer to visit the properties.

The artist's ability to draw the eye to desired elements while masking extraneous areas is evident.

Person is also being celebrated for a rare depiction of a sugar house from days gone by.

It is, as far as I know, of the only painting that is strictly dedicated to the sugar house and to the actual people.

Workers in the field cutting the cane and it has everything in it that you would want.

And I think it's a particularly valuable historical item for us because as you know, in your own lifetime, we've gone from having 100 sugar mills to better.

We have now four or five.

So this is a very exciting image as well.

Also included in Perspex work, a porcelain vase featuring a southern cityscape before the Civil War, the city of Baton Rouge.

As person it.

Today.

Much of Percy work is in the holdings of the LSU Museum of Art in the Shaw Center in downtown Baton Rouge.

The historic New Orleans collection also holds a number of important person art pieces, no matter where you live in Louisiana.

Opportunities to connect with the arts are everywhere, if only you know where to look.

So here's a list of some of the goings on in the arts around our state.

To learn more about these and other events in Louisiana, visit the website at LTB dot org slash art rocks or pick up a free copy of Country Roads magazine.

LP's Art Rocks website also features an archive of previous episodes.

So to see any segments again, just log on to LP PB dot org.

Karen Hale was in her thirties.

The first time she picked up a chisel.

That marked the beginning of a new calling sculpting stone.

Now, years later, you can find hale, sensuous, organic life forms installed in buildings, parks and cityscapes around the United States highlands, now exploring new mediums and fresh forms, showing that passion isn't always set in stone.

I never saw myself as a stone sculptor or any kind of a sculptor.

So when my kids went to school, I decided to go to the art academy here in Cincinnati, and it was there that I was introduced to Stone Sculpture and I was in my thirties at that point.

I think what attracted me to stone carving and what I saw in it was that not only was it a challenge mentally, but physically.

I went home tired and I started to go home tired from the physicality of doing stone sculpture.

Most of what I do in bar relief stone carving is commissioned work.

It's from either corporate America hospitals or people's private homes.

My greatest joy comes from when they just say, Do what you do.

And then I can give them a narrative about what they're talking about based on natural forms that I gather from nature flowers, leaves, even animals, birds.

To begin the process.

Karen sees the piece in her mind and then must put it on paper for her clients.

My drawings are pathetic sometimes because I see it, but I can't put it on paper.

That's not my medium.

Chisel and stone is my medium.

Once I have the drawing, a grid, the drawing, it's a scale I'm drawing to match the size of the stone.

And I transfer that drawing to the stone, and then I begin carving.

I just take the edge of the chisel and I start out writing the form, say, it's a bird.

It'll be like a scratching the surface where I outline that form that's going to pop forward.

That's the part that's going to stick out.

So everything surrounding that bird has to come off.

Then there's a leaf.

Then I have to take everything around that leaf off without losing the other leaves.

This is thinking three dimensionally.

So you have to know which things are coming forward and which things are staying back.

When I make a mistake, nobody knows it because a leaf can be just about any kind of shape you want to make it.

The tools that are used now are all pneumatic, but when I began carving it was all hammer and chisel, like they did in the olden days.

But it takes forever to get a piece finished.

And so I was introduced into pneumatic tools with a special hammer that's very small version of a jackhammer in the street, so only that chisels don't lock in to handhold both pieces inside it.

So you're working both hands, both arms at the same time, and you control the amount of pressure that comes through that air hose so you don't take off too much or you can take off more by having more pressure through my stone that I use mostly at this point in my life is Indiana limestone.

Most of it comes from Bedford, Indiana.

I choose limestone number one, because it's available.

Number two, because it's soft.

Number three, it wears well outdoors.

And number four, it forces me to put a really good design in it.

SD one Northern Kentucky's wastewater and stormwater utility is using art to.

Educate people about our precious.

Resource water.

They commissioned Karen to create three sculptures Water Gift of the Earth, Water Source of Life and Water Sculpture of the Land.

I actually went down to the quarries and I found these huge pores of stone that are probably 36 inches across.

And I thought, Wow, what are these?

And they said, Oh, that's just garbage.

Those were core samples.

They were each five feet tall, so we cut them in half.

So we had these four pieces in and then there was going to be a fountain.

So we had to call the centers out.

So the title comes from Water Sculpture of the Land, which the water cuts through the erosion, reveals the fossils, which tells the history of the land and how many millions of years ago and the fossils, some of them were carved.

Some of them were made out of terracotta clay.

And that was a project I worked in collaboration with Allan Nairn, who is a Cincinnati potter, now working at the Brooklyn Pottery.

Having worked with Stone for years.

Karen has taken on a new medium.

Clay I had no idea what I was doing in Clay, so I thought, How can I make clay more a part of me and me, a part of the clay?

So all of a sudden, one day it just came to me.

