AOTA-240628 - Kristina Knowski, Joel Sheesly, Chesterton Art Center

This week on Art in the Air features watercolor artists primarily depicting extinct bird species. Christina Konowski discussing her new framing business in Chesterton. Next we have the first Shirley Hines Land Trust artist-in-residence, Joel Sheesley, and his July exhibit at the Depot Gallery. Our spotlights on the Dunes Summer Theater production of Bridges of Madison County and their Broadway cabaret. Express yourself through art, and show the world your heart. Express yourself through art, and show the world your heart. You're in the know with Esther and Larry, Art on the Air today. They're in the know with Mary and Esther, Art on the Air our way. Express yourself through art, and show the world your heart. Express yourself through art, and show the world your heart. Welcome, you're listening to Art on the Air on Lakeshore Public Media, 89.1 FM, WVLP 103.1 FM, our weekly program covering the arts and arts events throughout Northwest Indiana and beyond. I'm Larry Breckner of New Perspectives Photography, right alongside here with Esther Golden of The Nest in Michigan City. Aloha everyone. We're your hosts for Art on the Air. Art on the Air is supported by an Indiana Arts Commission Arts Project Grant, South Shore Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Art on the Air is heard every Sunday at 7 p.m. on Lakeshore Public Media, 89.1 FM, also streaming live at lakeshorepublicmedia.org, and is available on Lakeshore Public Media's website as a podcast. Also heard on Friday at 11 a.m. and Monday at 5 p.m. on WVLP, 103.1 FM, streaming live at wvlp.org. Our spotlight interviews are also heard Wednesdays on Lakeshore Public Media. Information about Art on the Air is available at our website, breck.com, slash, A-O-T-A. That includes a complete show archive, spotlight interviews, plus our show is available on multiple podcast platforms, including NPR One. Please like us on Facebook, Art on the Air, WVLP, for information about upcoming shows and interviews. We'd like to welcome to Art on the Air Spotlight, from the Canterbury Summer Theater right there in downtown Michigan City, and we have Ray Scott Crawford, who's the artistic director, but along with him is John Burst, and they're going to talk about their next upcoming show. They've already had kind of a busy season so far, with Life's End of a Fact and Love's Many-Splintered Thing, but now it's starting here, starting now. Gentlemen, welcome back to Art on the Air Spotlight. Hey, Larry, thanks. Hi, it's good to see both of you. Great to have both of you here. Well, we appreciate you coming on and continuing with Art on the Air Spotlight, which is a great start to the season. In fact, we have another one coming up shortly to your next show, but let's talk about this one, starting here, starting now, and tell us all about it. Ray Scott, I'll start off with you, and then you can go to John. Okay, well, this is the second musical in our summer, and this one, I'll let John talk about it specifically. He's directing it. He's also our music director, so I just have worked with him on our Love's Many-Splintered Thing, and this is his fifth year to return to Canterbury. So, John, tell them about starting here, starting now. Yeah, well, you know, good things come in small packages, and starting here, starting now is a sweet little show. It was originally done off-Broadway in 1977 with three performers, two actresses and one actor. We've built that up a little bit. We've got two actresses and two actors, so we've got a small cast of four, and it's a sweet evening of songs that talk about love, explore love, love desired, love experienced, love lost. It's funny. Love is often funny. Whether ironic or just joyful, and there are moments of self-discovery, too, because when you fall in love or you fall out of love, you learn about yourself. So it's a real fun evening. It's kind of a breezy evening. You know, we touch upon all aspects of love, aspects of kind of learning about yourself, but not with too heavy a hand. You know, there are a couple little dramatic moments, but otherwise it's a fun, breezy evening, and we hope people will come and join us. Songs are so character-driven, and, of course, I always think of Barbra Streisand when I hear the title. Yeah, a young Barbra Streisand. That was one of her early hits was the title song, Starting Here, Starting Now. Actually, the composer of the show, David Shire, he had worked with her. He was an assistant conductor of Funny Girl on Broadway, which, of course, made Barbra Streisand a star. They had a relationship, and she was working with David Shire, and she saw the copy of his song on his piano, and she was like, oh, what's this? Fell in love with it, and she put it on one of her early albums, Color Me Barbra. So, yeah. What other music do we hear? This is a music review, so, I mean, you're taking other songs, and so tell us some of the music we're going to hear. Sure. So the opening number is a song about people, all four actors and actresses kind of discovering that they're in love, and then that's kind of a prelude to the title song, Starting Here, Starting Now, which is kind of a decision to go forward with