This time on Art rocks, a world class watercolorist seeking beauty and all things great and small throughout southwest Louisiana.

One painting just stopped me in my tracks, and I tell myself, that's how I want to paint a Nevada artist with fire in his hands and lifting the veil on some truly unique tattoos.

These stories right now 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.

Thank you for joining us for Art rocks with me, James Fox Smith from Country Roads magazine.

We're beginning in the southwest Louisiana city of Lake Charles.

That's where Sue Zimmerman dabbled in art for a decade before giving it away to raise her four sons.

But the love of fine art and a lot of honed talent stayed with her.

And as Sue's sons grew up, she discovered it was never too late to pursue her dreams and even to flourish as a fine artist.

Here's Sue to share her story with us.

I started taking oil painting classes once a week when I was 24 and with a friend of mine, and we took about five years.

I'd stop when I'd have a baby and come back a few months later.

And then the second baby.

I didn't want to go back to that same teacher and found a different teacher.

And she's wonderful.

Very, very talented.

Wonderful person.

One day she showed us into her house and saw these big paintings all over her house.

I was just in awe and one painting just stopped me in my tracks.

And I told her, I said, that's how I want to paint.

And she said, well, that's watercolor.

And I was just amazed because of the depth of color in it, all this transparent color, which makes watercolor so beautiful.

She had a full range of values light and dark, almost black.

And I think that's what makes the difference in her watercolors as to the ones I had seen before that were real pale.

It ended up being about ten years of watercolor classes, and it was just once a week in the morning.

That was my time.

I was raising these four boys.

In fact, that ten year span of taking watercolor classes, I had two babies, so I'd have to stop and start.

But I loved it.

And that was my time.

Never picked up a brush at home.

It was that one morning a week when I was around 40.

My three older sons were in school and my youngest was about three years old and out of the blue I got a job offer.

I wasn't even looking for a job.

I just learned that when opportunities come knocking, you try it out.

Don't just turn your back saying, I can't do it, so I did.

But the bad thing about it, I had to quit my watercolor class.

And so I went.

Five years.

Not painting.

Definitely not learning about art.

One of my friends gave me a book as one of these daily reading books that kind of help you find your authentic self.

It said God has given everybody a gift.

I made a pact with myself.

I said, I'm gonna go down a part time, and I'm going to use that extra time to study art again and to carve out a little place in my house to keep my paints out and start painting from home.

I bought books and got watercolor magazines and pored through those magazines, and I learned so much, and all the while actually doing paintings.

So about a year of that, a couple of my friends got me hooked up with a local frame shop that had a gallery.

I would bring my paintings to her and she'd frame up and sell them.

And then I decided to start Spread My Wings.

And I started entering juried shows and being accepted and even selling the painting.

They accepted, and I applied to have a solo show at this little gallery that the Art Association's has and was accepted and had a solo show.

It was very successful, and that made me realize, okay, I think I'm becoming professional now.

I got a website and I use it like my portfolio.

If you want to see my artwork, go to the Sue zimmermann.com.

I opened an Etsy shop to sell prints.

I learned how to make my own prints and I do very well with that.

I sell prints all over the country that way.

I started painting at other art shows outside of the frame shop and I was thrilled to be accepted.

And the jury chose.

And then when I would rent a prize, I was like, oh my gosh, really?

And then if it would sell, it was like, oh my gosh, that is really great.

It was a big confidence booster.

One show was a small show, but one of my paintings won Best of Show.

I was really thrilled for that.

In fact, I've hung onto that painting because it was so special because of what the juror wrote about it.

Watercolor is one of the most challenging mediums, I think, to kind of catch on to because of its properties.

You can't paint over it, you can't cover up your messes.

And then also you don't have a white color.

Your paper is your white color and your light colors all your light midtone.

So you have to save all that.

And so you really have to plan your composition before you start.

A lot of times I'll make a low value sketch first so I can figure out where I want to leave my lines and where I'm going to put the deep darks to make those lights kind of shine forth.

Then you start with your free paint.

That's a wet and wet lots of water, because that's another thing that you have to learn with watercolors is that it's all about the water.

You use a lot of water in making big washes, and then you start counting down your amount of water, and your brush gets less and less as you go along.

And that's where you can get your detail.

We have less water and more paint that each layer has to dry completely, or you mess it up and make mine put a wash of, say, yellow to create a glow.

That's be my first thing I do.

Find my glow.

The temperature in paintings is important in the design.

I've put warm colors in cool color away from the center of interest.

The next layer after that dries, I go and put another glaze and I can put a different color, like say some blue over a little bit of that yellow and it'll make a little green hue.

Rather than mixing it in I love the outdoors.

I can just almost live out there.

Luckily, I have a good camera on my phone because I can just pull it out and take a picture is wonderful.

It's usually has to do with how the sunlight is hitting a certain area.

It could be a building, it could be a field, whatever.

It's the light and dark that attracts me are the colors.

The beautiful colors.

All of a sudden show up in a certain time of day.

I am attracted to a lot of local flora and fauna.

I think it's been influenced by my husband and my four sons because they are all outdoorsman hunters and fishermen and they all love boats.

My oldest son took me out into some marshes in Cameron Parish and he had to get there by boat.

It was a natural aviary and has tons of roseate spoonbills and egrets and ibises.

And I took tons of pictures, and I've used those pictures throughout the years to create new paintings of birds.

So birds are kind of an ongoing subject matter.

About ten years ago, my yard was so pretty, all the flowers bloomed.

And so that was a phase.

I have some subject matters that have been popular, like a New Orleans paintings.

But landscapes have become my most favorite thing to do.

And now I'm kind of getting into skies and the cloud formations.

I'm glad to take the commissions.

I'm overjoyed when they come and pick it up, and they just all rave over it, and just sometimes they'll get tears in their eyes and that makes it worth it.

I had gone to a watercolor workshop with this well known artist from California that teaches plein air painting.

She taught us to take a journal, a book, and paint what you see plein air in the book, and then make notes and label where it was.

So I grabbed on to that and I flew.

I just love doing that.

And I'm starting my third journal now.

And did a workshop with that same artist in Italy.

I can look at those paintings that I have done and sketch is more like and just remember everything about that moment when I was painting, after I started exhibiting and entering shows and getting that confidence as a real artist.

I wanted to share with other people coming up in the watercolor world what I had learned about composition and the principles of design.

Because it applies so much in making your painting better, it puts it up a level when you really understand all that.

And so I taught a class for about ten years, and I got as much out of it as they did.

It was wonderful.

I even learned stuff from them, and it was mostly older people because it was like they worked all their life and they always knew they had a talent in art, and they finally had the time to embrace it.

And so I was just so glad to be able to give them that opportunity.

All over Louisiana, museums and galleries are hosting exhibitions that shed new light on the state we call home.

So here are some standout exhibitions coming soon to museums and 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 lpb.org/art rocks.

There's also an archive of all our Louisiana segments at LCC Bay's YouTube page.

From his home in Reno, Nevada.

Ben Rogers is the creator of burned wood prints.

Rogers uses fire, water, ink, and electrical current delivered from a repurposed microwave oven to create unique images that, like snowflakes, can never be reproduced.

I would describe my work as taking a piece of wood with the natural wood grain, the natural feel, the smell of the wood and burning it with fire, then taking imagery and applying it right over the top of the wood, like painting onto a wooden canvas.

My name is Ben Rogers and I create burned wood prints.

I'll choose maple plywood because it's very strong and it's very flat.

And take that piece, cut it down in my workshop.

And then I'll router the edges.

And then I'll flame the edges.

So I take a torch and actually burn around the piece.

And then I'll take a bit of water and baking soda solution and spread that over the top to help the electricity conduct.

And it also helps it stay on the surface of the wood rather than going through the middle.

And next stage is to burn it with electricity.

The process of electrocuting the wood is pretty amazing.

So I have a machine that I created in my workshop, and I'll take that and run an electric current through the wood, which travels along the surface of the wood, burning natural shapes into people call it fractals, or tree limbs or lightning, all reminiscent of what these burn marks in the wood look like.

No two are alike.

And those fractal shapes, they're totally unique.

Just like nature, just like a tree branch or lightning.

And they can never be reproduced.

Sand everything down so it's nice and smooth and looks really crisp.

And then run it through a big flatbed printer.

And that puts ink directly onto the wood, creating the imagery.

That is the final piece.

During the printing process, I'll take an image into Photoshop and I'll take a photograph of the wood and overlay it in Photoshop so that I can see that tan canvas, because basically I'm starting with wood instead of white, like you would on paper.

In recent years, what's also helped is a printer that has a capability to lay down white ink.

And so as the prints move through a layer of white goes down first before the color is applied over the top.

And this allows the colors to really explode on the wood canvas.

Growing up in Lake Tahoe, I've got a ton of Tahoe imagery, and I use a combination of my own imagery, but a lot of stock imagery, a lot of trees, bears, Tahoe mountains and chairlifts, ski resorts, stuff like that.

I love creating custom ones.

People love to have their own unique picture.

You know that family photo and have it in a unique canvas that I can create.

One thing that stands out that surprises people is when they pick up a piece of my art.

Oftentimes they'll smell it and it smells like burned wood.

It smells like if they've ever been in Tahoe in the wintertime and they've had a fire in the fireplace, it smells like home or it smells, you know, like a campfire from their childhood or something.

And so that's kind of a unique side effect.

My favorite part of the whole process is giving pieces to people and watching their eyes light up.

When you show them, you hold it up and they go, wow!

The uniqueness of the art drives me and I get positive reactions wherever I go, and it really fuels my desire to keep going and all the positivity that surrounds it.

The creative process runs on equal parts imagination and innovation.

In Miami, Florida, at a design studio named Stereo Tank, the team is exploring the relationships between sound art and architecture.

So let's take a trip to Miami to meet the studio's co-founders, and to come to terms with some of their wildly experimental projects.

It's a sound installation that creates, music or rhythms with water.

My name is Sarah Valenti and my name is Marcello Ortega, and we are starting.

Sarah Tank was born in 2009.

Our goal was to use space as an instrument.

So sort of like you can inhabit the musical instrument.

Of course, that evolved into many other durations.

We've been trained as architects.

We moved to New York, and then while we were working in architectural offices, we on our side, we started to do art projects in the city, public art, temporary installations and so on.

And that was also like a perfect territory to experiment.

This idea of combining public art and sound or architecture and sound into immersive installations.

We found several opportunities, grants and awards to be able to propose quick installations that could be done in the city.

Just targeting some areas that were underdeveloped or underused that needed activation.

We tried to experiment with sound, always sort of in a very primitive way.

The first sound installation we did was actually called Stereo Thunk, and that's where our name came from.

We took this huge plastic water tanks side by side and then, connecting them.

So the actual string that was creating the sound was also part of the structure of the installation because it was keeping it together.

So we liked that idea of kind of joining architecture and sound, even through structure of a project.

So we were invited to propose a project for Time Square.

We won, luckily, this competition and we had to design a hard, cheap installation.

That was the premise of the proposal.

It had to be related to love and we never saw ourselves doing anything like that.

So we took it really far away and looking at the heart more from a acoustical point of view.

The heart had some drums embedded so people could stop and play.

There were actually like six different acoustical percussion instruments, a very low frequency sound beating with a light.

All of these was pulsating while the heart was not being played by people.

We had to figure something out that was sturdy enough, and we went back again to the plastic tanks, thinking about the afterlife of a project.

We designed the Heart Beat project for being able to be transformed after its use in Times Square as another project that is called heartbeat.

We're going to show a sample of the cargo guitar, the cargo kit, that it was a project that we did in Japan.

These extra long string, it's within a shipping container.

So that's how we came up with the name.

The string is amplified, but it doesn't have any kind of effect.

So the string becomes smaller and the tone higher.

David top hat Charlton leaves his mark in all sorts of places on canvas, on the walls of buildings in his native saint Petersburg, Florida, and especially on skin.

Whether it's a surrealist mural of a medieval knight riding a giant snail or intricate skin art that celebrates the magic of the human body, Charlton's art always elevates the surfaces to which it is applied.

Come with us to Saint Petersburg, Florida to watch him in action.

My grandparents had a laundromat center in a tiny little valley town in Idaho, so wanderers and travelers would come to the laundromat center, where I spent most of my time as a child, and I would see bikers come through just covered in tattoos so innately mimicking, as most children do.

I would draw all of them myself, my friends.

And then that was kind of unconsciously unaware.

However, speeding up into my early teens, I became more aware of what a tattoo actually was.

And after receiving my first tattoo at the age of 15, I was kind of hooked from there.

The human body is a very three dimensional figure that has a lot of form and shape and flow to it.

So prior to tattooing, I took human physiology classes because I've always had a deep appreciation and fascination for the human body and how magical it is, which translates later on into the art form of taking a flat, motionless image and then understanding certain principles from the art realm as well as the anatomy realm, and putting them together to wear when the client wears a piece of art or the tattoo, it's there to fit, flatter and flow and compliment whichever area it is and designed according with the muscle striations.

Whether it's the joint or the arm, it should almost seamlessly be a part of them when the client comes in.

This is where the accountability and responsibility of the artist comes in to confidently say yes or no, but also kindly educate the clients.

Because the clients are collectors, they don't innately understand everything that the artist does.

Tattoo artist.

It's up to us to remember what it was like to be a collector and a client.

So to slow the roll, the patient and kind and communicate with them.

Why some things work, why some things don't work, and then also ultimately educate them on how to take their concept and transform that into not only a tattoo, but something that's going to age well and grow well with them in the skin.

Because unlike any other medium, the skin is a living, breathing, changing canvas, so to speak, where unlike paper or canvas that will stay the same, you have to take certain principles and steps to make sure that the ink doesn't settle and new and bleed together over time.

I was always drawn to Norse mythology, especially with the Celtic, knotting or designs and, the shading.

And then the thing that was super important to me was that I didn't want to have a tattoo that I could in a couple of years, bump into someone and suddenly they have the exact same thing.

David, some words just spoke to me really, really well.

Just because it's unique, it's his own piece of artwork that he made from scratch, just straight out of his, creativity.

And he didn't even showed me the artwork when I showed up the first day.

He just kind of told me, hey, I got something really good.

I know you're going to love it.

And it's been like that ever, ever since.

But I know that he's going to make it his art, and he's going to make sure that it's like done as well as I say, as he's capable of doing.

It's just absolute satisfaction.

Tattooing was definitely like the main corridor doorway that opened up other venues.

Since I had been constantly on a pursuit after moving from Idaho to Florida, like tattooing and learning that and then approaching the art forms and still doing that, it's like an adventure and chasing mountain peaks.

I appreciate the journey.

And then about a handful of years ago, a friend of mine over in Cocoa Beach had a box cans.

I was able to realize the amount of coverage that I could achieve in very little time with spray paint was just phenomenal.

It bit me and I just had that itch.

There's something magical about not touching whatever it is that you're actually applying a picture to.

Because tattoos are so precise, there's no room for error.

You're like, there you can't erase.

But with art, it was like taking all the leashes and the safety's off.

And it's just so Bob Ross would say, happy accidents and there's no mistakes.

And then it's pain.

So it's like if you make a mistake or a happy accident, you paint over it.

Can't do that with tattooing.

I want to provide a sanctuary, a space where individuals can get a glimpse of what it's like to feel what an artist feels when they're in that creative moment.

So I made the decision to do a private studio because that's the endeavor I'm still pursuing, is that path of an artist, and tattooing is just one of the main foundational mediums that has spring pointed me in to now, and that is that for this edition of Art rocks.

But don't worry, because you can always find more episodes of the show online at lpb.org/art rocks.

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 the state.

Look closer and discover more.

Until next week.

I've been James Fox Smith and thank 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.