Coming up next on Art Rocks, Louisiana artists examine the humble, extraordinary dandelion.

Since ancient times, dandelions have been used as a medicine, one of a kind.

Leather masks enable wearers to channel their in a beast the quest to build a perfect guitar.

And a French muralist bringing classical technique to bear on West Coast street art.

These stories are next on art rocks.

West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LPI be 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 of Country Roads magazine.

You don't need to be a gardener or an herbalist to appreciate the humble, cheerful dandelion.

This commonplace edible flowering plant is widely recognized for its changing phases and well-documented health benefits.

The dandelion appears throughout art history for the delicate beauty of its many faceted flower head, as well as its dramatic lifecycle changes.

Artists from south Louisiana and further afield created an exhibition to celebrate what the dandelion means to them.

The show is the brainchild of independent curator Elizabeth Weinstein.

His Elizabeth and some of the participating artists to share how this exhibit came to be.

This exhibition came about because I was searching for curatorial opportunities and ran across the fact that Long View has a creative residency program which invites outside artists and curators to submit a proposal they wanted something to do with health.

What most people don't realize is since ancient times, the dandelion has been considered a symbol of health and hope and resilience.

Dandelions are very difficult to get rid of, in part because they have a taproot that provides enough energy for the plant to rejuvenate itself very quickly.

So the plant itself is resilient.

But every part of a plant is edible from the roots to the leaves.

Even the flower itself.

And since ancient times, dandelions have been used as a medicine to treat all kinds of different ailments throughout time.

They're used in herbal teas even today.

They're very nutritious.

The leaves can be kind of bitter.

You cook them down and they kind of have a colored green or mustard green sort of texture and taste to them.

When I began to look for artists to include in the show, I found that there have been many artists throughout time that have turned to the dandelion for inspiration.

Even Van Gogh.

When Monet have famous paintings of Dandelion Giants, Mick Jagger did a song Dandelion in the 1960s.

Ray Bradbury's writing Dandelion Wine in the fifties.

Today, a lot of interior decorators and designers use the form of the dandelion.

But I wanted to stick with fine artists, so I found quite a few artists that I knew and some that I didn't know already had work that featured Dandelion.

So I started there.

But I am humbled by the fact that so many of the artists in the show all created new work.

It becomes more of an what's called an invitational that you invite artists and their 19 in the show, most from Baton Rouge and New Orleans, who created work for the exhibition.

Some are very personal.

Some are a little gritty.

Some are beautiful.

They took all different forms of the dandelion.

My piece for the Dandelion exhibit is called Origins and Endings, and it was a great opportunity for me to make a piece specific to the show already.

The theme of working with a natural element was very appropriate for my work.

I've been making work that looks at nature and human beings, our connections, our disconnections.

And in my piece I made kind of a dreamlike image where there are two figures and one has the head of a dandelion bud and the other figure is spewing dandelion seeds from the puff ball out into the air.

You see behind her what looks like could be the cosmos.

So there's a dark space.

And so thinking about the macro and the micro.

So thinking about space and then something as tiny as a dandelion seed.

I also pulled from imagery of all the different stages and parts of the dandelion, from the root to the plant to the seed path, and incorporated all of that into the image, the dandelions, one of the few plant forms that have been compared to the celestial entities, meaning that the bright yellow flower looks more like the sun.

And that's what many people are familiar with when they first kind of grow up through the ground.

And then over time they morph into that big white puffball that we're all familiar with blowing upon to make a wish.

I have two oil paintings.

They're pretty straightforward.

They're titled Sun and Moon and there's a dandelion and the sun phase, the yellow blooming phase, and then another in the moon phase, the seeds, and they're starting to blow.

And then there's kind of arches over them.

And it's sort of like night and day scene.

My work features a lot of nature and natural objects, but I try to do is to honor pieces of nature, leaves, rocks, insects, things that we often overlook, things that we'll walk by or things that we think of as pests and weeds, and to sort of elevate them to positions that are honored and positions that are just kind of seen as sacred.

And I think that the dandelion kind of fits that perfectly, where it's seen as a weed, it's seen as a thing that we try to get rid of, but it's a helpful edible thing.

It's great for the soil.

It has all of these benefits for the environment that we don't think of just because it's so prevalent and it's so ubiquitous.

This exhibition allowed the artists to choose whatever media they wanted to use.

The Tour du Gosse is from Lafayette, is known for his work using little bitty labels and creating mosaics and visual imagery from that.

So this dandelion here is an example of one in which he has done that.

This was made before the exhibition, but I felt it was a wonderful idea of the plant form and the tapestry.

He had begun before I approached him, but it's woven.

It's a woven tapestry in which he's looked at ancient cultures to incorporate his ideas of the dandelion as a medicine form, sort of a shamanistic view of the dandelion and its potential.

Some of the artists have used traditional oil on canvas.

Some artists have used photography.

Some have done street photography.

Some, such as Courtney Egan and her husband used AI, which is of course, a brand new form, artificial intelligence, instructing it to find other imagery that already exists of dandelions.

And then they wove it together into a video that we chose to play on an old television, which gives a wonderful concept of something very old and something very new.

And the juxtaposition between the two, I think, brings home how very contemporary the medium they've chosen to work with is.

Yeah, here in Louisiana, there's no excuse for just sitting there on the couch because our state is thick with cultural events and attractions to discover.

So here's a list of some cool exhibits, performances and festivals coming soon to towns near you.

For more on these exhibits and others like them, consult Country Roads magazine available in hardcopy and online.

To see or share any episode of Art Roberts again, visit LP Daub slash Art Roberts.

And there's also an archive featuring all of the Louisiana segments of the show available at LP Bee's YouTube page.

Away in Key Largo, Florida, Carolyn Guyer creates meticulously detailed leather masks that encourage the wearer to get in touch with the beast within.

Beautifully crafted, each mask is formed completely by hand.

No molds required until the faces of rabbits, dogs, goats, cats and other creatures emerge between Gaia's careful hands.

Here's her story.

My name is Caroline Guyer and I'm a leather worker who specializes in making theatrical costume leather masks.

And I live in beautiful Key Largo, Florida, in the Florida Keys.

It was clear from the beginning that whatever kind of creative, artistic esthetic is in my head translates well into a leather mask.

I love studying the animal faces, you know, I like looking at animals, so I'm happy to just study them and see if I can make a mask.

And at the same time, that is what people seem to want more and more of.

I'll never forget a customer asking me to do a rabbit and, you know, struggling with it at first trying to figure out how to do these animal faces.

And I did the rabbit and people loved it.

There seems to be like a creepy rabbit mask thing that's almost like a like a modern, archetypal collective, unconscious kind of thing where people really respond to creepy white rabbit masks over and over again, regardless of what movie they've been in.

They're in movies again and again and again.

So I find that is something that kind of persists year after year.

And then, of course, wolves are always popular.

And then I'll have people that'll be like, Oh, can you do one of my dog?

I have people who wear them, people who hang them on the walls and then people who do both.

We'll just leave them on the wall until they have a masquerade event to go to.

But I certainly sell to people who are only going to wear them and people who are only going to hang them on the wall.

I create the masks entirely by hand.

If I have an idea of a mask that I want to make and I don't have a pattern yet for it, in over 20 years, I've got hundreds of patterns.

I'll research the design and create a pattern.

And then I trace that on to the piece of leather, cut it out with a blade, and then I wet that piece of leather blotted dry.

And then I wait until the leather gets to just the right point for it to be molded.

And that varies from piece of leather to piece of leather.

And also depending on the humidity in the air or stuff like that, when the leather is at the right point to be molded, I sit there and I mold it all by hand, and then I set that on the floor or on a towel or something.

Let it dry overnight.

Most mass, I'll do an airbrush base.

So I go outside and I airbrush the base on.

And then after that dry, I buff it up a little bit and I add some detail hand painting with the acrylic paints.

And then when that's dry, a brush on an acrylic sealer and when that's dry, I sand the back so it's comfortable.

I add some felt padding if that's needed, some mass needed, some don't.

And then I'll put on ribbon ties or so on elastic straps and then it's ready to go.

I work very hard to make them comfortable and that is one of the hallmarks of my masks.

And that is why a lot of the groups, theater groups, dance companies come back again and again for my masks because you could put them on and almost forget about them is my goal anyway.

And that is one of the nice things about the leather is they tend to just breathe a little bit more than a synthetic mask.

I could just make goat masks all day long, and I have a dream project that I need to do eventually where I want to do all the different breeds of goats, you know, because there's so many different kinds of goats.

And I would love to do a beautiful mask representational of each one.

People who buy masks seem to enjoy goat masks, and it's always fun to do something like a leopard or a mountain lion, You know, if it comes out good.

That's the kind of mask where I'm like, Hey, look what I made.

That's kind of pretty, you know, just like the animal is a musical instrument is a special thing, almost an extension of the body mind and spirit, as any musician will tell you.

So it's no surprise that in the quest for the right instrument, many musicians opt to have theirs custom made.

One of the places they go is Colorado Springs, where a blind worm guitar's luthiers are building beautiful, utterly unique musical creations.

Come see, there are no rules when it comes to playing the mind bender.

It requires no formal music training.

You just kind of listen to what you're doing and you can pick out melodies and songs and a sound as unique as this one has to come from a pretty creative space.

Welcome to Blind Worm Guitars, where shop owners Kelly and Andrew Scott let their imaginations lead the way.

It all started decades ago when Andrew was growing up in Oklahoma dreaming of an artistic vocation.

I was just always creating stuff out of, you know, everything.

Moving to Colorado in 2002 turned out to be the perfect decision.

Leaving his old life behind.

Andrew built a new world in Colorado Springs, starting with an entertainment center.

It was huge, and it looked kind of like an Asian temple.

As I was building it.

I remember at one point I ran and jumped up into the big TV cavity of it, and I thought maybe I could do this for a living.

At some point, my sister had asked me to make her a lamp out of some broken instruments or something.

And so I started hunting all of these broken instruments from, you know, thrift stores and things.

And every time I would get them, I would say, Why?

I can't just waste this and I'd fix them and I'd make them work.

And then I just ended up having all these instruments and no lamp.

Then he met Kelly.

I really like whimsy and draw upon my experiences growing up and use a lot of that for my sculptures and that type of art.

So this one was my Valentine for Andy this year.

She booty shakes.

Is this anyone in particular?

It's kind of like me.

But one of the great things about this space that Kelly and I have put together is that we've created just a great lab, if you will, to invent and work with new things.

It's just great to have another creative person to bounce ideas off and to be inspired.

The rest is history.

Together, Andrew and Kelly are the reason Blind Worm Guitars is the Creative Imagination Center in town.

I realized that I had this great shop of all these tools and all this knowledge, and I had already done a lot of carving and precision woodworking and inlay work and kind of all the elements to building instruments.

So I started making some for myself for fun, and right away I started getting custom orders from friends and people around town and within probably a year from that, I had decided, okay, I'm moving into this music business side of it.

It just always felt right.

This is the Manticore seven that got us at least a couple of years now since I walked out of here with this one.

And so this to me is the quintessential heavy metal guitar.

Seven strings, red horns.

Looks like it might steal your soul.

And that's what I wanted.

It.

The Scott Sauce.

They're building materials as locally as possible.

Some even have family roots.

The bird's eye maple came from a table.

My great grandfather built over 100 years ago, and it got damaged.

And I saved all the wood.

This one here is a custom piece I made for a good friend of mine that it's a full acoustic guitar, but it's also has magnetic piezo.

And maybe components so you can hook it up to a computer processor and make it sound like a trumpet or anything you want, really.

We select wood here in town.

Um, and then we grew up sort of these blocks of chunks of wood that are then kind of rough down on a band.

Saw.

And then we attach to a pattern and then run them through a big router and, and then some other smaller routers until we end up with something a lot more refined.