this. We also have a lot of great songs. There's a song called Autumn, which is kind of a wistful song that one of the actresses will sing. You know, autumn is a changing season, and the autumnal reference, the autumnal years, the autumn years of a person's life, you know, it's a moment of self-reflection, it's a moment of loss, but there's also the moment of transition. So that's a beautiful song. One of the most famous songs from the show is called Crossword Puzzle, where a woman, one of the actresses, she's doing the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle, which is, of course, one of the most difficult puzzles in the world, and she used to do it with her ex-husband, and we find out during the course of the song that she's having to do the puzzle alone, and she constantly references the past relationship with her husband. So it's very comical at times, but there's a little heartbreak in there, too, because she's left to do something alone that they used to do as a couple. So it's a wide range of songs. There's a lot of company numbers. These four voices, they're going to sound like 40 once they go full voice. So who are those voices? Sure. So we have Elena Farley, we have Angel Pearl, Noah Bryant, and J. Cole Brenton. So that's the cast, and they're great. Excellent. Excellent. When do you start rehearsals for that? Because this is a mid-July show. I mean, you guys work fast, so I know, and you're kind of repertory. Yeah, sure. So the pre-production work has started now, started a while ago, but actually we'll be together in the room for the first rehearsals in about a week. Right. Excellent. And working on a smaller cast show like that, you have kind of a much more – I'm looking at, like, what's happening at the Tony Awards and Merrily We Roll Along, which is the revival and everything, but tell me about the intimacy of working that way with a smaller cast show. I discovered that it works faster and quicker with a smaller cast show in the Canterbury experiment, if you want to call it something like that, but it's easier for them to get to know each other more quickly, and I think that brings a heightened sense of a relationship to a show. You have to work harder, obviously. Small shows mean a lot of material for each individual. You've got four people in the cast that's, you know, they're covering a full two-hour or hour-thirty minutes, whatever it is, slot. So, yeah, it provides them the opportunity to really get to know each other quickly, and I think that makes for a much better show. Very good. And I was just going to say that our space lends itself to that. You know, we're a sweet little storefront theater that brings intimacy between the actor-audience relationship right off the bat. So you put a small cast on that stage, and you're going to have that immediate relationship with that person, and our space lends itself to that. We're getting in our final minute here. I want to give you a chance to talk about show dates, and also for our audience who may just listen to this for the first time, where are Canterburys at and how they can get tickets? Well, this show opens July 3rd. There's no show on the 4th. That's a 2 o'clock matinee on the 3rd. No show on the 4th, and then Friday, Saturday at 9 o'clock, I'm sorry, at 7 o'clock p.m., and then the following weekend, the same thing, Wednesday matinee, but we have a Thursday, Friday, Saturday evening on the 13th at 7. It's 807 Franklin Street. You can order tickets by phone, 219-874-4269, or you can go on our website and make a link to eTix, and the website is canterburytheater, all one word, .org. Oh, and it's the pretentious spelling of theater, T-H-E-A-T-E-R. The British spelling, of course, why not? John Burst, the music director, Ray Scott Crawford, Canterbury Theater, and the upcoming show is starting here, starting now. Gentlemen, thank you so much for coming on Art on the Air Spotlight. Thank you. See you at the Canterbury. Thank you. See you soon. Art on the Air Spotlight and the complete one-hour program on Lakeshore Public Media is brought to you by Macaulay Real Estate in Valparaiso, Ola Patrician, Senior Broker. And as a reminder, if you'd like to have your event on Art on the Air Spotlight or have a longer feature interview, email us at aotaatbrek.com. That's aotaatbrek, B-R-E-C-H, .com. This is Hannah Hammond-Hageman of Chesterton Art Center, and you're listening to Art on the Air on Lakeshore Public Media, 89.1 FM and WVLP 103.1 FM. We are pleased to welcome Kristina Kanowski to Art on the Air. Kristina is an accomplished watercolorist known for her portfolio of extinct bird species. She's an avid birder who prefers to work from life and spends most of her time sketching and researching species in the field. She has participated in numerous shows in Chicago and the surrounding states and is very active with the Indiana Audubon Society and the annual birding festival for which she creates the annual poster. A very recent development is that Kristina and Aaron Melendez opened a high-quality custom picture framing business with a space for displaying regional artworks called Ancillary. I'm so excited for both of you, and I just couldn't be happier for you, Kristina. Thank you for joining