Up next on Art Rocks, a Louisiana artist that the rich and famous turned to for paintings of themselves and their children.

My career has been very fortunate that I've had the opportunity to paint some of the most prominent families in America.

A dance troupe, putting musicians and dancers together on stage.

I like the notes of both composers, kind of floated off of the page and then floated towards each other.

A special effects artist making masterpieces of illusion.

Building a character, and then seeing it come to life as you work on.

It's one of their things.

And Alexandria's magnificent Saint Francis Cathedral.

That's all next on Art Rocks.

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

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

And thank you for joining us.

For Art Rocks, these generous of honor as intimate or as revealing of their subjects as works of portraiture.

One of the country's most sought after portrait artists lives in Louisiana and calls Lafayette home when it comes to capturing the human spirit on canvas.

People the world over turned to William Karl grow.

How does a child who grew up in the rural community of New Iberia learn to paint this way?

William Karl Grow cites many artists as influences, but none more so than the legendary American portraitist.

Aaron Shea Clark Grows Fascination with Shukla began at a very early age.

My mother loved Jack, and I think all the women in America did at that time.

And she had a McCall's magazine that she kept all this paraffin, and it was Jackie Kennedy's portrait that was in it that was painted by Aaron Schick, one of the greatest American painters of our time.

Get the McCall's magazine, flip it open.

And I would just tip myself said, you know, dear God, one day, could I just study under someone like this?

Little did I know I would end up to be one of his prized students, and he was like a deer.

Like an art dad in our column.

And anyway, we had a wonderful grade, maybe 35 years and 40 years of studying with him.

The opportunity to work with chick lit presented itself after GROSZ studied art in Europe.

He has also been mentored by another great American portrait artist.

I studied in Italy at the R in Florence, and so I was trained as a draftsman and classical, you know, techniques then.

And Frederic Taube has prepared me to go to Italy.

When I went to Italy, there was two years of studies.

Grows love affair with art began long before either Chic La or tabbies dented his life.

I was about five years old, I think, when they found out that I was talented and drew all the time as a kid.

I think I was born with a paintbrush in my hand.

My first painting that I sold was maybe I was I think I was maybe ten years old.

George Rodrigue had a show.

And as you know, our buried boy I'm from there are buried.

So we had George, his show, and my his paintings were maybe $100 at the time for a little painting.

And my grandmother said, You see that painting there?

Karl?

Can you paint me a cabin like that with an olive tree?

And said, I guess.

And she said, Well, look at it.

Because she said, I'm gonna pay for it.

So I went home, painted the little painting, and I think she gave me maybe back then that was like almost 40 years ago.

$10.

She had hung and I guess in a house proud of a grandson, Her other friends commissioned me to do same type of little paintings.

But I think I went up to like $25 because they weren't family.

So I couldn't give them a discount.

It didn't take long for Karl's talent to come to the attention of a local businessman and art collector named Compton.

Lobov Lobov started buying the young artist's work and exhibiting it extensively.

And before long, art connoisseurs nationwide were taking notice.

Stamens somehow arranged for these landscapes to be Mr. Lightbulbs to be auctioned at Sotheby's Port BURNETT Galleries.

It was part a Sotheby's portrait that in those days in Los Angeles, one of them was called River Scape.

It's a beautiful landscape of a by and I was they were almost like in that I painted in those days sort of like a typical Dutch landscape but Louisiana and the landscape up from an unknown not 19 year old kid went for like 40 $500.

That was like 40 years, 35 years ago.

While Karl still does occasionally paint landscapes.

His career has evolved to focus upon portraiture.

You want a true image, but what you try to achieve is the best of that person.

That's what I looked at.

This person I'm looking at How can I paint her in a way that brings her to a next level?

As a work of art.

What happens is I always look at the person and look at their greatest assets and feature and stuff, and that's what I try to put forward their best qualities.

Using that philosophy, Breaux painted this portrait of the author and literary critic Diana Trilling.

It has a permanent place in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.. My career has been from very fortunate that I've had the opportunity to paint some of the most prominent families in America and athletes, professional athletes, clerical portraits such as For the DA.

He was not cardinal yet.

Actually, Georgetown has a painting I did after the one in Fordham.

But it's, you know, it's intellectual South.

Louisiana's McIlhenny company, creators of the Tabasco empire, has commissioned grow to paint official portraits of several chief executive officers.

But the first McIlhenny painting came about by happenstance after a nephew of company president Walter McIlhenny, had him sit for Groh so the artist could paint a portrait for the nephew's own home.

