This time on art rocks.

We go out and about with one of Louisiana's most popular and prolific plein air painters finding refuge and recovery in a violin, scrutinizing the sketchbooks of Michelangelo, and a closer look at the Japanese art of anime.

These stories coming up.

So stick around for art Rocks West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LPI be offering diverse exhibitions throughout the year and programs that showcase art, history, music and more.

West Baton Rouge Museum Culture Cultivated Art Rocks is made possible by the foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.

Hello.

Thank you for joining us for Art Rocks.

With me, James Fox Smith from Country Roads magazine.

Here in south Louisiana, our climate can make spending long hours out of doors a considerable commitment.

Between the heat, the humidity and the enthusiastic insects.

The life of a planned air painter is not always a comfortable one.

But for Mary Monk, the reward of spending long days out of doors lies in the opportunity to capture Louisiana's landscapes.

In all their many moods.

Here, Mary steps away from the easel for a moment to explain her working process, which is primarily in pastels.

I love painting in plain air.

It allows me to get a greater degree of reality, a realistic details.

When you're working from a photograph, the camera can't do what your eyes can do.

Your eyes are way better distinguishing distance and atmosphere than a camera.

My favorite time to paint is late in the evening, right before dusk.

I go out before then and I get it all drawn up.

And I will maybe get some basic colors down of what they call local color, which is like the true color of the item before the light hits it and changes it.

And that just kind of gets you ready for the light because it's so fast.

Light is important to a painting because it really directs the mood of the painting.

If you think about it in terms of a play, they set up the lights for drama or for dark, scary, whatever it is.

So the light really affects the whole feeling of the painting, really.

Diffuse light from a cloudy day is just as beautiful.

You just have to be able to understand how to paint it.

That was one of the harder things for me.

Cloudy days were difficult.

I would just avoid them.

But as you mature as an artist, you realize how much mood there is in a cloudy day.

And then you start to learn how to distinguish that.

A lot of times a cloudy day will have actually more saturated color, even though it has less light.

I love water, I love to paint it.

It's very calming.

Kind of makes all the thoughts of anything else in life just kind of dissipate and I'm able to really concentrate on it.

I love rivers, lakes, ponds, puddles, whatever form.

I love the beach.

I go to Horn Island every year in Mississippi.

I like to paint there.

It's a national park.

So you get to camp and you can just get up in the morning, climb out your tent and paint all day and go to bed, and there's nothing else to do.

So it's wonderful.

I love it.

I love fields in particular.

I love the sugar cane.

I did a whole show where it featured a large portion of sugar cane fields.

When I was a child, we used to go visit an aunt that had sugar cane.

And I remember thinking it was just so mysterious.

Sugar cane at the time was very tall, and you couldn't see past that wall and you'd see it a distance and it would just spark my imagination, wondering what's going on in there?

What are the animals and the bugs?

And I loved it.

And so a few years ago I got to see up close burning cane.

It just blew me away.

I'd always seen it just as smoke in the distance.

But when you get to see them lighting a field and watching it, it's just really beautiful.

I like to paint the truth.

The truth is that when I go out to paint, I don't just go out and go, there's a blue sky and there's a green tree.

I try my best to capture the color that's there and the light that's there.

I'm not out there making things up.

well, this cloud isn't big enough, so I'm going to make it a big storm.

I don't do that.

There's just so much beautiful landscapes here.

You can't throw a rock without hitting something you want to paint.

I notice what you may not notice, because that's what artists do.

They examine and they learn something from every possible aspect because they're trying to get good at depicting it.

A lot of times we'll put artists in light and times of day that other people might be missing because they're at work or they're busy.

They don't have time for that.

For me, that's my job, so I have to have time for that.

The most appealing aspect of painting is it takes so much concentration that I don't think about anything else.

I don't think about the bills or whatever you're having for dinner that night.

You can just concentrate and focus and then you leave with a good painting.

I didn't know what Plein Air was originally.

I always worked from photographs.

I got a call from a friend, one day who was organizing a beta plein air.

She said, Hey, the New Orleans Academy artists are doing an event here.

And if you can do plein air paintings, they'd like to have a couple of local artists and you'll get the chance to show with them.

