Production of applause and ideastream.

Public media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

Coming up.

It's capers, kilts and haggis during the annual Scottish invasion of Berea.

A Cleveland kid paints a portrait of his generation.

Plus, the best baroque band in the land.

Offers a sip of Bach.

Hello, and welcome to another wee bit of applause.

This week only I'm Lydia stream, public media's caber basher.

Whether you're a member of the oldest Highland clan or have nary a drop of Celtic blood, a unique cultural festival welcomes everybody to the Berea Fair grounds each summer.

From heavy athletics to medieval reenactments to competitive bagpipes.

There's a bit of everything on display It's called the Ohio Scottish Games and Celtic Festival, and we truly mean both the aspects of the games and the festival.

The games aspect of it are all the competitions from the bagpipes, Scottish fiddle, Scottish harp, the Highland Dancers, the heavy athletics and then you have the festival, which are the over 60 vendors for over 20 clans from around Ohio and the greater regional area.

We have over 20 bands from around the country as well as from Canada.

We have over 150 Pipe Piper competitors as we as well as we have over 130 Scottish dancers.

We have Irish Wolfhounds, we have Clydesdales that are originally Scottish breeds.

We have the big, fluffy, Scottish cattle.

We have the Ohio School of Falconry that's showing their birds of prey.

And.

They'll have a clan tent where you can go and visit them.

If you know you're a member of that clan.

Like, for me, it would be clan Macmillan would be the clan.

I'd go and visit their tent and talk to them and sometimes give you a little shot of whiskey or something.

At the end of the day.

Douglas, when Douglas got in, I.

That's when I found out about it.

I never saw that in Scotland, I liked it, I said, this is great.

I wish we'd had it back home, but we didn't have it.

At first I thought, well, this is men.

Well, a lot of kilts and stuff, and I like that.

I couldn't stop coming back so every year I've been back since.

This is our 48th year, but it's also our fourth year in Berea.

Every year we're trying to bring in something new.

In the last three years, we brought in the Knights of Valor that does their full contact jousting in the ground.

So that's.

Coming back to is this is a really big games.

There's a huge band competition later.

And this is a really well known competition for the soloist too, because they offer all the different events.

Like a lot of people don't realize, there's lots of different types of bagpipe music.

And so it's kind of like a sporting event.

There's A68 March competition and A24 March competition.

And like different events that you can enter, play my fire department band down in Jacksonville, Jfr D Pipes and Drums.

It's become a big part of the fire service tradition here in America.

And, I'm not on the fire department or anything, but I love doing the civic services and the memorials and funerals and stuff like that.

So that's how I got into it.

Anyone who takes up the instrument becomes Scottish.

Anyone can do it.

Anybody can join this world that hasn't, Even if you're not Scottish and, you know, if you need a a really rewarding hobby, we're all here, you know, we'll be glad to talk to you about it.

And recruit you.

We definitely have people in the band who aren't Scottish.

Cincinnati is a very German town with German immigrants, and, I'm sure we have people with German ancestry, but people hear the bagpipes and there's something about it that just peaks their interest.

And, we, love that anyone can join the band.

I'm 5050.

Irish.

Italian.

I'm Irish on my mother's side.

At eight years old, I came to festivals like this, and I saw bagpipes.

And I knew that that's what I wanted to do.

The bagpipes specifically, are an instrument that can't be put in a corner.

When you hear them, it's going.

They're evocative.

When you hear them, they're going to make you feel something.

Whether that's joy, happiness, sadness, if you ever, you know, went to a funeral or it makes you think of a lost loved one, or if you know it's a loud sound that you don't really like, but it's the bagpipes will make you feel something.

They're loud, and although they originate from Scotland, I not being Scottish, I heard them and I thought I want to do that.

And I think so many people feel the same way.

And we as a festival try to cater to that as well.

Are you actually Scottish or Irish?

Not one bit.

I, Cherokee and German, but that's the beauty of this sport.

You do not have to be Scottish to participate.

You are more than welcomed in.

You're going to see a lot of camaraderie between all of the competitors out here.

Each one of us are trying to help each other.

Technique was what we did wrong because the better the person I'm competing with is, the better I'm going to get.

So it's a big, friendly sport and totally different in this sport than any other sport.

We like to have everybody in the sport, so today we've got almost 30 novices out here, which are people that's never done the sport ever.

This is my first time ever.

Yeah.

So so my friend who does and he got me into it.

He teaches, North Olmsted track, and he teaches throwing.

So he's been teaching me.

But, yeah, today's the first time I've ever picked anything up and thrown it.

And you'll see guys helping him out, trying to help him with technique for to put your hands what to do, what not to do.

It's just a really good group of people that come together for a common cause.

I've just tossed in heavy stuff.

Everything's going good.

Going good?

Had some issues with the caber.

But other than that, I feel like I performed pretty well on, all my, splits.

In.

2000 Twilight tattoo, as we call it.

Other Highland games, call it the, the mass bands where we have, we'll have all of our 20 plus bands march out together of over 400 bagpipers and drummers and all play together.

That is at the end of the band competition, and that signals the unofficial closing of the games.

But it's a sight to see because it's over 400 bagpipers and drummers playing, you know, one, one.

And we're just trying to get people here every day and every year because we are trying to just keep growing up.

So this is our culture.

We want to educate people.

And we also want to celebrate a. I mean.

To do or not to do?

Lend me your ears.

I hope you choose to do by signing up for our free weekly newsletter.

The to Do list.

It's filled to the brim with local cultural events, arts, news and artist features.

And it's all yours just by signing up at Arts dot idea stream.org.

And thanks.

When you paint someone's portrait, it's more than just capturing what they look like on a canvas.

It's also about capturing their inner spirit.

Our next two artists both possess that unique talent for portrait painting.

We begin in Columbus with Lashay Boyd, who recently traveled to Cuba for an artist exchange.

And while she was there, she found her latest muse.

My work is very much, figurative.

I make really big paintings, and I usually capture people that I know.

And my color palette is, like, super vibrant.

So that's probably going to be the first thing people will see and notice about my art.

The vibrancy is really speaking to, just the lightness because my subject matter is a little heavy.

I talk a lot about self-transformation and dissecting the psyche of a person.

So, you know, it can be heavy stuff because I'm pulling from real experiences.

Sometimes it can be traumatic experiences that I'm pulling from.

So that color palette being light and bright and, the skin of my subjects are magenta that bright, like pink color.

It just like, speaks to that lightness, like the light at the end of the tunnel kind of thing.

I went to the Columbia College of Art design, and I was kind of lost in school, and I was really attracted to figurative work, so that was always my thing.

But my iPad is really what helped me understand the levels.

I could go with my art, the layering, the coloring and everything.

We were walking around.

I was with David and Gavin and we were just kind of doing our adventure.

Just exploring the city.

And I saw this guy with big muscles, and he had a straw hat and a cigar, and, you know, he just.

I was drawn to him because he he looked like something that I already visualized.

I kind of had this idea coming to Cuba of what I wanted to capture.

So he he was like the perfect picture moment.

I was shy to ask him for a picture.

It's a awkward exchange, right?

Like you're an American.

They obviously know you're American, and you have this, you know, camera, and they're like, you know, you don't want to feel like you're exploiting them in a way.

So, you know, he was just kind, like he was kind about it.

I took two shots of him.

He took the cigar out of his mouth at one point, and I directed him to put it back in his mouth.

And so it was kind of like me still doing what I do, staging and directing people, because that's what I do in my work.

There was a blue building behind him, so there's just so much color to work with, which also captures the essence of Cuba.

And I usually when I do this, I am literally doing it as as if I was going to do it on canvas.

So this is like the overall sketch.

And then so I kind of started filling in his skin.

And so this is kind of close to what I'm going to be using some there's some purples in here.

There's some lavender in there.

Working with the shadows that were falling on his face.

Magenta.

And then there's, like, some light paints.

And so this is like, usually the color palette I do work with when I'm making my figures.

And then in the background here, there's this, like, texture of, like, oil pastels.

So like I'm going to be using oil pastel for that.

And, and I am going to be using some oil pastel in his skin as well as kind of displayed on the procreate.

It's really cool because you can like, you know, pick different brushes and pencils and pastels.

You, they can kind of like, you know, imitate that with that texture will look like when I think about how I grew up, when I think about the things that I went through, I always look at it as like a means of like, kind of shaping my purpose in life.

And I want to help other people get to that same feeling.

We all have, like trauma experiences that, you know, big or small, that shaped who we are.

And I think it's very important for us to find that core self even, like, outside of what we've been through.

You know, I'm motivated to let people know not to attach themselves to those experiences and become your own self.

I would say the biggest theme is the spirituality aspect.

And when I say spirituality, I'm not talking about religion.

I'm talking about literally we all have a spirit like we all do.

And I think that that's the biggest thing is capturing the spirit of that person.

You're going to see that in every piece.

So I love that part of my work.

It's it's true to who I am to I've always been like a spiritual person.

It's possible to be from any background, any race or whatever, religion, whatever beliefs you have.

We all are connected in some way by our stories.

And and, you know, I think that it's important that people will just take that.

They're they're being seen through the art at the same time, like, regardless of who they are.

I want people to feel seen.

Now back to Northeast Ohio, where Cleveland Institute of Art graduate Derek Walker is making a name for himself with his vivid portraits of young and proud black men and women.

We caught up with Walker shortly before graduation to paint our own portrait of the artist as a young man.

Last.

Summer.

My earliest memories of art included learning from my dad and my cousin.

They had a lot of different sketchbook pages, and they kind of encouraged me to pretty much learn how to sketch and do it on a daily routine.

I did a lot of drawings of cars, like Lamborghinis and stuff.

I was really inspired by Leonardo da Vinci and how he was also into drawing inventions and designs.

Aside from painting portraits, and I pretty much continued doing all that until I got into Cleveland School of the Arts.

One of my teachers that had an impact on me at CSR was Mr. Lynch.

He left drawings on the board every day, which is no surprise.

But they weren't just drawings like I get from most kids.

They were hilarious.

When we were reading hamlet, it would be something about Hamlet's interactions with Ophelia or Hamlet's interactions with Claudius, and I would always just say something hilarious.

You could see even at that time that his creative thinking was understanding history kind of in this context.

And then also creating this empathetic way of understanding people and presenting it and then creating a story.

And I think he does that for his artwork.

My class of students were one of the first students to actually enroll into the building, because it was newly built, and they wanted to make the school a bit more welcoming to the students.

So they invited several artists of the school to create murals on all of the blank walls.

And I was chosen as one of the artists.

And I was working on several different concepts for the piece.

And one that struck me was a piece that kind of resembled the mode of creation that Kane de Wylie does when he takes African-American figures and inserts them into traditional and art historical paintings.

At the beginning of the mural is from A girl with a Pearl Earring by Yohannes Mimir, which notoriously features a very white woman.

And he repainted it with an African-American so in the same way that I saw him reinvent or take history in context and tell his own story through it.

You know, he made a giant mural in Cleveland school, the arts cafeteria.

Pretty much every figure in that piece was created from imagination.

I would just use different facial features from anybody walking around.

So being at Cleveland Institute of Art, I really appreciated the plethora of majors at this school.

It's not just drawing and painting.

Derrick is extraordinarily earnest and thoughtful and he works very hard like he's in the studio a lot.

I can almost always walk by his studio, and he's there.

Professor Cooper would actually tell me different art areas to pull from, for example, like the Baroque period.

That's where a lot of artists would do chiaroscuro, which is a style of painting where you have like a black background and it kind of seeps into the shading of the canvas.

And that was definitely a popular style of reference that I would use in my paintings.

So for my landscape series is going through some of my photographic references for my paintings.

And one struck me from high school of my friend Isaiah, who was sitting on a pink couch and he was sporting a pink durag.

And after spending time with that photograph, I was thinking like, hey, I think I should do more paintings of my high school friends wearing do rags I haven't seen in painting before, and I thought it would be a refreshing thing to include with these old traditional conventions of painting.

He's very considered about how other people are going to understand his work and what it's going to carry out into the world.

So those are really mature ways of thinking about being an artist that you don't often see in a person so young.

I think that the Durag is really culturally significant to the African diaspora, because it's like a common theme amongst black people worldwide.

A lot of people wear it for fashion choices, and it has more uses than its origin of being a utilitarian object where you just wear it to bed.

But it has evolved so much where people can incorporate it into their outfits.

And I find that really intriguing.

I made sure to include elements that reference Cleveland, Ohio, for example, in this piece titled Fendi's Ballad, which is a painting of my friend.

He is standing in front of these two windows in the windows are shaped as the RTA logo for Cleveland.

This painting is a callback to the Leonardo da Vinci painting titled Madonna Leda.

The piece that Mayor Bibb was standing in front of was titled Astro Noir.

And for that piece, I wanted to explore ideas of Afrofuturism, specifically the themes of going to space upon inspiration from this jazz musician of the 70s named Sun Ra.

And he made a song titled Space Is a place.

He felt that African-Americans would only be liberated if they went to space, which is like an imaginative exploration, and Afrofuturism.

For.

So for my BFA, I'm exploring ideas of commuting and Cleveland commuting.

As far as like taking the bus or walking from place to place is something that I do pretty much every night.

Transportation is a big reality for him, and I think it's kind of amazing how he transforms it into something to make work about.

I really like the different visual elements I see at night, where buildings are kind of illuminated with the sky is pitch black, so it's all these different glowing elements.

For my piece titled Late Bus, I wanted to make a painting about a bus being better for it to be late than early, and I figure is looking at his watch.

No busses in sight and several other figures are in the background.

Just exploring the night.

I think now he's telling his own story.

He's finding what interests him and he's understanding through his own eyes why it's important, and he's communicating that through his art, and he's communicating it to a wider audience.

So this is my final year as I.

So I'm going to possibly take up like an art directing job or a creative directing job and maybe grad school.

And on the side I'll be doing a studio practice, so I'll still be painting.

You know, I expect that he's going to do extraordinarily well.

Like, I think that we're going to be hearing about him for a very long time.

Look out!

The trolleys are coming down the track on the next round of applause.

If you've never hitched a ride on a streetcar, we're saving you a seat at a Medina County Museum.

We all are dedicated to preserving this history and sharing it.

We also made a jogger.

County family.

That's all aboard the pastime of model train collecting and blues.

Man walking.

Kane cooks up a little traveling music.

All that and more on the next round of applause.

It's time to raise a glass and say goodbye to this round of applause.

I'm idea.

Stream public media's cabinet here before we go, I'm going to pour you some brandy for that's the Urban Dictionary.

Slang for a box, beloved.

Brandenburg Concerto number four.

Also beloved, here's Cleveland's baroque orchestra.

Apollo's fire, playing this masterpiece.

Cheers.

Know that.

You.

Have to.

Know.

That they.

Have.

You.

And.

You.

Production of applause and ideastream.

Public media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.