They invited him for dinner one night and had the portrait hanging in their dining room, and after thought it was so good, he said, No, no, no.

I'm going to take that to the corporate office.

That's going to be my corporate painting.

After all, everybody who's ever been president of McIlhenny Company has had a corporate painting, and he got up and walked out with the painting in his hand.

Walter was a very dynamic man, and of course, he was very proud of his military history.

So Karl captured that, and the family was so pleased with that that after Walter passed away and Ned Simmons took over the leadership, when it came time to have Ned's portrait painted, they chose him again.

And Karl pain at Ned's Ned was a much more somber person, a very pensive person, a more serious man.

And it comes across.

And then after Ned passed away, Paul McIlhenny became president of the company.

Paul was bigger than life.

He was just such a personality.

Paul knew everybody and everybody knew Paul.

And he was just wonderful.

And that truly comes across in his painting as well.

Paul passed away just fairly recently and his was done after he died.

Again, by Grow.

And I knew President has commissioned Carl to paint here.

So that will be four presidents of McIlhenny Company and they're all hanging here.

When asked whether he would rather be known as a great portrait painter or a great artist, GROSS says that without a doubt, he'd prefer to be remembered as a great artist because he can paint anything with works that extend far beyond just people and landscapes.

Now, opportunities to connect with the arts are everywhere in Louisiana.

You simply need to know where to look.

So here's a list of some of the goings on coming up around the state.

To learn more about these and other events in Louisiana, visit LP dot org slash Art Rocks 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. We're going to Boulder, Colorado, now, where a troupe named Third Law Dance is changing the game with their show back Uncaged, the dance troupe has teamed up with the Boulder Bach Ensemble to bring musicians and dancers together on stage.

Bach Uncaged What concept did you have in your mind?

The first thing I thought about was they're very different.

And then we thought, How are they the same?

And then we thought that someplace in the middle we would meet.

I feel like the notes of both composers kind of floated off of the page and then floated towards each other in terms of the music and the sensibility that we're using with the dancers.

The back side has an elaborate quality, I feel like, which goes with the baroque sensibility of the music.

So there are lots of flourishes.

There's sort of a more regal carriage.

Cage side is a little earthier, much more abstract, a little more neutral in the face, more about stop, start rather than through motion with the movement.

Third Law Dances collaboration with the Boulder Bach Ensemble brings live music and dance together on stage.

That's somewhat unique.

Musicians, when working with dancers, are often in an orchestra pit.

But Katie Elliott said that separation would not meet the company's needs.

So much of what the dancers are pulling from the movement is coming from the music.

We start in the studio.

Typically, I'm not choreographing to the music that we're going to do the final piece too.

So it's very important when we're on stage to have the musicians there with the dancers actually in that collaboration.

A lot of what you'll see in the live performance is happening right there.

Like they have taken cues off the musicians at that very moment.

That give and take or action in reaction to Newton's third law of motion, for which the company is named Dancer Gwen Phillips says introduces a new dynamic to the.

Piece.

It adds a richness and an energy that is not there when the music or the musician is not on stage with you.

It's so much fun to be able to look at Zachary, kind of play with him a little bit.

He is great at responding, he adds energy.

He will change the quality of his music based on how he feels like we're playing with each other and playing with him.

Has this project changed the way that you hear either of those artists?

Well, yes.

Every time I work with dance, the process changes the way that I hear.

So what I find thrilling about performing, especially Bach with dance, I'm able to change the course of my phrasing and my timing and even my ornamentation and my embellishments based on what's happening physically with the movement.

So the dancers are interpreting the sounds that you hear because I'm responding very much to their movement.

Why is the electric violin appropriate for this particular performance concerning Bach?

The electric violin is perfect for the space because I'm able to tap into the lute like sounds.

We have a bass voice and a middle voice and a treble voice, and they all are in dialog with one another.

So in a way, it's closer to the authentic period instrument of by then, perhaps a modern violin with metal strings.

Unlike an electric violin.

The prepared piano was available to Cage.

She invented the instrument.

It looks a lot like a traditional piano, but screws, bolts, pieces of wood and other objects attached inside give it a different timbre and resonance.

What you're hearing now is not John Cage's music.

It's Marcia Schirmer improvising on the prepared piano.

Generally speaking, Third Law identifies as a contemporary modern dance company.

But I would say it's more of a sensibility than it is an esthetic.

