(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Go watercolor painting with Kevin Kuhne.

(gentle music) Jammella Anderson explains the importance of making clothes for all body types.

And catch a performance from the Heavenly Echoes gospel band.

It's all ahead on this episode of AHA: A House for Arts.

(gentle music) - [Announcer] Funding for AHA has been provided by your contribution and by contributions to the WMHT Venture Fund.

Contributors include the Leo Cox Beach Philanthropic Foundation, Chet and Karen Opalka, Robert and Doris Fischer Malesardi, and the Robison Family Foundation.

- At M&T Bank, we understand that the vitality of our communities is crucial to our continued success.

That's why we take an active role in our community.

M&T Bank is pleased to support WMHT programming that highlights the arts, and we invite you to do the same.

(gentle music) - Hi, I'm Matt Rogowicz, and this is AHA: A House for Frts, a place for all things creative.

Kevin Kuhne is an award-winning watercolorist who loves depicting local urban scenes.

Let's head over to Kevin's studio in Albany and see what he's up to today.

(gentle music) - I am a local Albany artist who specializes in watercolor, but also does printmaking and three dimensional constructions.

And I think of myself primarily as an art teacher.

And that has always been a love of mine, the actual teaching of the subject.

But I still do a lot of my own work.

I have a degree in art education, and there were really not too many teaching jobs back then at the time and after a while I found myself cooking in restaurants and I just kept cooking in restaurants and worked my way up.

I was a food service director.

I was an executive chef for a while.

I did all that stuff.

It was hard and brutal and tiring, but I never stopped painting.

I never, never stopped drawing and painting.

Always did it on my days off.

(gentle music) It's kind of like I have to.

It's like exercise and nourishment and all that other stuff.

(pan sizzling) A lot of times with cooking, I'm not very big on following recipes.

I'll get the recipe, and the recipe sort of gives you that little roadmap where you wanna go.

And then once I get going, whatever, different things happen, you know, I throw in different things or I cook something longer or shorter than I should and I just play around and combine different ingredients.

And a lot of times with watercolor, you know, watercolor kind of tells you where to go.

You start the watercolor with this plan, you do all this planning, but the watercolor has a mind of its own.

And then hopefully it'll come out okay.

And sometimes it doesn't come out okay, and then you just, you just throw it away or you convince the person that you're serving it to that it's just fine, you know?

(gentle music) My watercolor work, I think in terms of subject matter, you're gonna see mainly buildings and structures and parts of buildings.

I've always been really, really attracted to that subject.

Even as a kid, like down in the basement I have the remains of my old model railroad.

And when I was a kid, I had a model railroad, but the trains never ran.

I could never, you know, the electrical wiring and the tracks wasn't that important to me.

I was always building the scenery and the buildings to go with it.

So I've always been attracted to buildings.

(gentle music) I'll just see some nice colors and shapes in any neighborhood.

You know, not so much in the nice suburban neighborhoods, I like the older neighborhoods.

And I'll sit in my car or sit on a curb or a rock or any place I can find, and I'll just start sketching away.

And I'm quite knowledgeable in perspective.

But if you look at my paintings, you'll see that sometimes the buildings seem to be tilted or moving a little, or they're not exactly perfect in their perspective.

I'm trying to create, like a life in the building, like it's a living, breathing, that's the biggest compliment people have.

One of the biggest compliments people have given me is, like oh, your buildings look like they're alive.

And that's how I sense and I see them as characters, as individual people.

I'm not worrying so much about if everything is perfect.

I never use a ruler, never.

I mean, matter of fact when I see someone else drawing with a ruler, I go huh, how can you do that?

(laughing) (gentle music) I always love to draw and paint on the spot.

And watercolor is very easy to, you know, it's easy to transport, it's easy to clean up, it's easy to pull 'em out real fast and work.

A lot of artists are afraid of watercolor, but one of the ways you can control it is by the planning.

So the process becomes very important.

(gentle music) I will spot something I like, and then I'll pull out a little sketchbook and I'll do a couple of little sketches of it to kind of get my composition and design.