We ran out cavities and drill holes for all the equipment, and then we put in the inlay, which we're currently cutting all that with the laser cutter.

And then they go through a process of clear coding and we, we go to the assembly process, our pit guards and all that stuff we make with patterns that we cut out on our laser cutter.

Of course, you have the relief in the neck, which allows you to get that full amount of tension that you're bending the strings in and that's that's really crucial to the design of this.

Also, the shape of it has to do with how it sits on your knee, how it hangs on a strap, or how it can sit on your leg this way, too.

Everybody does something different.

Back to that sound generated through this eastern inspired stringed instrument and created right here in Colorado Springs through 15 years of invention and the patenting process.

The mind bender is staged to be blind worms.

Most popular order.

A lot of it had to do with wanting to create things and sounds and ways to play that weren't out there.

Chopin has the koto, China has the guitar saying Vietnam had the Dan Tran, and they all rely on having a string for anywhere from 1 to 20 of them or so.

And using slight amounts of bending to create different sounds out of it and change the pitch a little bit.

The classically trained French painter Stefan Salyer, blends the past with the present, mixing the themes and the techniques of classic old world painting with the codes and rules of street art.

The result?

Large scale street murals that are impossible to ignore.

We traveled to Virginia City, Nevada to find out what that looks like.

I must've fancied you.

And I'm an artist.

I'm a painter.

I came from France like it was seven years ago now, because I love the United States.

So I sold everything I had in France and came here.

So I paint.

I use technique from the master, the French masters from the 15th century to know, like the glazing I'm using on that one, the multiple glazing with transparency.

So like the grease I had painted black and white first and I had the colors on the top with transparency, some different kind of techniques like that.

I work on Wittenoom and usually I paint subjects that are more modern with classical technique, so it looks really classical.

But when you take the time to watch it, it's a little bit different.

I get that training in France when I was in the French national Fine art school, the real first trip.

It's the creation of the design.

So I've got some images that appears in my brain.

That's why my wife think I'm nuts.

She's probably right.

I look at the pictures, I try to find a picture to see.

I can create my composition.

And first step is to create the design so I can create my design.

And after that I start to draw a just draw and painting, painting, painting.

So I will start with a dead layer to put the very quickly, the light and shadow, or it will look.

And after that I will add layers and layers and layers and I build the painting.

You build almost like a sculpture.

You add layers and layers and layers to build the shape.

Because everything we see, it's because of the light.

So the shape is created by the light.

So you need to add layers and layers and layers to create all the small differences in the light that create the shape.

It's a long, long process without layers, with transparency, a little bit like when you use sunglasses, different kind of colors.

So they will blend together like filters and you change till you obtain the transparency and the texture of the skin.

Sometimes there is like this one layer is around 50 different layers to create the texture on, on the skin and the the transparency, the light inside.

It's hard to stop because when you are in this process, you are in another world.

There is nothing else around you and you work with the inside of yourself, of your your deep thoughts.

It's just a conversation with your soul.

That's all you have with yourself.

And you talk to yourself and you want to have a message in that painting.

You want to put the emotion you feel when you paint on the parrot and on the painting.

It's really a meditation process.

In my painting, I tried to express something that disturbed me or something I like, and sometimes what I like it when the people who will do, the viewer, who will see the painting, they will try to find a message about me.

But usually they will find something about themselves.

That's what I like.

So it reflects more what people think about it, about the message I really put in that because my vision is completely different.

Probably all of you will will have a different opinion of that painting.

That's my goal.

So it's more like a mirror.

They can see what they would all down real deep thought and how they are.

So I want people to feel something, even if they don't like it and they say, Oh, it's disgusting, it's okay.

There is an emotion, it works.

So yeah, that's what I want.

And that'll be that for this edition of Art Rocks.

But that's okay because you can always see and share episodes of the show at LP Dot org's Art Rocks.

And if you love these sorts of stories, remember Country Roads Magazine, a useful companion for getting to grips with Louisiana's boundless cultural pleasures each and every month 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 LPI be 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.