(gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music) - In this edition of "WLIW Arts Beat," (gentle music) writing a book about animals.

- [Janina] I have learned to notice.

I've learned to look for things that I don't expect to see.

(gentle music continues) (gentle music) - [Diane] Realism in art.

- Art has a way of mirroring back to us what we've become, and it also provides us history in which we can reflect back on.

(gentle music) - [Diane] Handcrafted mandolins.

- People are excited about playing music.

They want a good instrument.

They love it and they share with their friends.

(guitar string vibrating) (gentle music) - It's all ahead in this edition of "WLIW Arts Beat."

Funding for "WLIW Arts Beat" is made possible by viewers like you.

Thank you.

(gentle music continues) Welcome to "WLIW Arts Beat."

I'm Diane Masciale.

(gentle music continues) Janina Marie Fuller is the author of "The Gecko in the Bathtub."

In it, she includes stories about her many encounters with different types of animals.

We head to Louisiana to learn more about the book and the writer's love of nature.

- The book is called "The Gecko in the Bathtub: Encounters with Marvelous Creatures."

There are three stories in the book in which the animals are not in the normal context where you would expect to find them.

One is about the hawk on the porch, one is about a monkey on my head, and the other one is about the gecko in bathtub.

And I knew I wanted the book to have sort of a lighthearted tone, so I could have called it "The Monkey on My Head," I guess, or "The Hawk on the Porch."

But the title, "The Gecko in the Bathtub," kind of made me giggle a little bit.

So that's what I went with.

I was gonna take a bath one day.

And I went into the bathroom and looked in the bathtub and there was a gecko.

It surprised me because how did it come up through the pipes?

I didn't think it had come over the top of the bathtub.

It must have come up through the pipes, but never has there been a time when we've run water in the bathtub or the sinks or the shower and had geckos float to the surface.

So I still don't know how it got there.

The book is a collection of short stories, and there're anywhere from two to five or 5 1/2 pages long.

It's great for bedtime reading for kids.

That's one thing that makes it a great book to read at night.

I think about 1/3 of the chapters come from right around this house.

The luna moth is a moth that lives in Louisiana.

It's about this big.

I had lived here for several years and never seen one.

And I lived in this property for several years and never seen one.

I walked out on the screen porch one day, and there was a luna moth hanging on the screen.

And I thought, if I could catch it and release it, then we would get to have more luna moth.

But the moth was already deceased.

We still have it.

It's in a little shadow box on the mantle behind us.

The monkey was in Ecuador.

As my son and I were en route to the biological research station where we were gonna stay for a week, we had this stopover from which we had to pick up a boat, but the boat wasn't coming for about 45 minutes.

We were relaxing at the river front, and suddenly there was a monkey sitting on my shoulder.

It was up before I could respond, and then it was on my head.

Clearly, this monkey knew how to be around people, so I wasn't really afraid of it, but it also had a lot of teeth.

I was laughing very, very hard.

I had a baseball cap on.

That monkey was sitting on top of the hat, so if I had leaned over, it would've fallen off my head, but I didn't think to lean over.

And finally, it just jumped off and ran away.

So that was a pretty fun moment.

Also from Ecuador, my son and our bird guide were with me when we saw the monster fish and the mother jaguar and her two cubs that were swimming right across the river right in front of our boat.

And there were about 15 of us on the boat and everybody saw them.

Those were quite spectacular experiences because they were so, so, so unexpected.

The story in the Galapagos Islands, this owl standing on top of a volcano in the middle of a hot dry day, with people walking around them, and he just didn't care.

It was like something from another world.

And later that day, we were on the same island but in a different part where there was forest and it was raining.

And we came up on this vermilion flycatcher.

And this bird is just this bright, vivid scarlet red that stood out so much against the leaves, behind it and the gray sky, and it was pouring green.

And the two birds didn't really have anything in common, except they were on the same island and they were both alone.

There was something about that moment when we drove underneath that bird.

It just felt like my dad who had passed about four years before that was just reaching down right into my heart, and saying, "I love you.

I'm here with you.

I'm proud of you."

My brother and sister are quite a bit older than me.

And when they were in high school, they had to take a biology class that involved a bird unit, but they weren't old enough to drive.

So my dad drove them on these early morning birding trips on the weekends.

And as the little kid, I always wanted to be with the big people, do what they were doing.

So I tag along.