And I thought, my God, that be amazing.

Of course I'll do it.

And I hung up the phone and I had to go look up what Plein air was because I had no idea.

So I did it.

I went out to Fountain Blue State Park and I parked my butt in front of the pond out there, and I was painting, and I was so frustrated.

There were bugs and I was hot and sticky and the mosquitoes were eating me and I was so angry, and I. I thought, this is terrible.

I wouldn't do this.

The Dragonfly I got in my bag and scared the heck out of me and I couldn't concentrate.

And I had so much trouble getting the composition because I wasn't used to the whole world being the subject matter.

Just to frame it was difficult for me.

And I packed all my stuff up and I went home and I put my stuff against the wall and I left the painting leaning there and I went to bed.

And the next morning I woke up and that was the first thing I saw was my painting.

And I said, my God.

Like, that's the best painting I've ever done in my life.

The light was so much better than anything I had done from a photograph that it literally at that point I decided that was it for me.

I was always going to paint plein air.

After that, I did not have any artistic talent as a child.

I went to Archbishop Chapel High School and I was looking for an easy class and I took a drawing because it was a very hard school.

I had a teacher named Miss Moke who was absolutely wonderful and she got life drawing and just all aspects in the way that they used to teach.

Hundreds of years ago, she was very hard and I remember on the first day of class she said, I hope you didn't take this class because it was easy, because I want you to know you can fail.

And that I require a very large drawing, completely shaded and turned in every week.

And if you fail art, you will fail.

So I so I realized that I made a mistake there in thinking it would be an easy class.

But the good thing is it was wonderful class and I loved doing the work and it was so worth it.

And if it wasn't for her, I probably would not be an artist today.

By the end of the first year, we were copying master drawings and we didn't do anything but draw for three years.

So we got really good at drawing.

I think that drawing is extremely important.

I don't think you could reach the potential you should as an artist if you can't draw, if you don't have good bones to a painting, it's going to be kind of out of control and you'll have to work really hard to rein it in.

Whereas if you get a good drawing down and you know what you're doing and you get it accurately, you can really concentrate on painting.

Best to draw slow and paint fast.

Across Louisiana, museums and galleries are staging exhibitions that shed new light on the state we call home.

So here are some standout exhibitions coming soon to museums or galleries near you.

For more on these exhibitions and others, consider Country Roads magazine available in print, online or by e-newsletter.

To see or to share any episode of Art Rocks again, visit LP Dorgan Art Ross.

There's also an archive of all our Louisiana segments at LP B's YouTube page.

Medical professionals and art educators have long recognized the value of artistic expression as a source of refuge for people navigating trauma.

Cal Morris knows all about that.

Morris is a professional violinist who found respite from his battle with cancer through music.

Let's watch and listen to a song of healing.

Am I going to make it or not?

You're looking at death like in its face and like you're so scared.

And and the way that ours becomes so precious.

I was like, I don't care if they're horrible hours.

I just want hours.

Cancer changes you in a way that I think a lot of people don't get or can't even understand the world.

To me, just as music.

At 13, I got interested in the violin.

It came naturally and I feel like it just so quickly.

I fell in love with it and I agree with words and just communication.

Like when I write music is just how I express myself.

It was literally about a month of that kind of on and off niceness.

And after more testing, I started coming back with this looks like I was like, it could be blood cancer.

And that was that was a huge blow.

It was something we never expected.

Cancer is absolute war.

Yeah, I can't even go there.

I won't let that happen.

I got to be there for them.

I immediately started doing chemotherapy.

I responded really, really well.

But they were still like, But to fix the real problem, we really think you need to do a transplant and you know someone who has a potentially terminal diagnosis.

It's that one shot.

It made me feel honestly so grateful to be able to like, have the opportunity to give him a prosperous life with his family and his kids.

The transplant like that was way, way harder than I could ever imagine.

Somebody so strong and so like.

Like, just like.

Like roll up into this.

Like, you know, bald, hairless, like, gray.

You know, human being.

It was so sad to watch him disintegrate like that.

Subsequently, he had additional complications associated with the transplant that were not run of the mill complication.

