Coming up on Art rocks, a memory maker moving through the world with music and nature on the mind.

People like it because it's just something from the area, not a generic starboard card.

Ceramics connecting viewers with the creatures and curiosities of nature.

An architectural and archeological marvel in Colorado, and some special techniques for photographing pets.

The goal of each photograph is to bring out the pet's personality.

Whenever I show someone their pets photo, they're like, oh my God, that's him.

That you capture fluffy right there.

These stories delivered to you on Art rocks.

West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LPB, 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, and thank you for joining us for Art rocks with me, James Fox Smith from Country Roads magazine.

Many Louisiana artists feel moved to represent our state's distinctive flora and fauna in their work.

Metairie artist Sean Aleman is one of them.

Using multiple media and working on many different surfaces.

Ailments.

Creative process celebrates all things Louisiana.

He even throws in Christmas cards based around Louisiana folklore.

Stop by his Metairie studio and see Christmas cards.

Image.

Start off with a Louisiana theme based off of Louisiana, either seafood or things like that, or Louisiana folklore.

Things like Papa Noel, Santa Claus with sacks full of toys like fishing poles and shrimp boots and alligator food toys and that sort of thing.

Anything I can find to put into this that people like it because it's just something from the area, not a generic Staubach card.

The Christmas card with the crawfish and the artichokes just went together.

It just seemed great because the red of the crawfish and the queen of the artichokes are Christmas colors, so it just lends itself to the Christmas idea.

And it's just a fun little thing where everybody goes to different crawfish boils and everybody tries to do a little something different.

People throw artichokes in their sausage, all kinds of stuff.

Corn.

They're popular with both tourists and labels.

I so lot of lost the internet to my Etsy website, but they don't just go locally, they mostly go to the Gulf Coast, but they also go to East Coast, West Coast, and everywhere in between.

People just want a little piece of Louisiana.

This is a favorite painting that I did a while back.

I tried to do make the crawfish intertwine with each other, and I call this one The View from the bottom of the pot.

So the crawfish are looking up at the sky, and they just kind of just a fun, colorful painting and just red, bright reds and bright yellows and the blue of the sky.

The Rooster at Mardi Gras is a version of the quarter.

Mardi Gras Cajuns chase the chicken.

They try to catch it to make gumbo.

So it's a big part of Louisiana.

It's a big part of Mardi Gras.

So the hats, beads, I've tried to make it fun.

I put beads and crown on the chicken.

For.

Being from New Orleans, I grew up and I've listened to jazz.

I've listened to blues.

I've listened to all these different bands.

There's brass bands and all kinds of different things.

I've go to a lot of music festival, which just feeds into the culture.

It feeds into the heritage of New Orleans.

Those are some of the things that would make it to my paintings, and that's what I want to share.

In this community and you also try to sell at the music festivals and that sort of thing.

I enjoy painting them and people collect them.

They have their favorite artists and that's something they want.

Same thing with the musical instruments.

In the cases all these people grew up, they played clarinet.

They played trumpet.

They played saxophone.

And they want a piece that they hang on the walls.

So I enjoy doing it.

My clients come from all over the place.

They come in town, they go to the festivals, and then they see the piece and they really enjoy it, that they're.

Among some of the people that I've painted over the years is a street performer down in New Orleans, going out on to Loosen Royal.

He would just sit on the corner.

He was blind in one eye.

His name is Grandpa Elliott now.

He recently passed away, but that was his thing.

He would sit there and play music.

From there.

He became famous and got on tonight's show, I believe, and played for playing the change into world tours.

Just a street performer.

But he was part of New Orleans.

He played it Monica and just sat on a five gallon bucket and played for change, you know?

So for the past few years, I've had the pleasure of designing all of the posters for the New Orleans Bourbon Fest.

It's fun festival where they let you go in all these high environments.

I try to keep all the posters with the Louisiana theme because it's the New Orleans Bourbon Festival.

I added old things like alligators and fiddles and accordions and anything I could think of, and a little Cajun cottage back in the back with a bar.

Even with a little outhouse in the back, I just try to mix them all together and fit them in there.

So it's like a puzzle and it all just fits in.

I'm really happy to win a can of crawfish drinking his bourbon and stuff like that.

I paint a lot of the birds.

The wildlife of the area, things like the pelican and the egrets and all of that stuff.

They're just beautiful.

They're so into the environment here.

Everybody's used to seeing them.

The cow image is just a fun image, and I enjoyed putting his ears over the frame and stuff.

Cows are also a big part of Louisiana.

The Baton Rouge area is known for its dairies.

I don't really have a favorite painting.

I enjoy the process.

I enjoy the completion.

I enjoy when somebody buys the painting and they take it home with them.

I do have paintings that we did keep.

I painted a lot of different things for when my daughter, who's who's now 14, before she was born, I painted a bunch of different things for the baby, for it.

We kept those.

I gave this to my wife and those still hang in our house today.

Things like an alligator as a tooth fairy and stuff like that.

Just fun little paintings.

I do sell a lot at different festivals, art markets and that sort of thing everywhere from New Orleans to Lafayette to Baton Rouge.

I also have things on consignment at different galleries and shops.

It's important to just branch out to get more things out there.

It's not just things on the internet or things that the shadows or things that the shop.

It's a mixture of all of them together.

I've always liked to paint before I strived at it from when I was a child, and I always wanted to grow up and do something in art.

I started off in architecture in college and I switched over to graphic design.

In the meantime, I got a degree in fine arts, painting and drawing, and I went back to study graphic design in The Graduate school, I paint in acrylics and watercolors, things like swamps and wildlife, fishing, hunting, that sort of thing.

I grew up here, and that's what I enjoy seeing, and that's what I want to express into my art.

But.

You know.

For more on these exhibits and others, pick up a copy of Country Road magazine to watch or rewatch any episode of Art rocks again.

Just visit lpb.org/art rocks.

You'll also find all of the Louisiana segments on LP's YouTube page.

We're northbound now headed to Bay view, Wisconsin.

That's where you'll find ceramic sculpture.

Jeff Rasch.

He creates one of a kind clay sculptures, fired and hand painted to give people a chance to really connect with the natural world, past and present.

Come see.

To me, my pieces are three dimensional canvases.

It's very fun to have these creature people.

I think of them as ecosystems of all kinds of creatures coming together, making a bigger being, much like nature is.

My name is Jeff Ross, and I'm a ceramics sculptor.

Ever since I was a little kid and that was the thing that I really excelled at, is working with, Clay.

It was plasticine back when I was a little kid, and I was just remember it was in fifth grade.

I made a plasticine pig and it was the best in the class.

And so that's where I got my start.

My work with clay, involves building hollow forms.

And so I construct, the pieces with about an inch or half inch thickness all the way around, depending on how big they are.

I really try to keep that about the same.

It gets too thick, things happen, pieces crack.

So the, you know, each piece is built hollow, like a pot.

I think if I was going to make just pieces that I want to make, they would be all life size human sculptures.

But I do try to supply different sizes for everybody else so the average person can take a piece home with them.

Variety is the spice of life.

For a long time, I was, stacking animals, just making sculptures of stacked animals.

And I always wanted to work with the human form, but I wasn't sure exactly.

You know, if I started stacking human forms, it might get kind of grisly.

And so I one day, it clicked that I could make human forms by stacking animals.

And that's what I did.

When I started a piece, I work from, photographs of, say, a human form.

And I have images of that person in pose from 360 degrees.

So images all the way around, and I make sure I blow them up on my walls.

And I use a calipers to get the measurements right.

Proportions.

Right.

And so that's where I start is, is getting the human form correctly proportioned?

It's difficult.

It's something that if it's wrong, it's wrong.

Very obvious to people, you know, that the anatomy is wrong.

You can fudge with animals.

People just don't know.

You know, they don't pay as much attention.

And so you have to do things with the human form to get it right.

And if it isn't, at least to me and I, and I think I'm more picky because it's my work.

But, it needs to feel right.

And then I sit back and think, well, what kind of an animal will fit in this muscle group to make this field right?

And so it then that just kind of evolves, and I don't know exactly what it's going to be until it happens.

Recently my pieces have been very earthy colors.

I use a lot of browns and greens and things that you can just find out doors, find it in your own backyard, my backyard.

But after a while I get a little bored and then I will go back and add color in my piece behind me.

