- [Narrator] Coming up on "ART inc." In the Studio: Shelby Meyerhoff, How to Photograph a Sunrise, and Imagining the Storm.

- [Reporter] If you want to know what's going on.

(groovy upbeat music) (birds chirping) (groovy upbeat music fading) (TV crackling) (slow soft music) - When I'm in the studio, then I'm able to sort of create and build on a fantastical language.

I'm looking at different angles, different poses, facial expressions, lighting, sometimes the color behind me.

When all of this is working together, the sense of the human person as an individual, me, almost sort of vanishes and the creature emerges for that, that moment that is captured on camera.

(camera beeping & clicking) (slow soft music) (slow soft music continues) A lot of my work is exploring our connection with other species and sort of seeking to reconnect.

(slow soft music) Making this work in a time of environmental crisis, there's a deep awareness for me and, and tension and mourning over what is happening to our natural world.

And I'm really interested in our relationship with other species and the sort of sense of false separateness.

(slow soft music) We are living creatures who are part of these ecosystems and we're not just acting upon them, but we are vulnerable to the consequences of our actions.

(slow soft music) The climate crisis needs everybody.

Finding a way to build community that invites the full range of what people have to contribute in is really important.

And so for me, that is through this work.

(slow soft music) I like to say that "Zoomorphics" is not a eulogy, that it's not a dirge.

And in my work, I think there is not only this, this tension, but also this sense of wonder and joy because I love being out in the natural world and I'm still really excited and interested in the nature that can be found even in urban and suburban places, the sort of semi-wild places where I've spent most of my life.

(slow soft music) Red Bellied Woodpeckers live in Rhode Island and Massachusetts and other parts of the country heading south along the East Coast, and they can be found in backyards and wooded places.

So that struck me as an interesting opportunity to dwell on place and what is local to us.

Woodpeckers in general can be, you know, annoying to people and that's interesting to me too, to think about.

It's easy to romanticize the natural world, but what actually happens when humans and other species come into contact is really interesting to me.

(slow soft music) (slow soft music continues) Making the work in total can take up to eight hours in a day, you know, including the painting and the photography.

(slow soft music) To me, the real happening is in when all three things come together, the painting, the performance, and the photography.

Because the photograph can capture a particular magic or illusion that that particular moment, that angle, that lighting just brought the sense of transformation together.

For me, as a woman, making self-portraiture, it's really exciting and important to get to make work that expresses the full range of what it is to be alive.

And I'm really aware of the history of women in art.

And even when women have made self-portraiture, often that is sort of erased from the official history over time.

And so to me, it's really important that I am the maker of my own image.

Painting, performing, photographing, to be fully present for that is, is a wondrous thing.

(slow soft music) (camera beeping & clicking) (slow soft music fading) (electricity arcing) - Anytime I go out in the morning and it's still dark out, I always get this really mysterious feeling.

There's been so many mornings where all of the conditions have come into place and the sky lights up with the most amazing colors.

(camera clicks) That's what excites me the most about photography, and I find myself continuing to chase those moments.

(slow soft music) My name is Ross Lippman.

I'm an arts and culture producer for Rhode Island PBS, and I'm going to show you how I photograph a sunrise.

The first step to photograph the sunrise is of course, to get up early.

The next step is to pick a location.

On this morning, I went to Point Judith Light.

I've had a lot of success here, especially late in the summer when it starts to get cool overnight.

With the temperatures dipping, what I was hoping we get is a little bit of sea mist in the air and we have that.

Once I'm on location, I need to come up with a composition.

When the sun is coming up, it's a challenge because everything is really dark because there isn't daylight yet, but the sky is really bright in lighting up.

And so it's really important to know the settings on your camera to make sure you're getting the right kind of photo.

(camera clicks) (soft guitar music) Once I have a picture that I like, I try to shoot and move.

(soft guitar music) (waves crashing) Point Judith has this really rocky and interesting shoreline and I find it to be a really cool area to play with long exposures on my camera.

And once you've found a new area and composition, I'm essentially repeating those steps again.