Then I might do a sketch in color.

I might run out of time and then come back the next day.

If you can find two days in a row in Albany where the lighting and the weather is the same, come back and do just a small watercolor sketch.

So there's a lot of planning involved.

And then when I get what I want if I like it, then I might come home and pull out a big sheet of watercolor and work down in my basement studio.

(gentle music) But by then I kind of know where I'm going.

I know where I'm going so it's not a big surprise anymore.

Color is very intuitive.

My approach to color is I look at a scene and it depends, maybe the thing that caught my eye was the fact that it was this brilliant pink building with some greenery right next to it and I like the way those two colors work together.

I said I'm gonna do a pink and green painting.

Or it might be a nice sunny day and I'm feeling, oh, all these warm colors.

So I'll under paint the whole thing in yellow ochers or raw sienna and new gamboge and just work around that and then build up contrast with a few cool colors.

That's kind of how I approach color.

I try not to get too hung up on the local color of something.

The, you know, just because the grass is green, you know, I might think that, well, you know, this building is red here.

The grass might look a little better as an orange color.

So I'll change that in an expressive way to achieve what I want.

(gentle music) How do I know a watercolor is done?

Wow.

You know, I always joke about that in my classes.

You know, you got this watercolor, looks pretty good.

And then the famous last words, just one more stroke there.

You know, and I'm like oh, what did I do?

It's difficult.

What I do and what I've been telling my students to do, is when you reach that point where you're really like, I don't know, am I gonna overwork it?

Is it not good?

Should I do more?

That might be the time to stop right there, put it aside, sleep on it for a couple of days, look at it next week, and very often you'll say oh yeah, maybe I should do a little there or maybe.

You gotta distance yourself from it a little.

Don't make that decision right when you're painting.

And don't give up.

You're gonna have a lot of failures.

I would say outta my watercolors, I'm doing really well if maybe one out of four I keep.

I have portfolios that are filled with watercolors that I'm not, I'll never show, you know.

I don't want to throw 'em away, but I'm not gonna show 'em.

Sometimes I might go back and fiddle with 'em, but not usually.

I just kind of look at 'em and I see oh, those are the ones that didn't work out.

So if you can get one outta four watercolors, but you should be happy if you can get one out of ten.

So that's another thing to think about.

The big secret to watercolor is you never make a mistake.

See, everything that happens on the paper, you tell everybody you did it on purpose.

And then therefore you haven't made a mistake.

And that way it gives you some confidence.

- Jammella Anderson is currently focused on reworking textiles to create clothing for all body types.

Jammella was even featured in a Glamour Magazine article highlighting creators who are reinventing the art of knitting.

Here's Jade Warwick with more.

- Welcome Jammella to House for Art.

So super happy to have you here today.

- I'm so happy to be here.

- Yay.

So to begin, I wanna let the audience know a little bit about what your creative focus is right now.

- Oh gosh, I feel like my creative focus is like, 10 different things, but I would say that number one is like making clothes for people with all different types of bodies and trying to like not be, like sort of fit into what the norm is and to be like exploratory and to be creative with like the colors and the patterns and the shapes of things.

And really like try and inhabit what art means, but in clothing form.

- Okay, so you focus more on like garments and textiles and fabric?

- Yeah, well reusing garments, breaking things apart, using old blankets, kind of like what I'm wearing right now.

And, like, reinventing or reimagining what the textiles are, giving them new life again.

- Oh, I love that.

So with this, why is this type of mending or reworking important within the current fashion industry?

Because you're pretty much taking secondhand clothes or materials and reworking it to be something new.

- Mhm.

- And, you know, the fashion culture right now isn't really like that currently.

So I want to, like, get your perspective on why that is important in today's culture.

- Yeah I, one of the most shocking things that I think I've heard is that the fashion industry is like number two in terms of pollution in the world.

And the way that we get our clothing and the water usage and the labor and the, like, you know, child labor, all the like really horrible things that you hear about every industry really, is so prevalent in the fashion industry.

And so with reworking or some people call up cycling, we're eliminating so much of that.