Very innovative, very athletic, very aggressive movement of a contemporary dance.

It does not look like ballet, though.

All of our dancers are ballet trained in general.

But it's Katy's unique style that we have grown over the last 15 years of our work together.

What can art do?

Art can save us from becoming a technological society in which people just feel that they're cogs in a machine.

We hang a clothes line up for the audience and they can hang their own metaphors on that and then take that away.

And maybe it is a healing experience.

Maybe it riles them up in some way.

But I think they can do something once they have that expression inside them.

For more information, go to third law dot OIG.

We're headed northeast now to Ohio, where resident Ben Peter is making a name for himself in the special effects industry by sculpting, drawing and designing some really unusual pieces.

Peter takes us behind the scenes for a look at his creative process.

I like to work with my hands as much as possible.

My favorite thing to do is the sculpting aspect building a character and then seeing it come to life as you work on.

It's one of the things I was watching a TV show and saw a guy named Revell Fein and he was carving pumpkins, and I figured if he could do it, it looks pretty simple.

I'd probably do it too.

I would probably buy three pumpkins a week and just try and do what I could with them.

I wanted to try and make my pumpkins look more realistic.

And so I went to center makeup school to try and figure out the cemetery, the nose and the face and the eyes and the lives and kind of got sucked into the industry.

From there for being a special effects artist.

You really are a multimedia artist.

You do the sculpting, the drawing, the conceptual designing, having the understanding of how to kind of create something three dimensionally in a drawing really helps you into the next step, which would be the sculpting, if you understand it on two dimensions.

As you're working in three dimensions, it's a lot easier to push something back or pull something forward.

So they really go hand in hand with that.

Prosthetics are pretty much used for all the special effects industries.

You start out with a wife cast, which is a copy of, you know, somebody's face, whoever it is that you're going to be making the prosthetic for.

And it's a stone copy, and then we'll sculpt the clay over the top of that.

And then you'll make a mold, which is the copy of your sculpt.

Really?

I've got a cake mixer, which is for making the foam latex.

You got to whip it up because it's like a four part batch.

Once you pour latex into the mold, you throw it in the oven.

Once you take it apart, if you don't everything correctly, your prosthetics should pull out nice and easy.

So if you look at movies, some of the main characters have different facial features than what you would expect or even TV shows like Star Trek, you know, all these different aliens that are up in space.

All of those had to be prosthetics.

So for the industry, it's a well utilized tool.

Knowing how to paint, you can actually take a bad sculpture and make it look really pretty with just paint.

Women do it every day when it comes to beauty makeup.

It's called contouring shadowing.

So it's the perfect example.

You have to really understand pigments and skin tones and layers.

You don't just use a skin tone, bass tone, and you're done with it.

You know, you'll never get the realism of actual skin since there's blood flowing through our skin.

You start out with a paint cone and then you can go through and put lighter tones over the top of it.

And then you've got your air bags or skin imperfections, freckles.

So that pretty much just comes down to paint and being able to know what color to use and what layer to use it at is really important part as the special effects artist, because anyway, you can just take and throw paint on something.

But to have it look realistic when it's just a piece of foam is really the true eye, like changing the facial structures and body structures.

Because to completely change it and make it look like it belongs there.

Give them a big jar, a big nose, or, you know, big ears with big horns or something and to make it look right.

It's not easy being the.

My biggest challenges, the special effects artist, would pretty much be the concept designing.

As a designer, you really have to think of certain things like, how old is that cut?

Is there an infected cut?

What kind of a cut is it?

You know, as a cut with a knife or is it a gash?

What is their skin type like?

All those different things that have to be put into the design.

You know, the very beginning workings of it before you can even sculpt anything, before you can paint it or acquire anything.

As a special effects artist.

I challenge myself with making sure that I think of those details before somebody else.

I think special effects is just another avenue of art.

I know that I can sculpt and I can paint and I can do all these things.

Well, now I can sculpt something, make it, and then apply it to someone's face, paint it, and create something completely different that I'll actually walk around and talk to you and interact with you.

And I think that's a valuable skill.

Especially with computers nowadays, everybody wants to CG everything with green screens or blue screens, whatever, and to have that practical effects that you can walk up and touch something and, you know, be a part of it is what I think is really important, that there are potential opportunities here in Dayton as far as movies.

And the thing that I'm probably going to try and focus on the most is my own personal art, doing my own kind of sculptures and recreating things.

Sometimes it's hard, but you make time.

For it because it's a passion.

Coming back home now for our Louisiana Treasures segment.

While it's easy to admire the architectural beauty of historic churches, few stand out from their surroundings quite like Saint Francis Xavier Cathedral does.

In Alexandria, Reverend James Ferguson lets us in on the past and the present.

Of this central Louisiana landmark.

St Francis Xavier Cathedral was built in 1899.

At the time, it was the only brick church in the area.

And if you notice that large clock tower, it's 140 feet high.

And at that time, when it was built in 1907, it was the highest manmade structure in central Louisiana.

And it really wasn't until 1910 that this church became the cathedral of the Diocese of Alexandria before the church.

That's now in Natchitoches.

The minor Basilica of the Immaculate Conception.

It was the cathedral.

But the bishop at the time noticed that Alexandria was growing so rapidly, much more so than Natchitoches, that he decided that the diocese would be here.

And he named it the Diocese of Alexandria.

And this church, Saint Francis Xavier, became the cathedral again in 1910.

It's a beautiful structure.

It's well known for its stained glass windows, the beautiful pipe organ that we have.

It's a neo-gothic cathedral.

And you'll notice when you go inside the church, the beautiful stained glass windows, the rose windows, and also the structure of the ceiling.

At the time it was built, it cost about $40,000.

And it's interesting, some of the bricks that you see here at the cathedral were brought from a plantation home that had burned during the Red River campaign and also the mortar that between the bricks came from the river sand from the Red River.

People come here for weddings.

They just love the church, especially the Long Island.

And the stained glass windows.

And the beautiful altars.

And finally, a Sacramento mixed media sculpture is repurposing recycled and discarded objects in some surprising ways.

Take a peek into Richard's thesis studio, which is full of found objects.

I asked myself many times, Where would I have gone if I have not gone into the arts?

And I think I would have gone into dark matter.

I probably would have been a juvenile delinquent when it comes right down to it.

I had a high school teacher that saved my life.

But he took my energy and channeled it and showed me how to channel it.

And I asked him, you know, which direction should I go or give me a sense of direction.

And he looked at me and he said, you know, just be who you are.

I decided I was going to have fun.

And if I can't have fun making my art, then I won't do it.

And I still have fun to this day.

And that was one of the reasons why I make the pieces that I do.

Everything that I use in my work is recycle.

And I use everyday objects, spoons, handles, handles that I've worked on.

All this stuff, stuff that I've used could be legs to an animal.

And I have to work with the material that I'm familiar with sheet metal and screws and wood.

I'm always looking at the ground and I'm always finding something look at.

And it really has to catch my eye when I find an object I already have in my mind where it's going to go.

And it's a feeling, really.

It's kind of a feeling that it belongs in that specific area.

That's a map pieces.

These are all salmon beads for salmon lures.

And this is stripped copper wire.

And there are all these little entities, in their words, names and little scribbles so they can look at the work and say, What is that?

Well, it's a guitar.

Oh, yeah, it is a guitar.

Well, there's the frets then.

You can kind of like, piece the pieces together about what the imagery means and what it is.

And I like to take those materials out of its natural dwelling and having it become something else.

It has a lot to do with using those objects, you know, as a spiritual sort of element, the respect of the planet, not being a throwaway society.

I love the outdoors.

I love animals.

I fish all of the time.

And I have a lot of respect for Mother Nature, especially the endangered species.

We have a white owl, or it's a tundra owl.

They're endangered.

I have Ed the armadillo and a porcupine.

California porcupine.

This is a great horned owl.

He's got eyes behind his head like most owls do.

My wife and I get a big kick out of watching birds and animals.

They're very humorous.

And the little antics and stunts they do just brought out something that maybe I could relate to and convey a message about.

Oh, you like this too.

And this is my night heron, in his eyes, moved to reflect his attitude, and a group of artists are just kind of in a ditch all of our own.

We're giving the pointer arts only 10%.

The rest 90% is hard work.

And I'm not afraid of hard work and I enjoy it.

It's a means to an end for me.

My life is a very physical life and I enjoy that.

I like being active.

I like working on my art.

It gives me a sense of security.

It gives me a sense of who I am and a direction.

And I need that.

Very much so.

Like most models, you know, I do it because I love it.

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

But remember, you can always watch episodes of the show at LP B dot org slash art Rocks.

And while we're on the subject, Country Roads magazine is a great place to find out about what's going on in the arts all across the state.

Until next week, I'm James Fox.

Smith and thanks for watching.