(camera clicks) (soft guitar music) For me, I want the picture to look just as much like how it felt for me when I was out there as it did actually look outside, and that's one of the great things about editing is you get to make all of those choices.

The photo is great, but it's the memory and the experience of being out that I find myself always coming back to.

Oh man, the sun's about to peek out over here.

Oh, this is gonna be, oh.

(laughs) Oh, that is so great.

I'm Ross Lippman and that's (camera clicking) how I photograph a sunrise.

(soft guitar music) (electricity arcing) (slow soft music) (waves crashing) - I'm Allison Bianco and I'm an artist and a printmaker.

I combine two printmaking processes: intaglio and screen print.

(slow soft music) So intaglio is copper plate etching.

After I complete the etching, I go back into the work and add color with screen printing.

(slow soft music) I think something that makes my artwork recognizable or unique is the combination of the etching and the landscape with bright playful colors and humor.

I think about the landscape as the truth.

I think, you know, like that's the true thing, and then it's all of those memories that come in in different odd ways.

I find that really interesting, so that's why there's comic interventions on top of just this like stoic landscape.

(slow soft music) (waves crashing) (birds chirping) (drawer closes) (slow soft music) So what I want people to know about me, I love ice cream in my coffee, every morning.

(slow soft music) I'm really excited to be a local artist.

I love Rhode Island.

Even after leaving, I've always wanted to come back and live here.

I like representing my state and creating that visual history.

The first thing that I really fell in love with, with screen printing, it was the big, bold, flat color, the fact that you could get color that had no stroke to it.

I was kind of enamored with the way that that sat against something that did have a lot of texture.

So I started by making a lot of pencil drawings and then adding big pieces of screen print right on top of them, blocking things out or playing with the transparency of screen print, and that led into using that technique on top of intaglio.

(slow soft music) (paper rustling) Once I've collected all of the research material that I might wanna look at, or the imagery and I've made sketches, and I'm ready to start working on a copper plate, the first thing I have to do to prepare is to smooth the edges of the plate.

(slow soft music) This makes it so the edges are not sharp and it won't damage the blankets or the prints in the final printing.

Then I put a layer of universal etching ground to coat the plate, which protects the copper.

I use a metal scribe called an etching needle to draw the imagery into the plate.

(slow soft music) After the drawing is complete, I take the plate to the etching bath.

That's the ferric chloride solution that will react with the copper and create a channel where the ink will then be able to sit.

The plate usually stays in the bath from anywhere between 20 to 40 minutes to get a nice deep line (clock ticking) that the ink will be able to hold into.

I was in Hawaii, I was moving very far from Rhode Island, and I also had recently lost my father.

That was a real shift for me, in terms of understanding who I was, understanding where I was from, and then being that far away from my home and knowing that home was very different now.

That kind of piqued my interest in archive.

It was personal archive at that point, but I was looking back at a lot of family photographs, and then I started looking at places that everybody might recognize, not just me.

(liquid dripping) (slow soft music) After the plate is removed from the bath of the ferric chloride solution, the ground is removed and then I can see the line and how well it has been etched, and if I wanna add tone to the plate, I then have to do a second process called aquatinting.

(spray can rattling) (slow soft music) (spray can spraying) (paper tearing) The paper has to be damp, so the fibers open and they accept the ink very well.

(slow soft music) I carefully wipe the top layer of the ink off the plate, leaving the ink into the channels that I've etched.

(slow soft music) (waves crashing) As a kid, I always was down in Matunuck.

My grandmother had a beach house there, so you know, ocean was a big part of my life.

There is a total mystery.

It's so vast, it's so powerful.

It's also the place where the sea meets the land, and those landscapes get altered by the ocean.

(slow soft music) (waves crashing) I think there's an interesting, you know, metaphor there, for that thing that is kind of unpredictable, especially in the storm setting.

(slow soft music) I started thinking about the storms as the psychological storm and the storm that was coming, but that the characters were ignorant of.

(slow soft music) This thing was happening in that same picture play, but they were totally unaware of it.

- You were interested in hurricanes, natural disasters?

- Oh yeah, hurricane of '38.

Yep, anything from Rhode Island especially.

I started looking at literal storms and how those literal storms actually impacted the inhabitants of Rhode Island.

I'm always thinking about the present and the past in tandem.

(slow soft music) When the groundwork is the past, or this historic or a 100 year old view or something that I wasn't there for, then I need to put some of the present into it, something immediate.

These like abstract colors, it's just very like this is right now, and then, you know, seeing how those things play together.

Like it almost looks like a blueprint or historic document, right?

This thing that I add on top seems out of place, and it makes you question something.

(slow soft music) I take a piece of paper out of the water bath and blot it with a towel and then put it on top of the copper plate, which is on the press bed, roll the blankets back, and then crank the press.

(slow soft music) Getting to see the print for the first time is always exciting no matter how many prints I've made, because there's always little surprise that I get to see.

I don't know exactly what it's going to look like.

(stapler clunking) (slow soft music) When the print is on the bulletin board, I start to make some decisions about what I want the composition to be and what I want to add into it.

I take it over to my table and I start making and drawing the films for the screen printing, and then I use opaque black markers to fill in the areas that I'm going to want to screen print later.

And then I go into my dark room to make and expose the screens.

And I add a layer of emulsion, which is a light-sensitive emulsion to it.

Once it's all dry, I can bring the films that I've drawn down to the light table.

Anywhere where there is the black opaque image, the light will not be able to get through to the screen and that part of the emulsion will stay soft.

I take the screen to the washout booth and rinse, and all of those areas where the emulsion has remained soft will fall away and an open area of the screen will be revealed, and in that space is where the ink can get through.

Where I've seen a shift in my own work was from screen prints of shipwrecks into "The Sinking of Matunuck".

I started, I was going from a very personal nostalgia, into looking at the landscape in a very specific way.

(slow soft music) And then "Leave Your Troubles Behind", which was the first time that I started exploring the corner pieces and it's with this big yellow sun and it has the adjunct of that creature.

So it's the first time that a creature showed up.

I used to put characters in the prints, you know, people, where they might have been my family members, whatever they were.

But then there wasn't anything, there was like no humanity in some way.

And so, the little eyeballs or creatures brought that back in.

They're also never really, I think, affected by what's happening.

(slow soft music) And then probably after that, "Later That Day at Second Beach", which is the first time that I used one plate and reworked the plate over and over again.

I'm using the same image a number of times to create a larger piece.

The audience wouldn't necessarily know that by looking at it.

It's just something that I know, so it's like my secret.

(waves crashing) (slow soft music) So at this point, I'm ready to add the screen printed layers on top of the etching.

(equipment rattling) (slow soft music) And I print a layer onto the transparent paper, (slow soft music) and then I can put the intaglio etching underneath and line it up.

(slow soft music) There's never just one layer of screen print, there's always multiple layers of screen printing.

That process can last anywhere from a day to a few weeks if I'm trying to resolve a composition or decide, you know, if something's right or if it's finished.

(slow soft music) - We are so delighted to have Allison's third show here in the gallery, and it's called "Allison Bianco, A bit of Weather".

(slow soft music) (people chattering) - The show represents my last four years of working in my studio.

(people chattering) What do you like about this one so much?

- [Child] It's (indistinct).

- Allison's work is very beautiful because of all the different textures that she's able to create within it.

It's not only layered as a print, it's layered in terms of what you can see and how you see it.

It's really interesting to note that although Allison is a Rhode Island-based artist and topographically, lots of names like Matunuck, Gaspee, are relating to the coastal area of Rhode Island.

However, it has a universal reach in it, and even though it's our scene, it seems to be everybody's scene.

(slow soft music) - [Narrator] Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time on "ART inc." (groovy surfer music) (electricity arcing) (groovy surfer music continues) (groovy surfer music continues) (groovy surfer music continues) (groovy surfer music continues) (groovy surfer music continues) Watch more "ART inc.", a Rhode Island PBS original series, now streaming at ripbs.org/artinc.