So instead of sending things to the landfill, instead of letting things kind of go to die, we're like giving them new life, you know?

That's exactly how we wanna put it.

And fast fashion, you know, I don't wanna knock anybody 'cause fast fashion does give us the opportunity to feel good in clothing, to stay kind of on the trends.

But when it comes to like, not trying to pollute the earth and be more sustainable, it's just, it's not the way.

But I think that what's super important is to kind of mix the two together.

So how can you kind of go in one direction, maybe get something that is a little bit more cheap, but how do you use it more?

How do you get more life out of it?

And that's where I think mending comes in.

It's not just mending vintage clothing.

It's not just mending old clothing.

It's mending things that you already have.

And so okay yeah, you got a hole in your sweater.

Maybe it's from H and M, but if you can learn how to preserve it, it'll last way longer.

- Yeah, and why do you think that's important?

- I think it's important because again, it stops pollution, but also like it allows clothing to be more of an art type.

So like mending can be more than just making it look like it once did.

It could be adding patches, it could be adding new color, it could be actually making it fit you better.

Because obviously the fashion industry makes clothing for one type of body and so if we can mend our clothing or like learn how to like rework it to fit us, then it is specifically for us.

And like how good does it feel to wear something that's just for you?

- Exactly.

You're literally wearing your own piece of art.

- Yeah.

- So let's talk about Lil Thrift Ma.

So what is Lil Thrift Ma?

Give us some background.

- Lil Thrift Ma is something that I didn't mean to start.

I just really like to shop.

I like to shop for other people.

I love to give gifts and it's sort of like, it was like a natural snowball.

My partner got me a sewing machine and so I was like starting to find clothes in the thrift store and again, mending them, trying to, you know, make this fit my body, my shape and then I was like I would love to do this for other people.

And it sort of, like, just really took off from there.

So I have a vintage shop.

I mostly focus on vintage from the '80s and '90s, little bit of Y2K, and then of course I'm doing like adjacent to that, all the stuff that I rework.

So getting blankets and denim and just secondhand fabrics and bringing both of those worlds together.

- Why '70s and '80s?

- '70s, '80s, and '90s, well, I think I'm really inspired by my grandparents and my mom.

My grandma had this like, she like, I didn't even think about it, but I'm wearing leopard print today and my grandma always wore it.

So for me, even just seeing that pattern is like really nostalgic and it brings me so much joy.

And like, I think that her style was just so classic, but also like really wild.

And so those eras that I focus on are really like, you know, attributing that.

She passed away many years ago so for me it feels like I'm kind of like, involving her in the process even though she's not here.

- Yeah, that's beautiful.

And that those clothes are built to last as well.

You know, I think we all have the, well at least one blanket from our great-grandmother.

You know, hopefully we all do in each of our households.

- Yeah.

- So you were recently featured in Glamour Magazine, congratulations.

- Thank you.

- About reinventing the art of knitwear and knitting and crocheting.

So give us some examples how you've done that within your practice.

- Yeah, so I think that because of that again, that like generational inspiration behind reworking clothes, especially reinventing knitwear, which I was actually approached for the article because they thought that I was the one crocheting everything, and I don't take credit for that, but I do like to say that the clothing was handmade twice.

And so I think that quote was actually in the magazine.

So I'm taking blankets that are often like disregarded and a lot of times I'll find like, grandma's names stitched into the blankets and things.

And so taking the blankets, kind of chopping 'em up, making pants, shirts, hats, stockings, whatever.

That's really what that article kind of focused on.

Like how are we taking this sort of thing that we see as for older people and reinventing it for young people, making it a part of our wardrobe and like really passing down the art of crocheting, the art of reworking, sewing, all of those things, mending?

And how it doesn't have to be just for older generations, that we should keep it going through our lineage and how important it is 'cause it is another way to preserve.

- It really is.

It truly is another way to preserve, again, beautiful articles of clothing, which can truly be pieces of art.

So I know you're also featured in Shop Berriez, or was it modeling, what was it with Shop Berriez exactly?

- It was a collaboration, and Emma Zack that runs Shop Berriez, asked me to bring some of my items.

She like handpicked from the stuff I had made to be a part of this photoshoot.

- And I know Shop Berriez really focuses on bodies with curves and different body types.

And I know you briefly discussed that at the beginning of the interview, but I wanna know a little bit more about that mission and truly why, why this intimate connection with that goal?

- Yeah, thank you.

I think like that's really the main point of what I want to do and what I want people to see is that I make clothing for all bodies.

And that means, you know, a lot of times when you walk into the store, you know, we've all worked a mall job and I remember just like not having a size for people that walked into the store and how isolating and how harmful can that be to someone where like, you know, the average size in America is a size 16, 18.

That is definitely not ever reflected in media.

It's never reflected on TV.

And it's like this taboo thing that we have bodies and that we have shapes.

And so what I really seek to do with my clothing is to make it for all bodies, body shapes, and Shop Berriez is like a big inspiration to me because they really have figured out how to curate that.

And so it's something that I really hold true and I don't carry under a certain size and I just want people to come into my shop, my little popups, and to like really feel seen.

It's like so life-changing for people when they walk up to my booth and they say wow, like, this is for me.

I never go to vintage markets or thrift stores.

I never find stuff for me.

And they're always told that well people weren't that size back then.

And that's not true.

It's really not.

People are all sizes at all times.

And so to hear that is like, really just like solidifying what I do.

And then again calling back to my grandma, she was a plus size woman and like, she's so beautiful as all people are.

And so just really, again, attributing it back to her and to like make sure that people feel as good as she looked and as as good as she felt when she was younger.

- That's true, and that's what clothes should do.

You know, we put on clothes to flex, to peacock, to look good, to feel good in our own skin.

- Why like take part of your, why dampen your personality, why dampen yourself and make yourself quiet?

Like your clothes should be an expression of you, who you are, and it's like, it's so important.

It's like a huge part of who we are.

- It really is and thank you for like providing that space and opportunity for folks out there.

I know it's definitely appreciated.

So any future artistic endeavors that involve mending or reworking that you see in your future?

Or any collaborations you want to just like dive into?

- Yeah I, I really want to start figuring out a way to create art pieces with my work.

So like beyond the art pieces of clothing, but finding out ways, making statements with art and there's so much waste.

Even after we've like, used all of the fabric we can from the blankets or the secondhand materials, there's still this like waste aspect and a lot of people do like pillows and things and they'll stuff it with like the bits of the blankets that they cut off.

So I wanna find a way to like really start to use like every single piece of the fabric.

And then I'd love to collab with other people.

I wanna collab with artists that paint, do screen printing.

I wanna bring like mixed media to the art and wear it.

So figuring out how to do that and how to make it for everyone.

- Yeah, it's amazing.

You heard it guys, like hit Jammella up if you want to collab.

Well thank you Jammella for stopping by today and talking with us.

I appreciate it.

- Thank you.

- Please welcome the Heavenly Echoes Gospel Band.

♪ I believe I'll testify for Jesus while I have the chance ♪ ♪ I believe I'll testify for Jesus while I have the chance ♪ ♪ I believe I'll testify for Jesus while I have the chance ♪ ♪ You know I may not, I may not, have a chance ♪ ♪ Yeah, yeah, whoa ♪ ♪ I believe I'll testify for Jesus while I have the chance ♪ ♪ I believe I'll testify for Jesus while I have the chance ♪ ♪ I believe I'll testify for Jesus while I have the chance ♪ ♪ You know I may not have this chance anymore ♪ ♪ Whoa ♪ ♪ Well I believe I'll sing with Jesus ♪ ♪ While I have the chance ♪ ♪ Well I believe I'll sing for Jesus ♪ ♪ While I have the chance ♪ ♪ Oh I believe I'll sing with Jesus while I have the chance ♪ ♪ You know I may not have this chance anymore ♪ ♪ Whoa ♪ ♪ Well I believe I'll shout for Jesus ♪ ♪ While I have the chance ♪ ♪ Oh I believe I'll shout for Jesus ♪ ♪ While I have the chance ♪ ♪ Oh I believe I'll shout for Jesus ♪ ♪ While I have the chance ♪ ♪ You know I may not have this chance anymore ♪ ♪ Whoa ♪ ♪ Oh I believe I'll dance with Jesus ♪ ♪ While I have the chance ♪ ♪ Oh I believe I'll dance with Jesus ♪ ♪ While I have the chance ♪ ♪ Whoa, I believe I'll dance with Jesus ♪ ♪ While I have the chance ♪ ♪ You know I may not have this chance anymore ♪ ♪ Anymore whoa ♪ ♪ I believe I'll pray to Jesus ♪ ♪ While I have the chance ♪ ♪ Oh I believe I'll pray to Jesus ♪ ♪ While I have the chance ♪ ♪ Oh I believe I'll pray to Jesus ♪ ♪ While I have the chance ♪ ♪ You know I may not have this chance anymore ♪ ♪ Whoa, anymore ♪ ♪ That's why you want to stand up ♪ ♪ You want to stand up and testify ♪ ♪ You want to stand up ♪ ♪ You want to stand up and testify ♪ ♪ And testify ♪ ♪ You want to stand up ♪ ♪ You want to stand up and testify ♪ ♪ And testify ♪ ♪ That's why you want to stand up ♪ ♪ You want to stand up ♪ ♪ And testify ♪ ♪ I woke you up this morning ♪ ♪ And I woke you up on time ♪ ♪ To get your help this shift ♪ ♪ And you weren't in your right mind ♪ ♪ I had to go and tell somebody ♪ ♪ You had to go and tell somebody ♪ ♪ I had to go and tell somebody ♪ ♪ Well that God's been good to me ♪ ♪ I said God is good to me ♪ ♪ I said God is good to me ♪ ♪ He's been better to me than I've been to myself ♪ ♪ I had to run and tell my neighbor ♪ ♪ I had to run and tell my friends ♪ ♪ My God is so good ♪ ♪ God is so good ♪ ♪ Can I get a witness for that God is good ♪ ♪ He put food on the table ♪ ♪ Go and tell somebody ♪ ♪ I said oh my God the savior ♪ ♪ Go and tell somebody ♪ ♪ Father's been good to you ♪ ♪ Father's been good to you ♪ ♪ I think I've been good ♪ ♪ I think I've been good ♪ ♪ And testify ♪ ♪ You want to stand up ♪ ♪ And testify ♪ ♪ You want to stand up ♪ ♪ And testify ♪ ♪ You want to stand up ♪ ♪ You want to stand up and testify ♪ ♪ And testify ♪ ♪ You want to stand up ♪ ♪ You want to stand up and testify ♪ ♪ Whoa because I may not, I may not have the chance anymore ♪ ♪ Heaven been good to you ♪ ♪ Heaven been good to you ♪ ♪ I think God been good ♪ ♪ If you know that God been good let me hear you say yeah ♪ ♪ I said let me hear you say yeah ♪ ♪ I said let me hear you say yeah ♪ ♪ Oh you better show some sign ♪ ♪ Oh you better show some sign ♪ ♪ I said are you gonna show some sign ♪ ♪ Heaven been good to you ♪ ♪ Heaven and God been good ♪ ♪ Whoa ♪ ♪ Because I may not, I may not, have a chance anymore ♪ - It don't get no better than that.

(gentle music) - Thanks for joining us.

For more arts, visit wmt.org/aha and be sure to connect with us on social.

I'm Matt Rogowicz, thanks for watching.

(gentle music) - [Announcer] Funding for AHA has been provided by your contribution and by contributions to the WMHT Venture Fund.

Contributors include the Leo Cox Beach Philanthropic Foundation, Chet and Karen Opalka, Robert and Doris Fischer Malesardi, and the Robison Family Foundation.

- At M&T Bank we understand that the vitality of our communities is crucial to our continued success.

That's why we take an active role in our community.

M&T Bank is pleased to support WMHT programming that highlights the arts and we invite you to do the same.