Funding for COLORES was provided in part by: Frederick Hammersley Fund, New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund, and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation ... ...New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts... and Viewers Like You.

THIS TIME, ON COLORES!

MILLIONS OF TILES, 11 YEARS OF INTUITIVE DESIGN WORK - BEVERLY MAGENNIS' TILE HOUSE WAS MADE FOR THE DELIGHT OF IT.

RAISE YOUR GLASS TO CELEBRATE THE FIFTH YEAR OF 'PINTS AND PRINTS' IN COLUMBUS, OHIO, A SCREEN PRINT POSTER FEST WHERE 12 ARTISTS CREATE LIMITED- EDITION POSTERS INSPIRED BY THEIR FAVORITE BREWERIES.

IT'S ALL AHEAD ON COLORES!

[Music] >> Beverly Magennis: [Laughter] What a fun house.

I started tiling the house in 1983 and I finished in 1994.

And I chopped every one of these tiles and placed every one and grouted every one.

I counted the tiles in a square foot and figured out how many there were on the house at one point and there were millions.

>> Michael Kamins: Wow.

It was a shack.

It was a square box, it was falling apart.

Do you want me to show you the picture?

>> Michael: Sure.

>> Beverly: We had pictures of how it was when I first saw it.

And then we added a little bump to it.

And then this is a picture of putting the tile just over the front windows so it's just kind of evolved.

Well, I had a career as a professional artist and I was making ceramic sculptures.

Large ones, and one day a gallery returned some of my work and I was devastated and I sat on the front step and I thought, "what am I doing, like what do I really want to do?"

And I thought about when I was in grad school and we had gone to see the Watts Towers.

And I was so moved by the Watts Towers.

I could get shivers now just thinking about it because it, you know, that was communication to me.

He communicated something to me.

So, I just thought, I'm gonna tile a little design around the side of my side door.

And I did that and then the whole rest of the house looked empty, vacant.

So, then my neighbor said, "I'll bring you some more tile."

So, he brought me some more and I started the arches around the front windows.

And then he said, "I got scaffolding.

I'm going to bring scaffolding over and you can just keep going."

So, I just kept going and he was so in tune with me that he would move that scaffolding after I finished a certain area, he would decide where I was gonna' go next.

So, Phil just came over in the middle of the night, moved the scaffolding.

I'd get up in the morning and that's where I tiled.

I didn't buy any tile.

It was all donated or found.

People left it.

I just had tons of tiles.

I worked on the outside during the summer and the inside during the winter.

[Music] >>Beverly: [Laughter] In the living room, I wanted the atmosphere to be, not quite crazy, so I did a white on white mosaic.

Because I didn't want a lot of distraction.

There was a bookcase where I made the books out of ceramics.

And I wanted to put pictures on the wall so I made a ceramic portrait of my daughter.

What I did in the bedroom, I made ceramic curtains and so the design is the pleats and the curtains are the way that I installed the tiles and the tiles had a design on them so that looked like fabric.

I came across a stash of those little one by one-inch tiles and I made wallpaper for the whole bedroom in that one by one-inch design.

And, then in the bathroom I made a medicine chest and, that has like a shaving cream and toothpaste.

And, then I also tiled the sink with tiny little quarter inch tiles and the kitchen ceiling had a leak and I thought well I'll cover that because I didn't have enough money to have it repaired but I had enough imagination to think about covering it with nickels.

So, I started with nickels and then I lost my job and so then I went to pennies.

>> Michael: There's some kind of concentric thing, cosmic thing happening there.

Am I putting too much into that?

>> Beverly: Yeah.

[Laughter] You definitely are because the way the design happened was, there was a light fixture in the ceiling and it was one of those round ones and so I started going around that and it's just one circle after another and I never looked at any of those pennies to see if there were any wheat pennies.

So, there might be a fortune on the wall.

The bottle cap room, there must be thousands of bottle caps.

There must be thousands.

>> Michael: Why bottle caps?

>> Beverly: Because they were available and you know, they were shiny and bright and they were a little unit.

I was inspired by working at The Quarters as a waitress.

All the waitresses saved the bottle caps for me and I did the ceiling completely in Budweiser because that's the most popular beer.

And I put them all on with a hot glue gun and they fall off all the time and they have to be put back on all the time.

Well, after I finished...

I thought, and even while I was working on it, I thought it would be so fun to walk out my door and see a bunch of big birds out in the yard.

Then I made some sunflowers and tulips and then I thought it would be fun to see some figures and so I made some Garden Ladies.

They had to be happy.

They had to have big mosaic skirts and then their arms held up this planter and they were just about celebrating nature.

Celebrating life.

Celebrating women.

I wanted some figures to guard the house.

So, there's a banana man.

There's a peach-cucumber person, carrot person.

I wanted them to be like friendly and bearing gifts.

I got my inspiration for those from pre-Columbian figures and that's what happens to me.

I'll look at pre- Columbian figures and they'll just blow me away and then they turn out completely different.

If I were to describe my creative process there are two things going on.

The first thing is that I'm confined it seems to the square or the circle and the triangle and I can't escape that.

I can't seem to make wavy lines or get into anything blended.

It's just always very geometric and somebody described it once as "the kindergarten visionary."

I found out early that I had to use contrasting colors to make the design pop.

So, I would never put a yellow beside a white.

I would put a yellow beside a black or a blue beside a red and sometimes I just had a very little bit of tile and I would just put a little triangle of that color in and it was just completely intuitive.

>> Beverly Magennis: I love long projects.

So, it was a surprise to me how it developed and how every side of the house is different depending on what I was feeling or what kind of tile I got.

I think my art is about committing to a process and letting the process develop, to create a finished product and along the way my intuition is directing me.

If I'm going to make a sculpture, say I'm going to make a Garden Lady, I sit down and I draw it out.

I figure it out.

But the Tile House was something else.

The Tile House was just an abandonment to my intuition.

And then the other feeling is one of joy.

And that's what I felt when I saw the Watts Towers.

That he had made something just for the delight of it.

And that joy happens inside me and it's always there and that's what I think composers have.

People that are artistic, they have some kind of feeling and I just have this feeling of exuberance.

And every time I drive over here, I feel joyful and I feel this is the way a house should be.

Should be happy, should be decorated and it should celebrate creativity.

BREWING ART >>JESS: We're here at Upright Press, an independent screen-printing shop in Colombus on the south side preparing for our fifth year of Prints and Pints.

>>JOHN: Prints and Pints is a screen print poster fest.

It's a collaboration between the Daily Growler and Upright Press and then we bring in 12 breweries and 12 local artists to create unique posters.

>>JESS: So, the artists treat this project kind of like a gig poster where they have an idea for a beer that the brewery makes and they work with the brewery on what that imagery will turn into and I think it's worked out really well that the breweries have given a lot of artistic license to the artists and that's why the posters have been so amazing.

The posters are limited edition, there's only 30 and they are numbered by the artists, one of 30, 32 so on and so forth and that's It.

So, I think that's contributed a lot to the excitement about the event.

>>JOHN: It is just a one-day event every year so only available in- person, no like online sales and it's just a really special event for us and for the community and the artists and the breweries.

>>JESS: Once they had agreed to it, then I let the artists choose which brewery they wanted to work with.

>>DUSIN: My name is Dustin Brinkman and I am working with Seventh Son Brewery.

Yeah, for Prints and Pints.

I have a really kind of soft spot In my heart for Seventh Son because when I first moved here I didn't know where anything was and I was overwhelmed by one-way streets coming from a really small town, so I lived down the street but had no idea It was there and I stumbled upon it.

And, I would go there every night after that.

I loved their atmosphere that they kind of cultivate there and the drinks and cocktails are always absolutely amazing.

But, yeah, I think I just really wanted to kind of in some ways give back to them, like by working with them in I wanted to participate in that way because I had such a warm experience there from the get-go.

Talking with the brewery it's not just Seventh Son, they have the two other breweries, Get Away and Antiques on High.

I tried to take little component to take the airplane from the Get Away because it has this plane and travel theme to It, taking the Seventh Son cat, also known as the assistant manager, the Antiques on High van and all those different things.

Really wanted to try and culminate all those different things into one poster that still centers around like that specific brewery, which is Seventh Son.

Yeah, my process it feels like there Is a lot of steps in it and it takes quite a bit of time.

Normally a start off with like a very, very generalized sort of gesture sketch.

The digital collage comes from either photographs I will personally take or things I will find on the Internet.

From there I print it off at scale, like the exact scale I want to print and carve that out, transfer that on to the linoleum block that's cut down to that exact scale as well so that Is fully 18 x 24 like what our poster is going to be and from there it's just sitting and there Is a process of carving which usually takes quite some time.

Then I come in here and I use the presses that are just behind me and then I will pull that first release proof.

Once that's dry I will scan that In and then do a sort of photo merge and photoshop, transfer that Into Illustrator for live trace and come back to photoshop and do all my brush work and tools and do all the color layering and stuff like that.

What I'm going to do for the poster when we go layer wise Is start off with this super intense very bright yellow that will get dulled down a little stuff.

This layer Is meant to only purposely be used for shadows to give stuff some depth, then red will go next with the sort of background sort of tone that like makes It not as just flat in there, and then the last color will be that blue that kind of transforms like all that yellow into a green.

I think by the end of this week I will be done and I can -- I can send the images to Jess to get them ready for printing.

çMUSICÑ >>NATASHA: I'm Natasha Wheeler and I'm working with Yellow Springs Brewery.

I wanted to work with the yellow springs brewery because I grew up in a neighboring city so I'm really familiar with the yellow springs area and it was just a place we visit with my family, as I got older it was just like the place we would drive to hang out for an afternoon at the shop and things like that.

The natural trails and hiking and it's just one of the more unique spots In Ohio.

When I was pared with Yellow Springs Brewery they already knew they wanted to have a poster for a beer and the beer is Creative Space, it's one of their I think NE IPAs.

I kind of had a few Ideas about how we might represent Yellow Springs.

My process for creating the print, I usually like to start with just a messy, sketchy thumbnail to try to get out the Idea and how I kind of want the eye to move throughout the piece and then once I kind of establish that flow I like to bring the sketch to the iPad.

I wanted kind of a loose free hand approach to It, so with the iPad I could really get in there and just touch up all those details, and then once I kind of have that really nice, refined sketch, I will bring It to the computer and I will use a program like adobe Illustrator to actually separate out the colors into layers and really refine anything that didn't translate well.

One of the Ideas was representing this Idea of a free spirit, so I wanted to use kind of like flowing lines because you think beer, it flows, Ideas flow, to then help tie all these different scenes together.

A lot of outdoor elements because the brewery itself is kind of a hub for outdoor enthusiasts.

Hiking obviously Is a big one, cycling, the bureau Itself Is positioned right on a bike path, it's got some repelling hidden in there, there's skateboarding, kayaking, there Is a river, got somebody bird watching, butterflies, flowers, just more natural elements that you might see there.

I would kind of say Jeff was like a master printer.

I'm always really pleased and surprised when I see like the actual print It's really cool.

There's just something about that Ink on paper and like the matte quality to It all when you've been looking at it through like an Illuminated computer screen, it's just so cool to see those colors and it comes together.

>>JOHN: What I see from people who come to the event and buy the posters is kind of a general excitement.

I think it speaks to people's relationship with the breweries themselves and the scene.

>>JESS: This Is a big beer city, you know, there's over 60 breweries in this city so It's an important thing to people.

>>DUSTIN: People love beer and people like art.

It's nice when it comes together like that.

>>NATASHA: I think it makes artwork approachable.

It's very affordable.

>>JOHN: To be able to put a poster from a local business by a local artist on your wall is something that's pretty unique.

>>JESS: A lot of the artists that have done this have gone on to be kind of mainstays at that brewery, designing cans, t-shirts.

>>DUSTIN: Being able to participate in Prints and Pints has opened up my circle of artists and environments and things to work with, and I think being able to bring in those different types of artists within that community and see how everyone is taking on these designs a little differently broadens that horizon to what poster printing It and graphic work and imagery can be through different sort of lenses.

>>NATASHA: If you are into the local craft beer scene in Columbus, I definitely think It's an event worth checking out.

>>JOHN: Again, just like uniquely positive and good vibes abound.

>>DUSTIN: It's the most relaxed sort of event art exhibition I have been to in quite some time.

>>JESS: Looking for five more years.

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"UNTIL NEXT WEEK, THANK YOU FOR WATCHING."

Funding for COLORES was provided in part by: Frederick Hammersley Fund, New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund, and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation... ...New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts... and Viewers Like You.