And that's how I started to learn how to look at birds when I was about nine.

I never imagined that I would ever have a caged bird as a pet 'cause I think birds don't belong in cages.

When our friends who were moving begged us to take their love bird because they couldn't take him with them to Hawaii, I couldn't say no.

I knew this bird already 'cause we'd spent so much time at their house.

And then when the mother of my son's friend had baby left birds that she didn't have space for, I took them too.

So I had these four birds, and we lived in a small apartment.

The only reasonable place to put them was in my bedroom.

So I had them in the bedroom.

I hung sticks from the ceiling.

I let them out a couple of times a day.

They could fly around, hang out with each other, or with me.

I have learned to notice.

I've learned to look for things that I don't expect to see.

I've learned to look around the corners of the windows on the outside to see what might be lurking in there, or building a nest there, or a web.

During the day, this little gray tree frog usually sits above the board under the porch roof and just sits up there, and the little hiding hole, little cubby hole.

And then at night, we turn the porch light on around dinnertime.

And at nighttime, she comes down and she sits on the lion's head or right on the porch light, and she eats the bugs that are attracted by the porch light.

She does this little mini migration up and down, up and down.

Sometimes I'll come out in the morning and she's still sitting on the lion's head.

Sometimes I'll come out in the morning and she's gone.

And then I think, "She's gone.

And if she's gone, I never know if I'll see her again."

And maybe two, three, or even four days go by, and then suddenly she's there again.

I do have a relationship with the turtles.

Here's how I think of it.

Animals and these plants, they were all here way long before we were, long, long, long before we were.

And I consider it a privilege to live in their space.

So I thank them for allowing me the honor of seeing them, when the turtles float up to the surface or swim up and eat the cat kibble that I throw out for them.

I thank the hummingbirds that come to our feeders.

I thank the armadillos, even though they dig holes in our garden.

I just think that we need to kind of turn around how we regard our relationship with the plants and animals around us 'cause we're all part of the same system.

And it might be in some danger right now.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) - For more information, go to janinamariefuller.com.

(gentle music continues) And now, the Artist Quote of the week.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) Up next, we travel to Florida to hear from artist Dean Mitchell.

Whether it be a landscape, still life, or figurative work, when he paints, he draws from the challenging experiences of his youth and examines the world we live in.

Take a look.

(gentle music continues) (gentle music) - When I was a kid, I experienced racism very early on, and it's an irony that I used to pray, "If I could do anything with my work, it would help us heal those wounds of racism and segregation."

A lot of these things have shaped my sensibility about what I do.

So a lot of it is not just because I think it's interesting in terms of light and this and that and shadow, which does interest me, but the main overture about the work is about poverty and the marginalization of people and how those spaces affect our whole sense of self and of space, that's been just a part of who I'm.

This art thing, however you want to describe it, is a huge part of my my life.

And so I want it to mean something.

If I can change the world in any way, it would be to help break down certain social constructs that I think are detrimental to us as human beings.

And there are plenty of them.

(gentle music continues) - My name is Matt Cutter.

I'm with Cutter & Cutter Fine Art in St. Augustine, Florida, and I'm also a painter.

We've got a good track record over 10 years of selling hundreds of paintings from Dean.

So I think he's a very strong worthy artist, and I do think he stops people in their tracks and it's very contemplative.

He's not grabbing you with the brightest color, he's not grabbing you with bells and whistles.

He's grabbing you in a different way.

He's asking you to like come in very slowly, examine what's going on, feel that nuance, and that's what he brings to the table.

So if you're 30 feet away, you would say, "That's realism."

And it is.

It conveys that emotion.

When you look really closely at how he's laid down the watercolor layers, there's a lot of abstraction, there's a lot going on with the design.

What he does, he plays with this dark and light.

And everything, in my opinion, with Dean's work is keyed in on a strong design that sets up everything for the painting.

(gentle music) - Dean Mitchell is beyond that of a master.

If you have one where you say, "This is apprentice and this is a master," well, the apprentice learns how to do this or that.

And then once they're able to demonstrate that, then they say, "Oh, okay, now you're a master."

Dean Mitchell is an enigma.

And Dean Mitchell was born to do what he does.

(gentle music) When I look at Dean Mitchell's work, I do see science, I do see philosophy, I do see religion, because some of those pieces like "Rowena," when you see that particular piece, that is a religious piece, that is an icon, that is an actual Mary that you say, "Oh my God, she speaks of humanity."

We're in the world with someone painting like a Andrew Wyeth, and in some cases, better than Andrew Wyeth come from?

And therein, I think, lies the spiritual quality.

Because if you look at Dean's background, Dean achieved not because of, but in spite of, in spite of is when God takes place, therein lies the miracle.

(gentle music continues) (gentle music) - I was raised by my grandmother from 11 months old.

And so I was sort of a highly active child.

And so I would often walk to town with her, 'cause I grew up in the panhandle of Florida in a little town called Quincy.

And I had no idea of the kind of wealth that was in Quincy because we basically stayed in the Black community.

A lot of us, when we first got our first bikes, we would ride over in the area, and we would see these huge mansions.

And so I began to look at the wealth discrepancy.

And I said, "How could somebody have house that big."

Really didn't really understand it.

But I think through the years, as you become more educated, more socialized, you begin to recognize how you fit into the social structure or social order of things.

And then when Martin Luther King started merging on the scene, we were watching on television.

So a lot of these things have shaped my sensibility about what I do because I do a lot of things.

A lot of the environments that I do are a window into poverty and a window into that psychological space in which I emerged out of.

As teacher Tom Harris, there was four of us who were really interested in art, and he introduced us to local art competitions.

And so we were often the only Black people at these shows with Mr. Harris and his wife who were Caucasian.

- But I called it the crucible of competition, which can be good or bad because it puts pressure on kids.

(gentle music) He was even as focused then as he is now, but there were so many negatives.

A lot of it was was the black-white thing.

He paints what he wants to paint because it feels the need in here to make a visual statement about what's going on, and that's the strength of Dean Mitchell's painting.

Half of his focus and intensity is based on, "This is what I'm doing is extremely important and it's never been done before.

And whenever or however, whatever the recognition is, I have to do it my way."

Which, to me, is almost the definition of what art is or what art's supposed to be.

- I will be gone at some point, but what I leave, will it really make the world better in some ways and make us examine our own human behavior toward one another?

- He didn't paint to sell.

Okay, that sounds ridiculous because he had to make a living.

He painted because it's something he had to do, it's something he had to say.

- He wants people to like examine this work on a deep level.

So I do think he's very important now, and I think his work will be very important 100 years from now.

- I think art has a way of mirroring back to us what we've become.

And it also provides us history in which we can reflect back on to not keep repeating the same mistakes.

It's that kind of troubling world that feeds my passion to try to figure out how to derail some of the destructive behavior.

(gentle music) - [Diane] See more of Mitchell's work at deanmitchellstudio.com.

Now, here's a look at this month's Fun Fact.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) In his workshop in Athens, Ohio, acclaimed luthier Don MacRostie creates mandolin.

Having studied the instrument for decades, he makes each one by hand and uses his immense knowledge and skill to produce an incredible sound.

Have a listen.

(gentle music) - I moved to this farm a little over 40 years ago.

I've been out here about 41, 42 years.

Moving here, there was a machinery shed that I thought that'll make a nice shop.

I think I got kind of interested in the guitar in high school.

It was during the folk revival of the '50s and '60s, and I was interested in that music and trying to learn that.

My name is Don MacRostie.

I own and operate Red Diamond Mandolins here in Athens, Ohio.

I graduated college in '66, and that was around the start of the Vietnam War.

So I wound up in the navy.

I was in Vietnam, I was on an aircraft carrier.

I got out of the service in '70.

I decided to use my GI bill, go back to college.

I came to Ohio University.

I enjoyed not only going to college but I loved the area.

I saw a lot of the county and a lot of the Southeast Ohio, and I've been here ever since.

My sister-in-law had a mandolin.

So I, looking at that, and I don't have a lot of space, it'd be a lot easier to build a smaller instrument.

So that's how I got to pick the mandolin.

I was thinking about a name that I could put on the peghead, and I was reading a book about a fellow, who, in the 1800s, was traveling Europe, hunting Stradivarius violins.

And one of the names of the Stradivarius violins was the Red Diamond.

I said, "Ah, that's a name, I'll use that."

I've been building for close to 50 years.

I've seen how instruments come through to the audience, and there's an instrument that seems to, for bluegrass music, really project out sound.

And that's the Gibsons of the early '20s.

They were signed by Lloyd Loar.

- Don MacRostie is one of those guys that was always on the search for the secret formula to the best sounding mandolin.