Here you can see it's very colorful and I have koi in my backyard, and so it's fun to change it up and add lots of color.

I'm really have always been drawn to nature.

As a little kid, I would wander in the woods, cats, creatures, just enjoy exploring in that stuff.

And it's just something that's always kind of a longing for to go back to.

And so I find, using nature in my work now is something that I can draw on and just continually explore nature and go from there.

I have a product called Wild Spots, and they are faces that have a lot of fun with creating different expressions.

And I like to have these groupings of faces and have them interact with each other.

It's kind of again, the ecosystem thought, but this time it's more emotional relationships between people and my faces, which, they're like little mini green men.

And they again are taken from putting the human form and putting them back into nature.

And so the leaf form is something that you find in the wild and merge that with the human form.

And conversations with each other.

Well, it's fun sewing my pieces that are themselves, you get a variety of people coming through, and it's fun to look at people's expressions as they look at my pieces.

And quite often they laugh.

Or, occasionally I've had people start crying in my booth over the pieces.

You can find stately mansions surrounded by spectacular gardens in sites all over the world, but there aren't many places quite so unexpected as an English style castle perched high above Colorado Springs named Glen airy, the house was built in the 1870s with numerous additions during the decades that followed.

Visitors are welcome for tours, overnight stays, personal retreats and more.

So let's take a look.

It's this rugged place at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, with an English style castle right in the heart of it.

It's a little shocking the first time you come to the ground.

It's so beautifully constructed.

It almost is perfection.

And it looks like it's been here for hundreds of years.

I think the way that you come in to Glen Erie on this winding road up a canyon and there at the back, this castle is situated looking like it's always been here.

The thing that makes linear canyons so powerful is, you know, it's part of the same geology as garden of the gods.

The garden of the gods landscape, consists of course, large famous red rock formations.

They're different colors of sandstones and conglomerates in the granite.

They're actually, uplifted during the mountain building process of Pikes Peak.

So as the mountain tilt sandstones tilted vertically, you don't really see these sandstone spires until you get here.

The canyon opens up to you as you arrive at the castle and continues on.

It's a beautiful place and it draws many, many people and always has.

One person enraptured by the views was General William Jackson Palmer, who came to the region on a railroad surveying trip in 1869 after marrying his wife, Queen.

They returned to the area and soon began construction on their dream home.

John Blair, the landscape architect, saw an eagle's nest or an area on the side of a beautiful rock here, and gave the name Glen Erie to this space.

The carriage house at Glen area was built in 1871.

It was the first building built on the property, and William and his new wife, Queen lived in the upper storeys while they were waiting for their main house to be built.

The original culinary was a Gothic style house, and it was built in the form of a Latin cross, and it had about 27 rooms that was built on the banks of Camp Creek that flows from the mountains down the culinary Valley.

Years of expansions and renovations created the estate we know today.

After Palmer's death, Glen Erie was eventually purchased by The Navigators, an international ministry, becoming a conference center.

The region has long been affected by natural disasters, including fires and floods.

While serving as site for flood mitigation work, the City of Colorado Springs lead archeologist Anna Cordova stumbles upon something left behind the site of Palmer's trash dump.

This is where one man's trash became a treasure for local historians, context is everything in archeology, and I started thinking of, you know what am I close to?

Who was living in this area at the time?

An archeological dig of this nature is actually very rare.

To find more about Palmer, over 100 years after he's gone, it's a once in a lifetime.

You can't tell a lot about one particular family in a public dump, because lots of families are putting their trash in those places.

The really unique thing about this site is that everything that's out there we know came from this estate, which was apparently a really rare thing in archeology.

There are a number of artifacts that we actually recovered.

Were about 65,000.

We have looked at every one of those artifacts.

We have recovered and identified probably at least 50 different types of ceramics buttons, forks, knives, cooking utensils, cups, stemware, liquor bottles, pipes, flower pots, lots of different animal bones, wooden furniture, pieces.

Just, identified a tree cleat, which was really interesting.

A clip that you attach to the toe so you could climb the trees.

There's also industrial items.

So a fire hose.

We also have bottles that went into early fire extinguishers, photographic equipment.

So we have darkroom elements.

There's a lot of medicinal things too, as well as medicine bottles, medicine jars, vials for homeopathic type of medicines.

And a lot of people ask why we care about trash.

Why it matters.

But trash can tell you a whole lot about households and people.

It can speak sometimes even to ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender.

It can answer so many questions that we'll talk about the daily lives of these people to what they ate, what they wore, what they read.

It's unedited.

And that's where its power lies, because it's literally the raw material of their lives.

Out here at Glen Erie on the road again, this time to Tampa, Florida, where we'll meet Adam Goldberg, a specialist pet photographer.

Goldberg uses his camera for good, making unforgettable photographs of animals to encourage pet rescue and adoption.

I was doing adoption photos at the Humane Society here in Tampa and just doing it for fun on the weekends, and they asked me a few months in, hey, we love your pictures.

We think the community would love them too.

We hosted a photoshoot fundraising event for us and at that point this was two years ago.

I had no idea how to do that, how to get people to sign up the marketing behind it.

It went very well.

Sold out, hosted another one.

That one sold out.

Hosted another one that sold out.

Then I started reaching out to other animal shelters in Florida.

Those sold out.

So it took off because they just had a simple request.

And that simple request turned into a career for me.

And since that first event, it was in July of 2016, posted about 200 pet photoshoot fundraisers across the country, and we just surpassed about $71,000 in donations.

The goal of each photograph is to bring out the pets personality whenever I show someone their pets photo, they're like, oh my God, that's him.

That that you captured fluffy right there.

To get a good picture at a photo session.

It's important to have a calm demeanor.

The dog will feed off energy of me, of their owner.

Then I make a fool out of myself.

Noises, squeaks, squeals, and barks and times.

And the other thing is treats.

And I use a lot of peanut butter to rule.

It's important for shelter animals to have great photos because social media nowadays is so prominent.

And without that, without a good quality picture, they're just going to get ignored.

Suncoast Animal League gets a lot of interesting animals that have been through turmoil or trouble, and I was doing a pet photoshoot fundraiser, for them, and one of the foster parents had come over and asked if she can bring her in for a photo shoot, just to document her progress.

Clover was actually caught in a fire.

Her family was in, a shed.

And the mom, Daisy pulled to the puppies some of the puppies out.

And actually, she was found laying on top of some of the puppies, protecting them.

A few of the puppies had little marks on them, but Clover kind of got the brunt of it, where it looks like maybe that one of the pen panels fell on top of her and burned her pretty badly.

When she came to us, her immune system was so compromised that, not only was she healing the wounds on the outside from the burns, but she had some immune system issues on the inside that we had to work through as well.

So she she's a little fighter.

Adam is an amazing photographer.

He does a lot of, good things for the rescues in the area.

Suncoast Animal League shared that fundraiser and photos of Clover on their Facebook page.

And through that exposure, Madeira Beach happened to be following our page.

Our secretary, Tricia Eaton, saw posts about, Clover being up for adoption at Suncoast Animal League and Clover is great.

She came by we we liked her story and, she's just a real sweetheart.

So we, we chose her, and it's been great with Clover being adopted by the fire department.

I was so proud.

And it was just amazing to see her walk down in the commission meeting with her badge on and to give kisses to her new family and just know what kind of life she's going to have and the life she's going to touch.

You know, the kids that see her that have scars.

And, you know, she was a fighter.

She is.

And and just how strong she is.

And, you know, the help that she's giving to the firefighters because they go out and they see some pretty bad stuff, you know, on a daily basis.

And to come home to her and she's always happy and wagging her tail and happy to see them.

It makes the station feel more like a home.

The job can be stressful, and it's really nice to be able to come back to the station and know Clover be here.

I was able to do a photoshoot with her again as a follow up and the firefighters were there.

It was amazing.

We did some photos and in front of the truck and it was awesome.

Clover is the best dog for what she's doing now.

We plan to involve her in public education and teachers and stuff like that.

And like fire safety programs that we do with the schools.

And so she will have a job stop, drop in.

And that is that for this edition of Art rocks.

But never fear, there are always more episodes of the show to be found at LPB.

Dot org slash art rocks.

And if you just can't get enough of these enriching stories, Country Roads Magazine makes a great guide to what's happening in the arts, events and at destinations all across this state.

So 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 LPB.

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.