And the pain was so bad, I didn't know how I was going to get through the next 10 minutes and like much less an hour or day.

So is he dying right now?

If he is like, what would I regret not doing?

And I was like, I need we need the kids here.

Like we need to get to be together and put my violin out for like two months or so.

I couldn't, but I would hear, like, this song, like just so much music in my head.

I just sat at my keyboard for the first time and just wrote this whole song.

Like, I feel like there's so much that's going to come out and already has from this journey was really one of the best days of my life.

Like being able to hug that little Phil, her little arms just wrapped around me, in my arms around them and be back together.

Caleb had made an announcement that he was going back to the docs and and we, like, dropped everything.

And we were like, this is something we're actually not going to miss.

But just to go back after that.

Coming that close to making it and it was there was only two people there.

And so to get to that day and just see so much love and so much support put out, it was it's hard to describe with words.

That's like everything.

I mean, that's just that's the reason that people undergo this horrible experience of transplant and the complications that occur post it's to live their lives again.

I really got that miracle that so many people hope for and pray for and long for.

Michelangelo Di Ludovico Buono.

I wrote this symphony known to the world as Michelangelo for obvious reasons, has been recognized as one of humanity's greatest artists for half a millennium.

During his lifetime, this sculptor, painter, architect and poet created some of the iconic works of the Italian Renaissance.

500 years later, Ohio's Cleveland Museum of Art is presenting an exhibit of Michelangelo's surviving sketches, enabling visitors to gain a closer appreciation of the artist's techniques and creative processes.

Michelangelo was a painter, sculptor and architect, and throughout his career he worked from sketches.

We get the sense from these drawings that he had everything very well-planned out before he started to paint.

Emily Peters is one of the curators of Michelangelo Mind of the Master.

The exhibition features a couple dozen of Michelangelo's drawings alongside replicas of some of his masterpieces, including the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Italy.

So on the back of this sheet is just an array of different limbs and figures.

And you can see that Michelangelo would rotate the sheet.

He was working very swiftly, probably.

I'm thinking through some of the different figures on the ceiling.

This hand right here, this arm and this hand.

Those correspond to the very famous scene on the ceiling of God creating Adam.

And that is God's hand, which you can see here.

No pressure.

You want to get the hand of God, right?

You want to get the hand of God, right?

He practiced it many times on the other side of the paper.

Michelangelo drew the figure of a muscular male nude, and he worked out the details of the body in motion, down to the flexed toes.

Two of the drawings for the Sistine Chapel that we have are four figures called agouti, which is an Italian word meaning nude man.

These were very important compositional elements in the Sistine Chapel, but they didn't have any narrative significance.

Michelangelo used them to kind of punctuate the narrative scenes in the middle of the chapel, and his contemporaries were completely astounded by these figures.

Michelangelo's Focus on the Human figure continues to influence art today.

He was working at a time when artists generally did not study anatomy yet and also at a time when, though artists would sketch from life models, they often didn't sketch from nude models.

Both of those things are really key.

Even to this day, to art education.

So which is this drawing here?

So this is one of two drawings in the exhibition for a commission for a fresco called The Battle of Cash.

And it was his first big fresco commission for the City of Florence.

It was a commission that he never completed.

However, what we do have are these wonderful preparatory drawings.

And it was a moment when he's bringing his vision of the heroic male nude to a wide public.

It's such a muscular physical drawing thing and that he might look like he's about to race into battle.

But it's almost comical when you see the whole picture.

He's not in battle yet.

He's racing from from Bath.

Right.

So Michelangelo's concept for this fresco was that it was a great battle between Florence and Pisa, but he was portraying the moment when the soldiers were called to battle and they were caught in the river Arno taking a bath.

So this really played to his strengths because he could focus on the nude male figure and kind of the rushing aspect of getting ready for battle.

These drawings have never been seen together in the United States, and they once belonged to a queen.

How did these get preserved over the years to now be on view today?

Well, it's really interesting.

There are not very many drawings by Michelangelo that still exist.

But we do know that this group of drawings was in the collection of Queen Christina of Sweden.

She's a very interesting woman who abdicated her throne in the 17th century and moved to Rome.

And she loved Italian art.

And then throughout the centuries, those albums were sold to various collectors.

And in 1790, they were sold to the Tylers Museum, which is a museum in Harlem, in the Netherlands.

And they've been in that museum ever since, which is one of the reasons they're so well preserved today and are still together as a group.

The exhibition Anime Architecture presents Japanese animation created before the digital era.

The show is at the Murakami Museum in Japanese Gardens in Delray Beach, Florida.

It features drawings and paintings that form the raw materials for some remarkable animated films.

So let's take a look.

I'm Carlos Stan Silver.

I'm the curator of Japanese art at the More Common Museum and Japanese Gardens.

This is animate architecture.

This exhibit features four films that came out between 1988 and 2004.

These films are all anime, which is the Japanese animation process.

And they are all sci fi, and they all also encapsulate a realistic style.

So that's what each of the films have in common.

And, you know, anime is a multibillion dollar business today.

The original curator of the exhibition, Stephan Weekley from Berlin, he started this project back in 2008, and he was fortunate enough to go into studios, meet with the animators and look at some of their work.

And he was really interested in the process of anime making.

It's amazing.

You have hundreds of artists working together to create one film.

And he talks about how a lot of the artists were hesitant to put their art in frames and on the wall, they didn't see it as art.

They saw it as just a small part of this whole production.

The curator went with the backgrounds and not just the characters.

For example, in the Japanese anime process, the voiceovers come last.

You know, in a Disney production, they come first.

But in Japan, it's the opposite.

They have a much greater emphasis on the environment and movement.

Ghost in the Shell came out in 1995 and it's based on a very popular manga series.

We really can't underestimate the importance of this film.

The people who created The Matrix say flat out that this film inspired them, and the entire film is about artificial intelligence in the future.

But how this artificial intelligence interacts with the technology, with the machinery.

And really, they're talking about what it means to be human.

For this film we featured some of the hand drawings by Takeuchi Atsushi, and then we have the paintings of Ogura Hiro Mazor, which actually appear in the film.

So you can see that development process, how they go from the raw images and ideas into the more technical details and drawings, and then the final product in the feel and the emotion that comes out.

It's almost as if the background in the environment is its own character In the film, they really want to emphasize that.

We do have some photography as well, and location photography was very important.

Remember, these artists were going for realism.

And the director of Shimamoto not only worked on anime, but he also worked on live actions.

And he thought, Well, why don't we do that for anime?

And I love to point out this piece right here.

He snapped this picture in a shop after he had gone in his lens, sort of clouded over.

And then this is what his art team did with it.

And I love it because we're not just seeing a copy.

They're not copying what they saw.

They were inspired by this.

And you can see they added some signage.

They added a building over here.

I also like to point out in this piece, again, it's a watercolor on paper by Ogura, Hiro Masa.

And this one would have been captured on film for the final product.

You see these dark colors here?

It has this nice, broody tone to it, but when that transfers to film, a lot of that gets washed out.

But Ogura was a master at finding just the right mix to create these darker tones and still keep them vibrant.

This piece here is from the film Pet Labor, which came out in 1989.

If you look very closely at this piece, you'll see a few little bits of tape across the top, and that's because there are actually three layers here.

Why would they do that?

Why would they go to all that trouble?

Well, in this particular scene, we have a flock of birds that flies through the frame.

And so we had to have space in between those buildings and they were moving at different cameras speeds to how complicated it gets just for a flock of birds to fly across screen.

Around 1997, the anime industry moved to entirely digital productions from concept design through to the final piece was all digital and it was this great wave, this great change that took over the studios, especially throughout Tokyo.

And today there are only five studios left who can do hand-drawn backgrounds, and that is that for this edition of Art Wraps.

But don't worry, because you can always find more episodes of the show online at PB Dawgs Art Ross.

And if you can't get enough of stories like these.

Country Roads magazine makes a useful guide for discovering what's taking shape in Louisiana's cultural life All across this state.

Look closer and discover more.

Until next week, I've been James Fox Smith and thanks to you for watching.

West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LPI, offering diverse exhibitions throughout the year and programs that showcase art, history, music and more.

West Baton Rouge Museum Culture cultivated MD Art Rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.