Why not carved the clay?

And then I found out, too, because I have essential tremor that I can't throw.

And poor clay.

I can't throw clay because my hand shakes the whole way up.

So I hire somebody to throw a basic pestle for me.

And then I embellished it.

I add the handles, the decorative handles to it.

I add the stuff that make the big.

I've focused on pitchers.

And then the pitchers reminded me of Bert.

So now all I do are these vessels in clay that are burnt.

And once I figured that out and I liked that I had this carved clay vessel, then I thought, Something's not right.

So then I decided I'll carve a base for it out of limestone.

So then I brought my stone carving back into it.

So now I'm conflicted between carving and making clay.

But I found a way to keep the stone carving into my life by creating these vessels.

So that's how that all got started.

And right now, the clay vessels are just occupying all my time.

I can't imagine not doing this.

I mean, the only way I won't do this is if I'm dead because this is what I feel like.

I was born to do.

That is my passion.

And I think that's what my legacy is, to just fulfill your dreams by doing your passion and follow your bliss.

To see more of Karen Hale's stone sculptures, visit Karen Hale Dotcom in Houston, Texas.

Tamara Cooper's semi-autobiographical musicals have kept her audiences laughing for more than a decade now.

Two Amari Cooper is old as hell deals with mortality the only way she knows how by laughing at it might.

Be Who is Taylor Cooper?

Well.

Well, I always had the feeling it would be on that tombstone.

What would be.

It would be in your obituary during the.

And I think.

I think funny, funny, funny.

Lady, lady is is is very important to me.

I am I real champion champion of comedy.

Comedy who is trying.

To find.

Ways in ways that I'm a graduate of graduate yesterday.

And my dear friend, your friend and brother brother Jason Miller and other and I both went to school there, at school there.

We had both run out of some knowledge writing that Jason wanted to do in a way he had really had written, like in my You Are You and we just met and we started working on things.

I think, like with everything, the more you do, the more you do something.

You learn to learn the best way, the way to learning by doing.

And and so that's how that's how I began.

To get a.

Love means love musicals.

I was totally very much into the old elevator after musicals and sort of in my blood, my mike on comedy started.

I said it off on Expendables Assassins.

At the same time, I do a lot of play out of my whole, like, real life story, story.

Your answering thoughts, thoughts, freak out breakouts concerns and then put them in to musical musical theater for some people are just full of jokes that, you know, it's almost like I'm going out there to be there, be on stage, stage for paying, paying ordinary actors like a family therapist.

I have, you know.

Great moments sometimes, sometimes shocking myself.

It was so it was set up by somebody or whatever with an audience of champions.

Came in with a gun to my head and was kind of dismissed.

Who?

Maybe they did.

They said it was different three years or so.

It was a widow show, a year every year.

But there is a sort of a vaudevillian stand up and before the formula and then this.

And then what happens when you don't you don't see your therapist?

It's like a one woman show in a show with about 10,000 sarcasm consultants because you can't have a grown ups.

It's fun.

It's not this this show.

So this is how in my my 16 original show I'm gonna.

To Titanic on game day.

I do make some make statements in the show about about the entertainment industry especially for women or women of a certain age sort of is harder and harder and harder to find roles of.

And we certainly see that in Hollywood.

Hollywood where these these, you know, leading actor leading Hollywood is sort of you're here after after 40 already or do very strange things to their face.

He says statistics around go around.

In a coordinator or and you're only allowed to land on end or all the week following some reporting roles.

Mother, mother, stepmother, stepmother.

Stepmother.

That is all that is.

Oh, God, Greek got you got.

What are you saying?

I can I can't just show the camera.

Show you can do good show.

Show good, good.

Some girl girl is the lead, I guess.

I guess I make that point but but I've been lucky because I get old.

My old herald here of of Crown Star in my own show shows, I have I have audience bodies and virtually actually in the shows.

And so they approached me with some that started it started as kids the kids even to that that are still still filming the show.

It's like a family kind of renovation tradition.

There's something somebody excavating her and to turn every summer summer to see what up that what you're doing for doing the thing as important as important as it is, it is for people people to connect to that they may not bring out maybe, maybe darker, heavier, heavier that they can relate to, relate to or question about it.

And think I think I think comedy is also just as and just as important the need to learn to love, share the share of that, to be able to learn about ourselves in my life.

Maybe answers are harder and and and and find the humor.

The humor in it, I think, was really importantly important for us.

US, God and.

So more information visit catastrophic theater dot Ojai bringing you back home.

Now for our Louisiana Treasure segment this week, we're visiting the Louisiana Veterans Memorial Park in Lake Charles and celebrating a major tribute to one of our nation's war heroes.

The people of Lake Charles develop the Veterans Memorial Park to show their gratitude to all the men and women in Louisiana who proudly served their country.

One of the focal points of the park is a beautiful statue of a Lake Charles native who was killed in the line of duty.

First Lieutenant Douglas.

Before day, he sacrificed his own life while shielding the rest of his soldiers in his platoon from a mine explosion in 1968.

He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor in 1970, and the bronze statue was erected in Veterans Memorial Park in 2013 to commemorate his bravery, First Lieutenant Fournier's image was carefully crafted by artist Jane Stein.

LACROIX He stands helmet in hand and weapon pointed down to show that his mission is now complete and he is home.

People visiting the memorial can read the words of four days.

Sun urging us to not only to remember his father, but to consider how they too can make a difference in the lives of others.

This project was funded by many individuals and organizations, including members of Four Days 1961 graduating class at Lake Charles High School.

In the world of performance, collaboration between artists of different disciplines challenge, energize and ultimately produce fresh and vital works.

In this segment, we go within the Dayton Performing Arts Alliance as members prepare their latest high energy collaborative production.

As a new ballet springs into production, the Dayton Performing Arts Alliance is in the midst of another creative collaboration.

I just find it endlessly fascinating to watch the work that Karen does with the dancers in the studio, because she's, in a way, essentially doing the same job that I do, but in a in a different medium, a different discipline, with different language.

It's always interesting to see how someone else handles the interpersonal relationship with the artists.

For every minute of choreography you see, it's between an hour and 2 hours of work.

But you really have to find things within the music, within the layers to be able to start to pull steps from it.

I can remember times when I would see a phrase in my head and then look and see that it actually came to fruition.

It's just mind boggling.

That's what I thought in my head.

This is so great.

It's also nice to see what the dancers have to bring to it.

I mean, you might give them something.

It may not work.

And so you're seeing where they're going to go with it.

That's a really important way for a dancer to grow because it helps them become choreographers themselves.

It helps them to listen to the music better.

They become part of the creation.

People will say, Oh, it's Karen's ballet.

And I would say, You know, it's not it's not my because I didn't do that step.

They did that step.

The preparation routine for the musicians and the dancers.

Is very different.

The dancers, you know, take a fairly long period of time to learn the work.

Standard is a five week rehearsal period to put on a show, and then our weeks are normally six day weeks working about 9 to 5.

The musicians, on the other hand, you know, they have the music in hand about a month ahead of time and they work on their own.

For us to put together a ballet performance in three rehearsals, including a dress rehearsals with the stage and everything else, is a fairly normal occurrence.

And it sounds insane, but that's the way we do it.

As long as everyone does their homework, we're good.

Neil is wonderful.

Neil Gelman, our conductor, because he will come in to the studio and watch and read the music at the same time.

I spend time in the ballet studio watching the piece and learning what happens and making little squiggles of my score so that I know what's happening in the dance.

These are the music we.

Can't ask for more than that, and I think that that's one of the key components to getting it right.

Dancing to live music is so much better.

I love it.

When we're dancing with the Philharmonic.

You can feel energy in the building.

It's just a complete package.

You can hear the instruments better.

You can really hear like the soul of the violinist.

The spontaneity and the energy that you get in a live performance that you can't really get anywhere else.

And that's what makes it so exciting.

It's the difference between microwavable meal.

Or.

A five star restaurant.

I mean, you're going to get food one way or the other.

But how do you do it?

The new ballet is about the decisions we make in our journey through life.

Four weeks from curtain, creative decisions are beginning to take their final form.

We might finish it today or tomorrow, so I don't actually know what how's it how it's going to end yet.

I don't even have the music for it.

Three weeks before the first rehearsal, the librarian has the parts ready for us to pick up.

One of the challenges of playing a new piece of music is there are often no preconceptions about what we've got to do first rehearsal and put it together.

And sometimes it just clicks and it makes sense.

And sometimes we all look at each other like, What?

What's going on?

So that's why we have Neil.

Creating something new takes inspiration, energy and courage.

The anxiety starts back up when you get into the theater and then you look at it for the first time as an audience viewer and you think, What the heck did I do?

But you just have to walk away and trust that the baby will come out perfectly with all ten fingers and ten toes and everybody will be happy.

You know, the awesome show.

I love collaborating.

I think the fact that we have this very unique collaboration between the Philharmonic and the opera underbelly, I think we're still the only city in the states that has joined forces.

It gives us the opportunity to do things that we otherwise wouldn't be able to do.

And those things are starting to bear fruit.

And I think it's the arts, so it ain't easy.

But I do think that we are stronger together than we ever were or would have been separately.

That's going to do it for this edition of Art Rocks.

But remember, you can always watch episodes of Art Rock set, LP B dot org slash art rocks.

You can also find out more about what's going on in our state on both the Art Rocks website and country roads magazine dot com.

So until next time.

I'm James Fox Smith and thanks for watching.