(bright music) - [Shelley] Welcome to "Kalamazoo Lively Arts," the show that takes you inside Kalamazoo's vibrant, creative community, and explores the people who breathe life into the arts.

(bright music) (logo swooshes) (bright music fades) - [Announcer] Support for "Kalamazoo Lively Arts" is provided by the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation.

Helping to build and enrich the cultural life of greater Kalamazoo.

(bright music) Susan Teague, congratulations on much success you you’ve had been followed in your life, including, are you best known for this 9,000 square foot painted mirror at the New Bronson Children’s hospital?

Yes.

Yes, so back in the year 2000, Bronson Hospital was being built to say the process.

And they were looking for some Muralists to paint 4000 the first 4000 square feet.

And so I submitted a proposal and they liked the idea and voila, for that was my first four thousand square feet in the children’s hospital.

When did you know you were going to be an artist as a a lifelong talent?

Believe it or not, it was three years old.

My mother is an artist or was an artist she’s since passed.

and I was in the hospital for some reason at age three and my mom decided that she was going to bring me paint and canvas and how brave of her because it was oils.

So I sat there in that little hospital bed and I painted my little heart out and I knew that’s exactly what I wanted to do.

And I have.

Fill in a gap between now and maybe that first job after college.

What how was the career progression?

in art?

Well, I was married when I was in college, and so art I was still working with it, but not seriously because I was tending to children.

My first experience was illustrating a book, a literary book, and that was published in two of those, and then it was another book and then another book that I illustrated.

And then I got a call to go to the Art Institute to start teaching there.

And that really opened up my career because I got to study with five internationally recognized artists through the influence of being there.

It was amazing what I had learned.

And so from there, it the teaching was a big part.

I realized how much I love teaching.

I’m very good as an instructor.

One of the things that I’ve encountered in my 30s really actually 40 some years as an artist is that people will say to me whether they’re students or friends, that they really want to paint, but they’re frustrated because they it looks like mud and they don’t wanna don’t how to fix it.

And so I’ve put together this opportunity here for an understanding of what color can do and what it can’t do.

So here is a color wheel, the mixtures of the primary colors, the secondary colors and the tertiary colors.

And what is very simple to understand is that once you start mixing colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel, they turn to mud.

And that mud is kind of a neutral color.

It’s not warm, like it is up here and it’s not cool, like it’s down here, it’s neutral.

So in a painting, we would want pure colors.

We would want semi neutrals and we would want these neutrals that are in here.

So I thought I’d tell you that we’ve got nine different color schemes that are proven harmonious color palates that will go if you use them, they’re going to be successful, turn out to be successful paintings.

The first one is called monochromatic.

And that’s just simply monoaning one, chrom meaning color, and we’ll just take one color, and I have blue over here.

and we would just take this and we could make mixtures and I would take that color and I could maybe make this really a dark shadow down and through here.

I could take some white and make that much lighter color up here, like so.

But all of this would be variations of just one color.

Not many artists will tend to just work with one color, but it is guaranteed to be harmonious when you’re done with it.

It can be very pleasing.

And here’s the value up here that’s much lighter.

So you have all these variations of one color.

Then we get a little more complex.

We go into a complementary color scheme.

orange and a blue They’re actually opposite down to the color wheel.

If I start mixing these together here, like so, and I’ll take a little bit of that blue and mix it together.

I’m going to get a nice shadowy color back in the wall on that back wall.

This is where your mud and colors will come in very handy because you don’t want everything to be bright and brilliant, then the viewer’s not going to know what to look at.

And then I will take the orange.

Warm colors come forward.

They look like they come in front of everything else.

I’ll put our warm colors up close.

Like here.

Add a little white to that for a lighter value.

And then I will just put blue on the table here, straight pure blue.

And then what I’m going to do is makes a little bit of orange with that, that blue just a dot.

Now, if I stepped back and I looked at this and I said, okay, well, I got a light and medium in a darker value here.

But boy, that blue stands out like a sore thumb.

So then I can go back and do another variation.

I can mix a little bit more blue with this to that orange, maybe add a little white to it to soften that up a bit.

And now I have this neutral color and I’m gonna put right on top of it.

And it softens that up.

Okay, so that would be the complementary scheme.

Moving into now three colors.

This is what we call a split complementary.

That means instead of going across the wheel like this or like this, we’re going to split it.

Instead of going straight across, we’re going to do this across.

This is where orange would be.

We’re going to split here, like so.

So I’m going to take the same colors.

I’m using yellow orange and red orange.

blue first here.

Make this the shadow.

That’s got orange added to it.

And then I’m going to take my uh yellow in here because it’s yellow orange.

put this on the side.

So I’m gonna take my little bit of my red, a little bit of my orange, and get this value right through here.

I could put this then as a background.

If I do this, we’re going to see that that bright color so aggressive that it’s going to stand out like a sore thumb.

So it would be better, in compositions and in your paintings, to create the bright colors for your objects that are important.

So I would have reversed.

I would put that here and this in the background.

If I’m not liking that, I can just simply, okay, I’m going to take this color and I’m going to add some blue to that.

So now I have got my orange, red, my yellow orange, and I’ve got my blue and I’m mixing it together like this, and change it up.

Okay, so those are three of the color schemes, monochromatic, complementary, split complementary.

Back to present day, what continues to inspire you?

Oh I don’t mean to be trite about this, but everything.

I’m meaning that with all of my heart, because life experiences when they happen, they go into the well inside.

And when that bucket of experience is is full and it jell, it pops out into an idea.

This friend of mine, who’s an artist, as an art teacher at elementary school, uh was retiring.

She gave me a box of colored tissue paper so big like this.

And she said, I want you to have this.

And I thought, I don’t want to to do with this.

I mean, I’t tell I didn’t know.

I said, thank you.

Yes.

And I appreciate it.

And I believe everything works together for good.

So I didn’t throw it away, sat in my studio for four years.

I went to California to jury an art exhibition, walked into the Mission Inn where they have stained glass windows.

Thank you.

They’re they’re from floor to ceiling.

Extraordinarily beautiful.

I saw one that had an icon in the middle of it and I thought that tissue paper color, I thought I could turn that to make it look like it’s a stained glass window.

And I’m going to do something with an icon with women.

But you know, it’s that’s the gelling point.

It’s when something’s brewing on the inside and it wants to say something.

You don’t quite know what it is and you just take the lead.

You let it you let it flow through you unexpected.

And so I went home and I made to begin with, I made seven, eight foot high, four foot wide icons of fictitious goddesses.

And the first icon that came out was Diana, DYE dash ANN A.

And it’s a woman standing in a salon holding dye bottles and her hair is all multicolored.

and went into another one germaine.

She was holding all these disinfectant cleaners, and she’s standing there with all the mops and so on, and she’s the goddess of disinfectants.

And all of these, I don’t know, again, why am I why am I doing all this?

Well, what happened after I did 16 of these play on words?

It became an art exhibition and that turned into something much deeper.

That was a really well-favored exhibition here at Art Prize in the year 2010.

And Ripley’s believe it or not came, they purchased for them for their Orlando Museum.

But the people photographing them and photographing and photographing while I was there, I thought I’m onto something here.

There’s some people are relating to it.

It turned into a book in which I wrote stories about these goddesses, but they’re true humorous, but true stories about women.

so the exhibition is celebrating the contemporary woman in her gal spectacular humanness in her everyday story.

But yet at the same time, speaking to the core essence of her as a goddess in today’s world.

Thank you for being here, Susan.

Thank you.

Appreciate being here.

(bright music) So Basic Comfort.

I’ve got the comfort of five men here that do their thing magically.

Give me your first name and why you’re involved.

Oh, Ryan, I’m the basist.

I Sam, I’m the drummer.

Mike, I’m the rhythm guitarist and vocalist.

I am Paul, and I play guitar and sing.

I’m Tony and I play keys and I sing.

Tony, I’m go write to you.

How’d this gang get together?

How did you get started?

Uh, so, I actually started basic comfort in 2017 end of 2017, for my senior capstone at Western.

And it was like a album concept album um that I asked I think most everyone except for Ryan and Paul, I think we were on it.

So, Mike, Sam were, um, and then over time, the group slowly formed into this, and I think since last year, we added Ryan and it’s been us kicking it.

I wanna get to your music, but how much does it matter that you can sit next to each other after a couple of years and and have a laugh?

Uh, getting along super important, and we all we can all pall around, uh we don’t irritate each other too much.

uh, we can tolerate how much we do we irritate each other, which helps a lot.. and we p focus on at each other..

I mean, you got it like it’ I don’t know, it’s fun.

I was living with Paul and Tony at the time and they would practice in the basement, so I’d be up in my room and one of the air ducks went directly down the basement, so I could hear I knew the tunes.

and and Tony just asked me, he’s like, hey, you wanna, you know, just uh, be our subdummer for a bit and feel it out and I sticking and I love it.

I love I love these guys..

I feel like the older I get the more I realize that, like, I only hang out with these guys.

No, uh, it’s just been nice, cause we’re all good friends and we all played music together, and we’ve been in like, Kalazoo for a long time and just kind of like, we’ve gone through the ins and outs of living in a town where we all play music in different bands or go to shows together or hang out together, and like, this just kind of formed a really nice, comfortable basic comfort for all of us.

so yeah, that’s what, you know, it’s been.

I think, like, forming a band is kind of like forming a relationship, like, having a partner, right?

And like you have to be able to, like, be best friends.

if you’re gonna spend that much time together.

like, spend that much time in the car, like in the studio, like, you know, everybody’s going through stuff, like, but we all still show up.

like, even if we haven’t had, like the best day, like, we’re still there at practice, just like, ah.

And then we just like, you know, make some music and jam and the band’s like everybody in the bands like, my best friend.

Yeah.

Maybe it’s a bad thing, but like it’s the people I want to spend time with.

So, describe, like, who you like to play for.

What’s a what’s a what’s a decent gig?

I just as long as the audience is enjoying things, whenever there’s an audience that’s just completely still, it’s always a little bit unnerving.

to to be the disparity between like us moving and like makes you want to buy them a drink.. try and loosen them up a little bit.

Someone said something really interesting to me the like a couple months ago and they said, whenever you play a show, play for the person that, like has come off work and had like either a bad day or something, and they’re coming to see you specifically.

so, like, in my mind, I’m always like, when I play a show, it’s to either give someone a memory that’s gonna help them feel better or feel good and whether it’s dancing, whether it’s like feeling like emotional or enjoying a sound or something like that.

so, like, that’s the crowd that, like, I really enjoy in vibe off of, so.

like, you have to, like, make the audience think that it’s fun and exciting forition.

Yeah, you gotta have fun up on stage.

I like, oh, they’re having fun.

It’s those moments when you’re on stage that you’re like, this is what I do this for.

right?

Like, that’s where it all kind of comes together.

You’re with these guys, like there’s people in the crowd dancing, moving, like the energy is there, like that’s always every time we play a show, I’m like, this is why I keep doing this.

not I don’t like doing it, but it’s like, you know, you have to carve out time every day, like we all work, like we all have other jobs and like, you know, you have to every day, you gotta be like, all right, how am I gonna fit in some music?

and you know, it’s hard.

I think a thing for me lately has been, like having us having fun, intentionally coming to the stage, like, let’s just have fun.

I think I say that before we play any show at this point now, and it was like the intention of why we practice and why we are in like practicing individually and as a group to just have fun.

Why do we do why are we still doing music after all these years?

you know?

It’s not for the money it’s not for the money.

It’s for it’s because we love it.

I think the other thing I want to throw in there is like we we also produce and record all of our own stuff.

So, like, Tony and I went to school for music production and recording engineering as well.

So I think that that kind of plays into that because we we have like we’re not limited necessarily by like time in the studio or budget in that way, so we can really think about like, how we how do we want this song to sound and like, you know, we can really shape things in the way that we want.

like, we have complete creative control of what comes out.

all the way to the max.

So what’s this side of you when it comes to texture house?

Uh, yeah, so texture house Sound and visuals is an audio video production company.

that me and Paul started in 2020 out of necessity to make money during lockdown, but also passion and and dry and um now it’s I would say it’s like a full fled video production company.

um so it’s me, Paul, Angel, Andrews and now Zac Clark.

We make mostly story based stuff, but we me and Paul specialize in posts sound work and production sound work.

And and give me an example of that.

Of like post sound?

Yes.

So, currently we’re mixing a short film.

and we’re, you know, doing the dialogue editing, cleaning it up, sound design, um, and fully somebody else is composing it, so once that’s all together, it’ll come back to us and we’ll mix it and kind of polish up all the sound.

What’s it take to do your job good?

So, you know, I think I think the big thing that I’m realizing is that it takes, like, constant, like, a constant desire to, like, learn and grow.

Even though I’ve been doing this for 10 years now, there’s always something to learn, and even if you go back over the things you’ve already learned, there’s always those like little things that like, oh, yeah, I could try this way or something like that.

So, you know, I think that’s that’s the big thing, is just always being willing to learn no matter where you’re at and your skill level.

and then along with that, I mean, it’s time management and, like, getting yourself going in the morning and be like, okay, I really gotta, you know, not procrastinate kind of give this stuff done, and, right, so, yeah, it’s like learning, time management, and, you know, just like, wanting it.

being obsessed with it, really.

And where do you wanna take this business?

What?

Um, I’d love to keep growing, um, keep making better, um video production projects.

I wanna get more into featuring films.

I wanna get into more, like serious storytelling.

um I want bigger budgets to get better talent in.

And I think back to what Paul was saying is like, it’s a curiosity that is what really drives at least me, and learning new things, but also just like the intuitive um seeking out what what else is there, the why behind it?

Like, I feel like for me, video production and audio production, it was a why, how does it work?

Why are films made the way they are?

Why does music produce the way it is?

Is that in that seeking the answer that made me an expert in the things that I do?

What’s still the big dream?

Ah, I mean, it’d be nice to have this be able to sustain us so that we could just do this full time.

I mean, it’s a competitive scene.

There’s a lot of people trying to do the same thing, and it doesn’t really pay well to be a musician, unfortunately.

but it’d be nice to at least be able to, you know, afford rent and food and just the basic, like Mazlau’s lowest hierarchy it needs.

so at least in the winter, yeah.

Yeah, it’d be nice that basic comfort could provide for our comforts in life.

Like, yeah, you know, like like actually the s. That’s the dream.

That’s the dream, yeah.

What about um Kalamazoo?

I mean, is Kalamazoo, your home is where you like to play?

Maybe there’s a a gig north of town or what what keeps you here?

Uh, yeah, I was born a few blocks from here, and the the music community here is is crazy.

It’s it’s it’s it’s I’ve never found anywhere else that has such a concentrated amount of musicians, especially like divine neighborhood in Kalamazoo.

You can walk around the block and you’ll hear, you know, different bands practice, and it’s just a bunch of different styles.

There’s a ton of house venues and it’s just people who are really passionate about music.

and it’s just great to be in that community and a part of their community.

Kalamazoo, I kind of didn’t know why we moved here, and for all of all the places where we would go, you know, coming from an entire different continent, coming to Kalamazoo is kind of like, you know, it was weird for at first, but then when I got to go the town and I got to be live in the vine neighborhood for a while, I started to see a lot of like, you know, great artists.

and like that really pushed me to be better and like, as far as like listening to music and like enjoying music and like seeing all the different bands.

We I don’t think no, you didn’t live in the house with me, but I lived in the showhouse.

We had shows like just in the basement.

We had different bands from all over, you know, the United States, from California to British Columbia and Canada, to we had a band from France in Toulon and making him and played at our house.

Yeah, no, it was kind of nice.

Yeah, yeah, for literally all over the world, we had a bunch of people, so I got to meet some of like the best people.

Yeah, it made me really, like to even have that in a place like Kalamazoo where they would come to like and all of them every single time they came, they played the show, they would be like, dude, these crowds are amazing, these people love music, they love like coming out to a show.

We get like, you know, 200 people in a basement.

an issue in a fire code did the show but people enjoyed it and they they loved you know, they loved the music and like just, you know, seeing that really always I felt special to be in a place like Kalamazoo where you can get that any weekend, every weekend on a Tuesday night, on a Wednesday night, on a Friday night, like you know, so that’s awesome about a Kalamazoo.

I think we have two albums, really, but we really released our like the album that we put the most amount of time and effort into last year in December called dimensions, and it was sponsored or we got a grant through the arts council of Kalamazoo that really helped push that out.

We also did a music video called All about you, featuring Moorea Masa, and that was also, thanks to the Kalamazoo Arts Council for helping fund that.

And we won the um yeah, music music video award for our Michigan’s R&B and Soul music video Award.

Doing something right.

Congratulations to you all.

Thank you, please listen to the album.

Please listen to album.

find myself so I love you Know that I’ve been away I find myself so I can feel you to find myself so I and love you know that I feel away I find myself so I feel once again again, again, again, again, - Thank you so much for watching.

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- [Announcer] Support for "Kalamazoo Lively Arts" is provided by the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation.

Helping to build and enrich the cultural life of greater Kalamazoo.

(bright music)