us on Art on the Air. Aloha and welcome. Aloha. Thank you for having me. So exciting. Well, Kristina, like we always do with our guests is we want to know their origin story, all about what they were, where they came from, and everything like that. I would like to see how you got from where you were to where you are now. So tell us all about Kristina. Well, as much as I love being here, I'm actually not from Indiana. I originally grew up in Joliet, Illinois, and got my high school degree in Plainfield Central High School, so true suburbanite back in the day in the Chicago region. But I went to college at the American Academy of Art in Chicago. Always wanted to do art, always had a passion for art, and I was very lucky to get a scholarship back in 2008 to go to the Academy, and it was a wonderful experience. I got to do the full four years, got to meet a lot of wonderful people, kind of go downtown and experience downtown Chicago, which was unbelievable. And I was very lucky to meet my then boyfriend, now husband, Aaron Melendez, at the Academy, and, you know, I graduated valedictorian back in 2012, and eventually moved out here into northwest Indiana after we got married. I want to talk about baby Kristina sketching with her. Tell me about school and how did you grow up in an artistic family? Oh, my gosh, no. I say that with lots of love for my family, but I was the weird one that wanted to do art classes and sketching classes. I took classes, like college classes, when I was in, I forget what grade I was in, but I was always drawing, always had a sketchbook on me, and always took any art classes, especially in the summer months, and I could just do whatever I could with it. And, you know, I do credit my father with a little bit of that skill because he does a lot of miniature modeling, and he has a great eye for detail doing work like that. And, you know, he does a lot of research on planes and tanks and uniforms, and so I kind of think I got a little bit of that from him. My work is kind of research and detail-focused, but I do credit my mother for my love of nature. So while they're not very artistic-minded people, they do love nature and they do appreciate art, especially now that I'm older. But I do give them credit for that. Their support system is great. So your father built models then? He still does. Oh, yeah. I did that for years. I still like to do that. And you're right. The details are important. The other thing he taught me is while they say men don't like to follow directions, when you do model building, you do follow directions. Because all of a sudden, I glued it, and now I can't put whatever it is together. So there's a reason for that. So, yeah, and you do learn a lot about detail, about, you know, the paint schemes for the different aircraft and the different, you know, I get that. So that's actually very, I guess you might say, a craft-slash-art skill and everything. Absolutely. He does a lot of, there's like local shows in the Chicago area that actually judge the work. And he's gotten, every year he's gotten an award, and I'm very happy to frame it for him. And he's very proud of his work, and he always tries to get better and better. So it's, you know, it's very similar in a lot of ways. So continue your story. You graduated from college, and then what? So long story short, I did start off with a illustration degree at the academy. I ended up switching that to a fine art degree about halfway through. I started off with watercolor, which I hated. And I ended up falling in love with it after taking another, giving it another chance in college and switched my major to a watercolor major. So after college, I started, I turned shows into the Chicago area and, you know, Midwest states. And I got lots of great response from that. Slowly started working towards the northwest Indiana area, but I actually started framing back in 2011 when I was still in college. And I thought, gee, this might be kind of helpful to have a skill set to frame your work. As any artist knows, it gets very expensive to start framing your own work and then driving it to an exhibition and banging it and taking commissions after that. So very quickly you figure out framing is something you might need to learn. That's true. Yeah, I was very lucky. I started off very humbly at Hobby Lobby and Joliet, and I learned a lot of great skills there. And I quickly wanted to continue staying in picture framing. So I joined lots of different artist groups. I ended up doing more custom framing in different locations in the Chicago area, anywhere from Addison, Arlington Heights, downtown Chicago, and eventually into northwest Indiana. So while I was exhibiting my work, getting my work out there, which is mostly birds, I was also framing and learning a lot of skills with regards to my job. And, you know, it's one of those things where you can learn the basics in two weeks, but to really get into the skill set, you really need to dedicate some time to it, as anyone will tell you, in framing. I want to backtrack a little bit. Sure. So I want to go back to art classes in elementary school and high school. Did you have teachers who encouraged you, and did they notice your talent and your sketching? