Up next on Art Rocks, a husband and wife team in Alexandria with a magical talent for turning wood into sculptural masterpieces.

I like thinking of what you want to do for a project and using the best medium that works the best for it.

We meet the father of modern Iranian sculpture.

He just gave a body to it because that was just a drawing in 3D.

Then I realized that that was a great discovery.

Make the connection between art and culture.

Folk art is constantly evolving.

It's an expression of a particular people.

And get to know an artist who's taking pumpkin carving to a whole new level.

Just thought that looks like an awful lot of fun.

I should try that.

That's all right.

Now on Art Rocks.

Art Rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.

Hello, and thank you for joining us.

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

It's an oft repeated trope that in relationships, opposites attract.

But one Alexandria couple has discovered that when it comes to creating arresting large scale art installations, they are always on the same page.

The combination of the two of us is wonderful because if I can draw it or make it out of pipe cleaners, anything that he can kind of see what I'm talking about, he can build it into a structure and then we go from there.

She's better at any of this stuff than I am.

She just goes on to other things and lets me have my part.

Janet and Carl Aarons have always express themselves artistically, but once they became empty nesters, the couple began taking on projects on a much larger scale.

We were in charge of Mardi Gras ball for a then a crew of women and their gypsies.

And so every year we did their decorations and it was kind of a year long event.

Every year was a different thing.

So Carl built some big pieces for those and we would build on the theme we've done The elephant that you can read on has a hotel on the top of it, and it was all decorated and painted.

Carl built a horse one year that's made to scale from a horse that was a friend of ours.

So how does one make a horse like this?

From plywood.

Carl says he carved the head and then built the frame of the horse from plywood.

He then used a special saw to cut strips of wood that were one eighth of an inch thick and then delicately and painstakingly wrapped it around the frame to capture the grace and power of a living, breathing horse.

Carl says this project only took a couple of months of working nights and weekends between the two of them.

The couple is willing to tackle just about any medium.

I like thinking of what you want to do for a project and using the best medium that works the best for it, I guess you'd say.

So it could be wood, it could be iron, it could be clay paintings, anything that kind of like it all.

And I love doing a show that puts it all together.

You know, how many different ways can you do something?

My favorite is concrete, and we started out with this bench that's in the garden and we like that.

Then I've done three or four for, I guess, the five heads.

One is right here by the back door.

It's out of concrete.

That or planters that you can put a plant in concrete.

Whereas you build in a where's your arm out.

So I decided I better get into something a little bit lighter.

So I started doing pottery.

I like to do hand building and also throw.

I like the hand building the best because you can come up with something so different.

You know, I've done practical pottery, like dishes or plates, so the throwing is more traditional and but you can do pretty much anything you can think of if your hand built in it.

So I really like that the best.

There's we want to know about glazing.

And when you get a piece that you really like and you like the way it turned out, it's like a miracle because sometimes it just the glazes aren't always the same color as they're going to turn out.

You really have to use your imagination and think of how you want it to turn out.

I think that Frida, here it is, is fantastic.

And it was a little organ grinder box up on a shelf in there that she made out of clay.

It's really good.

She has tremendous imagination and ideas and she thinks of things for me to do.

She's an artist.

My artistic director.

The Art of Spain, an exhibit of Spanish religious icons that travel to the Aaron's home city called on them to develop pieces using a Louisiana material not often associated with works of art.

We cut cypress knees and made angels out of the Cyprus knees because it was the biggest thing I could think of for these huge round tables in this huge room.

What could you make angels out of?

That would be substantial enough to show up in this room.

And so we did Angels from Every Walk of Life really.

Karl's experience working with wood goes all the way back to his childhood.

I've always done Carved and Whittled.

When I was a kid, I always like to carve.

I just never thought about doing it seriously on any scale.

I went out fishing trip out west and saw some totem poles and took a picture of some of them.

And my brother just happened to have a big cedar tree, fell in his yard and brought it to me.

And I said, Well, that's the totem pole.

Getting inspired to see something.

You think of what it could be and you become inspired to do it, to make it.

Not only does the couple work seamlessly together in tandem, Janet particularly enjoys collaborating with other artists, as she did in a recent show, where each artist was responsible for his or her own table setting.

It was a very successful show.

It was interesting.

Each person just went over and above and knocked themselves out doing it, and it was so fun to see it all together because every person was very detailed.

We know the ones that are good at this and good at that.

And and when you put them all together, it just comes out so great.

And that's kind of how whatever we did together is better than just one of us doing it.

The Aaron's Home and Garden serves as a beautiful showcase of their diverse, striking body of work, and they say most of their shows are sellouts as artists.

Neither Janet nor Carl had any formal training.

They simply learned from doing and redoing until the concepts in their minds eyes took shape.

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 and culture around our state.

To learn more about these and other events in Louisiana, visit LP dot org slash Art Roxy or pick up a free copy of Country Roads magazine LP's Art Rock's website also features an archive of previous episodes.

So to see any segment again, just log on to LP B O.G.

Influential Iranian sculpture Parviz Tena Vali was born in Tehran, but he's lived in Vancouver, Canada since 1989, influenced heavily by his native country's history, culture and traditions.

Ten of all his work appeared at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, giving visitors an introduction to the man considered the father of modern Iranian sculpture.

He's like a blank spot on the radar of the US consciousness.

In the arts.

That's unthinkable and it's unforgivable.

So here we have this amazing opportunity to redress the situation.

The situation is that Parviz Tan obviously is regarded as one of the world's leading contemporary artists and certainly the highest selling Iranian one for 60 years, he's produced sculpture, painting and jewelry, all rooted in Persian myths and culture.

And yet the 77 year old artist is only receiving his first major U.S. exhibition now at the Davis Museum, says its director, Lisa Fishman.

Parviz has been collecting, you know, tribal materials, handicraft and artisanal wares for decades.

And what he's demonstrated through that activity is the kind of richness, the visual richness, the material richness of the common landscape of daily life in Iran.

Well, I must tell you, culture is flourishing.

For as long as he can remember.

Tangible.

He says he's been enamored with poetry and music.

It became his wellspring as a child growing up in Tehran.

And today it colors his descriptions of his work.

Cages are a recurrent theme.

For most people.

Cage is like a jail, you know, like a prison.

But not for me.

No.

In my culture, poets talk about their trust as a cage in that chest.

There is a nightingale singing all the time, gets agitated.

And that's what causes the poet to write poetry.

There is an optimism and beauty that has infused tangible his work, even when it wasn't present in his life.

The Iranian revolution forced him to become an absent artist.

There were a lot of difficulties to make a sculpture.

There was no fuel, no power, and that very little could have been done in my studio.

That's why I started mostly reading, researching and traveling the country at the end, when I think about it, it was very fruitful and very much of learning for me.

Because it caused you to do things you wouldn't.

Have.

Yes, exactly.

Exactly.

Maybe if it wasn't heavy due to all these turbulences, maybe I would have continued repeating myself in my art.

Throughout war, attentively, literally continued to make something out of nothing.

He is the Farsi word for nothing.

And in the 1960s town of Old, he began interpreting the word as it exists in the form of its Arabic script.

The Heat is now a project.

50 years running.

I just gave it body to it because that was just a drawing in 3D and that was only the start of it.

And then I realized that that was a great discovery because it was very elastic and was very adaptable with other objects.

Does it have a character for you?

A personality?

I he doesn't have a gender.

I mean, this is a good question.

And sometime he becomes like the beloved.

It's a female and sometime is like a friend or a male.

And so to me, it's a genderless.

A sculpture.

Today tangible.

He produces his work from studios in both Vancouver and Tehran, although he's currently embroiled in a suit with Iranian authorities.

The mayor of Tehran, who was a cultured man, he expressed his love to have it to turn my museum, my house into a museum with some of my artworks, and I accepted it.

I thought that was a great idea.

But then soon after him, Ahmadinejad became the mayor.

He wasn't the culture man.

He didn't like any of that.

And he closed my resume down and I had to fight for nearly six years to get my house back.

But my artwork was taken away.

Even so, for his lifetime of prolific output, ten of all, he remains an iconic figure in Iran.

His optimism is just as pervasive.

Will you ever slow down?

Not so far.

Not so far.

The age hadn't changed.

Me and I work the same as I used to do 20 years ago.

30 years ago.

I. I don't get tired of my work.

I, me.

But you're lucky.

I think there are a lot of people who wish they could say that.

I think I'm lucky.

Although ten of all his work is no longer on display in Massachusetts, one of our sister stations captured it before the exhibit moved on out west.

Now to New Mexico, where Albuquerque artist Catalina Delgado Trunk explores the mythologies of pre-Colombian, Mexico.

She shares inspirations drawn from the sophisticated Mesoamerican cultures that flourished for more than 4000 years before the first contact with Europeans.

Let's take a look.

We all come here and we're all asking the same question Where do we come from?

Why in the world are we here and where are we going?

And every civilization, every culture, every group has to answer those questions for themselves because it gives it a meaning to your personal life myths.

And so these these these questions are very, very powerful.

And every culture is an immigrant.

I live between two worlds.

And for many years I really didn't feel like I had a sense of place and a sense of identity.

All immigrants come with a basket, and there are three things in that basket that we all bring into the country, and that's food, language and traditions.

And I felt, well, then I had to start making use of my three seeds.

I found that the easiest way for me was through my artwork, particularly with oral stories.

And I am a folk artist, okay?

I work Papel Picado, which is good paper, and it's called Papel Corteva or Papel Picado Either way has a very long, long history.

You have to remember that folk art and whatever discipline it's expressed, it's constantly evolving.

It's an expression of a particular people, of who they are, their identity.

As you search for identity and as you search for a sense of place, you obviously go back to your past.

What is it that you heard?

What is it that you learned as a child?

So you had to dig into the memory?

And that's what I started doing.

And some of the myths.

No, I'm kind of half way.

So I did a lot of a lot of research on them.

I can see I have an awful lot of books.

I do a lot of reading.

And, you know, I keep going back to to Mexico City and exploring and concentrated on one particular area.

So the southeastern edge of Mexico City Mystique.

Male Part of the comment, these are the areas that really stick to the real old traditions.

I'm not an anthropologist, I'm not an archeologist.

I just learned a lot of this stuff from osmosis when I was growing up.

Family stories, oral histories from from neighbors and just mainly listening to makes me remember a lot of what I was.

I was exposed a lot to the coyotes, as they're called.

These are the books that were written in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, and I think there were only about 22 that survived, most of them in Europe.

And I have a reproductions of but just all in one they'll pick the graphs.

It's it's not thriving.

I've always been very attracted to them.

And growing up in the culture that I did, you're surrounded by all of these symbols.

What's interesting in Mesoamerica, the idea of sin, heaven or hell simply did not exist.

If you didn't behaved in your lifetime, you were punished in your lifetime.

But where you went after you died had nothing to do.

How you live had everything to do with how you died.

If you died as a warrior, you went to the sun, God as an eagle, and you carried the sun from dawn until noon.

Then you come back as a hummingbird in the afternoon carrying messages.

If you died in childbirth, you also joined the sun and carried the sun from noon until sunset in the morning.

You'd come back as a butterfly.

The monarch butterfly, to bring the hearts of the warriors, the sun.

Children that died before the age of five went to the land of the nursemaid tree, which was a big tree that dripped milk, and the little children would be restored back to health with this milk.

And if you died of old age or another disease or whatever, you went to the make land, the land of the goodly the Lord of the underworld.

And it took you four years to reach there.

You had to go through nine different obstacles.

And it was during those four years that families were duty bound to give you the food and the tools necessary to reach them.

Make that.

That's your roots.

Oh, you're the other mortals in Mexico.

Art is really a very strong medium of of universal communication.

When you start seeing the humanity of all of us, the world here, and there's no plan at all together, and we all have different life experiences and well, you share them, then you have a greater sense of understanding how else are we going to ever get along?

You'll don't reach out.

That's the whole point of it all for me.

Not, you know, some exhibit and some gallery reaching out to people, building bridges and crossing those bridges.

Very important to me.

Back here in Louisiana, the people of China have joined many in our state in working to preserve the legacy of General Clear Channel in our Louisiana Treasures segment, we're visiting the Chennault Aviation and Military Museum in Monroe to see how art and memorabilia are preserving the legacy of the leader of the Flying Tigers who called Louisiana home.

We're real proud of Northeast Louisiana that we have a true American hero.

My grandfather went to China to the aid of China before any American did in 1937.

What he was able to accomplish in China and set records that have never been broken to this day is an incredible story.

And so here at the museum, we're very proud to be able to let not only Americans know, but Chinese.

We have this new bilingual exhibit that tells the whole story of China from 1937 to 1945.

We have a talking animatronic of General China where he can talk to you himself.

We're very proud.

At the entrance of the museum, we have a statue that was donated to the state of Louisiana in 1976 of General personnel and their appreciation of what he was able to do for their country.

So, you know, this is something Louisianans can really be proud of is our heritage and that we have this true American hero.

The museum is part of the largest navigation school in World War Two.

We actually graduated over 15,000 navigators, and we're very proud of that history because we supplied over half the war with our navigators.

We have a road that was worn by the last Emperor of China per year that was given to my grandfather in appreciation.

We have his Chinese medals that President Ma of Taiwan gave us special permission to have here and put on display.

And we also have his christening gown from 1893.

We have his first Wang's as star.

We have the largest collection of Asian art memorabilia than any place in the United States now.

And just in time for fall, Dean Arnold is a graphics designer and an Ohio illustrator who recently started working in a whole new medium.

Pumpkins.

His 3-D creations of fleshy faces draw plenty of onlookers to his quiet neighborhood, where an army of heads watches over the sidewalk.

This guy has his own personality in it.

He doesn't share it with anybody else.

I saw some extreme pumpkins that weren't like anything I'd seen before, and I just thought, That looks like an awful lot of fun.

I should try that.

Yeah.

I've heard of Jack O Lantern before, and let's see how far I can take it.

Well, generally, I'm looking for the shape.

Tall pumpkins make great open mouth, scream faces or real more realistic faces.

Whereas wide pumpkins make really great grins.

And you can really exaggerate the expression.

Heaviness is a big thing too, because the heavier it is, the easier it's going to be to carve and don't hollow out the pumpkin.

I just carve the surface of it.

So all I do is shave off the heat, the rind, and then just immediately start.

First thing is to decide on an expression.

The more extreme and exaggerated, the better.

This could be a surprised face on this side.

This could be a scowling face on this side.

I'd like to know which way the stem is going to be facing.

So I don't want to carve something that where the where the stem disappears and you don't see it later on.

The way it starts is is I take a large tool scraping tool just at random, expose some of the meat.

Once I've gotten the rind off of the center area, I don't know what it is exactly.

It's going to be all right.

I have decided this one is going to be scowling with his brow, but he's going to be grinning wildly with an evil grin.

So I start just kind of digging out the eye orbits around the nose.

It depends on on how the pumpkin cooperates with me.

I have one X-Acto knife that I use for the for the final tiny little details, like when I'm cutting the teeth or something like that.

But almost everything is just a scraping tool.

These are like sandpaper.

So we get great smoothing tools.

Whenever I get to this point, I have this overwhelming memory trace when I'm at my dentist and my dental hygienist is flossing me, they all rot.

They all rot at about the same base.

But they generally last about two days before the nose starts to shrivel up and dry.

And and usually by the time I do throw them out, I have to use a shovel.

Last year, it was just an experiment to see if I could do it.

This year is less of an experiment.

It's the experiment.

The experiment is still there, but now it's to see how well I can do it for months.

Are you kidding?

It's a compulsion.

That wraps it up for this week's program.

But remember, you can always watch the episodes of the show at LP B Dawgs Art Rocks and Want More Country Roads is a great place to find out about what's going on in the arts across the state until next week.

I'm James Fox.

Smith and thanks for watching.