And, in my opinion, he found it.

What sets Don's mandolins apart from the rest, in my opinion, is the constant pursuit of the golden era sound.

And when I say that, I mean the mandolins of the early 1920s that were manufactured by Gibson.

He's come up with this really interesting process of measuring the flexibility of the top and back of some of those legendary mandolins and then using those measurements to kind of guide his own building process.

(torch hissing) (water fizzing) - When I build mandolins, I start out with the sides.

I make the blocks, I bend the sides, and glue them up into a rib assembly.

That's the first step.

And I even put the linings in that allow the tops and the backs to be attached to the side.

Then, I'll carve tops next.

The tops will be carved and glued on.

And at that point, I'll voice it to some extent.

That means make it of a flexibility that will produce a good sound.

It's a combination of the arch shape, the flexibility, the species of wood, and many other things that produce a sound.

Once that's done and the neck is fitted in, I'll glue the back on, which makes the rib assembly, the body assembly very rigid.

And then you can put the neck back in it and set your angle and finish up the neck.

It'll get a fingerboard, it'll get a peg head for mounting tuners and decorations of the peghead.

It's traditional for a good mandolin to have a darker finish.

It's a sunburst, they call it.

So it's a shaded finish from a bright Sun in the center, golden to a darker edge.

Once the is completely done, you put strings on it.

I was building mandolins in mid '70s, and it turned out that there was a company here in Athens that did instruments.

There were, it was called Stewart-MacDonald.

And then I got into product design with them.

I was able to do things there because of my prior building experience.

And the things that I was doing there, I was able to bring home and better do my building.

For bluegrass and a lot of other styles of music, the F-5 mandolin is what's desirable.

It's beautiful.

The design is incredible.

It's attractive.

A lot of people buy kind of on reputation.

And if I build instruments that really please other people, I get customers.

People are excited about playing music.

They want a good instrument.

They love it and they share with their friends.

- I think Don is helping to strengthen the arts in Ohio by building the best instruments possible.

And I would consider Don's mandolins to be some of the best in the world.

You see him across the bluegrass scene.

Alan Bibey, a really great bluegrass mandolin player, plays his mandolins regularly.

Josh Pinkham, another amazing kind of world-renowned mandolinist, plays Don's mandolins.

And it makes sense that his mandolins are some of the best in the world because he is a sensitive person that way.

You know, he can see what you need and what you're looking for in an instrument and wants to make a product that fills what you need.

It almost feels like a family relationship when you purchase an instrument from Don.

I own two Red Diamonds.

And when I look at every nook and cranny in corner, everything is just perfect.

There's not a single thing out of place.

And it's really interesting to kind of look at a mandolin and then hear the sound that comes off of it.

The lows are rich and sustaining.

The highs aren't too shrill.

They're very glassy and bell like.

So it's really interesting to play a Red Diamond compared to some of these other mandolins.

There's life in every single note all across the fingerboard.

Not only is he building the best instruments that he possibly can, he's bringing attention from around the world to Central and Southern Ohio through the kind of craft that he's chosen in his life.

And I think that's really important because it brings fresh musicians and fresh perspectives to this region.

And then, they take a little bit of Ohio back with them whenever they take one of his mandolins.

- And as I started building mandolins, I started learning to play mandolin too.

By playing, you're able to understand musicians that you're building for.

I play with a couple of guys regularly right now.

We've played together for 40 years, probably.

Music has allowed me to buy a farm, raise a family, and love what I do.

There was a term back in the '60s that I latched onto.

It was called right livelihood.

And it meant what you're doing in your working life has to be right or contribute to the planet, the world, the neighbors, and not be destructive.

And I think that building instruments and playing music is right livelihood.

I was able, through both Stewart-MacDonald's, employment at Stewart-MacDonald and my building to do well and to have a good life.

(guitar string vibrating) - Yeah.

- [Diane] Discover more at reddiamondmandolins.com.

(gentle music) And here's a look at this week's Art History.

(gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) That wraps it up for this edition of "WLIW Arts Beat."

We like to hear what you think, so like us on Facebook, join the conversation on X, and visit our webpage to watch more episodes of the show.

We hope to see you next time.

I'm Diane Masciale.

Thank you for watching "WLIW Arts Beat."

(gentle music continues) Funding for "WLIW Arts Beat" was made possible by viewers like you.

Thank you.

(gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues)