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[ ♪♪♪ ] WOMAN: I go out to my backyard to watch birds and patiently wait until birds come.

MAN: A lot of this process is a give and take.

It's a long, slow conversation between you and the tree.

MAN: A lot of people think it's like a sacrifice to sit and wait for wildlife to show up.

Where I think it's, like, privilege to just be out here, and I love it.

[ camera shutter clicks ] Hiroko Cannon was a successful illustrator and designer in Tokyo, but in 1987, she and her family moved 5,000 miles away, here, to Pendleton, Oregon.

These days, she's making her mark as a master watercolor artist.

[ ♪♪♪ ] HIROKO: In the beginning, I just did it for fun, and then I didn't want to give up.

Every time I got a really, really scary feeling.

"Could I do it?

Are you okay to finish this one?"

But after that, I finish it, and then people buy those things.

And I thought, "Oh, I did a good job!"

[ birds chirping ] I go out to my backyard to watch birds.

Need to be really careful and gently go out and patiently wait until birds come.

[ chirping ] That's a pretty one.

Pretty.

It's nice today.

ERIC SLADE: Hiroko never takes photos.

She studies and she remembers.

Just my brain and my eyes are best camera... highest quality in the world, so... [ laughs ] I see a bird that has personality.

It's a shy one.

Cannot get into the bird feeder.

Try it.

Yeah, push them in!

There you go.

[ chuckles ] [ ♪♪♪ ] When you paint the personality-- human or bird or dog-- the most important part is the eyes.

With eyes, eyebrows show the emotion.

I make tiny, tiny feathers up in one part a little stronger, and then it's a totally different face.

I was born in Osaka, Japan.

I liked drawing since I was very young.

When I was 26, I moved to Tokyo.

I started to work as a graphic designer and then went to school in the night after work.

I studied human sketching.

It was really good study.

I loved Tokyo because I could have everything-- movies and food and everything.

Very exciting city.

[ ♪♪♪ ] And then I moved to Pendleton.

That was 1987.

At that time, I had a husband who is American who decided to move back to the United States.

I was almost crying because I was born in Osaka, the second largest city in Japan and then worked in Tokyo.

So that's just a culture shock.

I'd never seen a place like that.

[ cows mooing ] Pendleton is my home now more than Japan now.

I don't want to go back to Japan, because I'd miss people and I'd miss this dry weather.

At the Pendleton Art Center, Hiroko's work is in nearly every room, on every wall.

Is this an original?

Yeah, sure.

Cool.

She's had two solo shows in the past several years.

And in the center of town, a mural elevates her work to a new scale.

The city of Pendleton embraces and celebrates Hiroko Cannon.

[ ♪♪♪ ] I am painting right now a bald eagle.

I use translucent watercolor, and I use tiny brushes and then use them as a colored-pencil kind of way.

Hiroko's work is painstaking and precise... slowly building up layers of color.

A single painting can take two or three months to complete.

How do I feel when I finish my painting?

[ ♪♪♪ ] Just like finishing a spring cleaning, kind of.

[ laughs ] "Oh, I did it!"

[ ♪♪♪ ] [ birds chirping ] RICHARD: There's no doubt it's a slow art.

The fable always comes up, "The Tortoise and the Hare."

The trees are the tortoise, constantly plodding along, and can easily grow out of shape.

My name is Richard Reames, and I'm an arborsculptor.

It needs some explanation.

It basically is the shaping of live trees into things: houses, walls, or just loops and spirals and hearts and almost any conceivable design that you wanted to make out of a living tree trunk.

A lot of this process is a give and take.

It's a long, slow conversation between you and a tree.

You say something, the tree says something back.

[ ♪♪♪ ] There's many similar art forms.

Bonsai is simply miniaturizing trees.

The object is to make it look like a miniature tree.

Topiary is working with the foliage of a tree.

Pleaching might be the most related in that oftentimes the branches grow together.

But it's also pretty well defined as a single wall pattern.

But this is more like 3D chess compared to that.

So it needed its own word.

These are apples, young apples.

This has already flowered out, and the new growth is coming out everywhere.

A lot of the work involves pruning and bending and tying to a shape.

Once the shape is held, then you can bring any part together with any other part with grafting.

It's called approach grafting.

So what I'm going to do is just remove a little bark where these are going to touch and then bring those two cut surfaces into contact.

And they just grow together.

Because nothing is severed, that's why it mostly always works out.

Pull that snug.

And in about two years, I can take this off and they'll be grown together.

[ ♪♪♪ ] I tried a lot of different kinds of experiments with trees.

This is the tree that waters itself.

I just drilled a hole straight through the trunk, hooked it into the water system, and then through the years, I just kept extending this pipe by putting on extensions to keep it from being swallowed.

One project I did with a neighbor was he wanted to grow a boat, and I said, "I think I know how to do that," and so we got the trees, and that's how we grew a boat.

There's no telling whether a piece is going to work out or not in the long run.

So tools are really fun.

They're real easy to make.

And all you do is get an old tool head that hasn't got a handle anymore-- everyone has them laying around-- and you slip it over a sapling in the wintertime, when there's no leaves.

And eventually it totally filled in the handle, spilled out the back, and made the shovel nice and tight.

It took me maybe ten minutes.

The tree put in about four or five years.

If you look in the forest, it's not hard to find natural trees just growing together, one to another or a branch back into the tree, one branch back into the same branch to make a loop.

You can find examples of them everywhere.

And so I believe that's what inspired other people that were doing this art.

When I first started looking into this art, I found a rich history that goes way back.

[ ♪♪♪ ] And the oldest example I found was 1516.

It was a painting of an angel and an alchemist.

John Krubsack grew a chair, and he harvested it and took it to a World's Fair, 1919.

I was inspired by the work of Axel Erlandson.

He grew trees into all kinds of things, like chairs and ladders and hearts and spirals, and he had a roadside attraction in the Santa Cruz mountains of California, a place called the Tree Circus.

And I grew up about ten miles from where that was, and at the time, I don't think I barely noticed the trees when I was little.

It wasn't until I was in my 30s that I recalled Erlandson's trees, I'd read about them, and got inspired to try to grow some trees.

[ ♪♪♪ ] When I was 25 or something, I was one of the gypsies.

I traveled all around.

I had a van.

I was pretty much a free spirit.

So eventually we landed here.

And all our friends were looking to buy some raw land at the same time.

The whole place got divided up between us and our friends, and we all started building our houses and having our kids together.

I took a class in how to build a log house.

I went and felled all kind of dead standing trees.

My wife and I worked on the house for three years before we moved in.

And I remember looking at Erlandson's notes and drawings and then thinking, "Wow, wouldn't that be neat to grow some of these kinds of trees?"

So for a while I was doing mini installations, fairs, floral shows, and things like that.

This is a chair design.

INTERVIEWER: Is it a comfortable sit?

Oh, yeah, well, you know, I think any wooden chair could use a cushion.

My first book was called How to Grow a Chair, and it was mainly my ideas on how you could grow a chair by bending saplings, grafting.

After I wrote How to Grow a Chair, I was contacted by people around the world who wanted to tell me about other people that were doing this art, and then I gathered up the history.

And so after a decade, I had a lot of material for my next book.

You know, it's hard to say where this art might go.

I'd love to see it catch on and become more common in the landscape.

Art in a lot of ways, it embraces life.

More trees are planted, and I think that's a good thing for now.

You know, I think we need more trees on this earth.

I have no idea how long this is going to last for me.

I really enjoy it now, and it sure seems like I can continue this for the rest of my life.

It's a gentle work, and it's really fulfilling.

[ ♪♪♪ ] [ ♪♪♪ ] MAN: Lithia Park, when we first moved to Ashland, did not seem like it would be much of a hotbed of wildlife activity.

There's a guy leading Tai chi classes over here.

He's a friend of mine.

But there's a few very interesting subjects and creatures that frequent Lithia Park that, over time, I've come to appreciate much more.

I got beautiful images of a screech owl in this tree last fall.

It was some of the best light I've ever had.

The bird never moved an inch the whole time I was here, but the light moved constantly.

I got about 15 seconds of light where it just kissed the bird's eyes and the face.

One evening, there were two fledglings sitting right here on this tree.

It was just absolutely the most beautiful thing in the world.

If you want to get something magical, you look for light, you look for all these different things that hopefully can come together for you once in a while.

I think that's a sapsucker, actually.

That is a red-breasted sapsucker.

[ camera shutter clicks ] That's pretty...

Pretty bad light.

I'm going to try to sneak around the other side.

[ camera shutter clicking rapidly ] Going to be a very low percentage of good shots here, but I think I got a couple.

Funny thing about woodpeckers is they move their heads about 10,000 miles a second.

This is one of my more favorite spotted owl images.

They live in old-growth forest in these spectacular trees that are hundreds if not thousands of years old.

I love the tree, I love the composition.

I love-- It captures the essence of a spotted owl and the essence of where spotted owls live.

There are a lot of owls in my work now, and there probably always will be.

To this day, I still feel privileged every time I'm around one.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Yeah, I think we're ready to go.

INTERVIEWER: What are we hoping to see today, Dan?

We're hoping to see river otters or possibly a couple different raptors.

Really, I never know what's going to show up here.

My name is Dan Elster, and I'm a fine-art wildlife photographer based in southern Oregon.

Southern Oregon's pretty rich.

Most of my photography's within a couple hours of home.

See if we get lucky.

There's a river otter coming right toward us.

You see him?

Okay, I see two river otters out there.

[ camera shutter clicking ] There's a great blue heron across the way there, too.

A lot of people think it's, like, a sacrifice to sit and wait for wildlife to show up, where I think it's, like, this privilege to just be out here, and I love it.

This river otter's climbing up on a branch over here.

He's probably got a fish.

When I first started doing wildlife photography, it was more about just capturing an animal on film, where now it's become my art form, my form of expression.

There's a spotted towhee right behind you.

Um, whoop-- [ camera shutter clicks ] I don't know if it'll be sharp.

I'm kind of doubting it, but I got him.

[ ♪♪♪ ] When I'm taking pictures of wild animals, I am really trying to tell their story.

I'm trying to see a little bit more than what maybe a casual observer would see in a raccoon or a fox or an owl.

I want more people to be aware of what's around them.

I don't think a lot of people take the time to look and understand and think about what's around us and what's worthy of protecting.

[ children chattering, laughing ] My family's made up of my wonderful wife Patty, my daughter Savannah, and my son Forest, and our Golden Retriever, River.

That's right, buddy.

Two hands all the time, right?

There's certainly a joy in raising two kids, and I'm constantly teaching them about wildlife.

I hope they can carry the torch on the love of wildlife and maybe helping other people develop a love for wildlife.

[ ♪♪♪ ] I always know there's another image to be had or another memorable neat encounter with an animal or a bird or whatever it may be.

That is what drives me.

A lot of things have to come together for me.

I need a subject to cooperate, I need light, I need my equipment to perform.

But they come together often enough to keep me going.

I enjoy it no matter what.

Even if I'm having a lousy day in the field, I still just feel lucky to be out there and just watch things unfold.

My last good image is what makes me strive for the next good image.

Thanks so much for joining us.

If you want to watch these stories or dozens of other stories we've done, just go to our website... And be sure to follow us on Facebook and Instagram so you can see what we're working on right now.

We'll see you next time.

[ ♪♪♪ ] [ birds chirping ] It's a pretty one.

This has been here over 15 years.

It's almost ready to harvest.

Support for Oregon Art Beat is provided by... and OPB members and viewers like you.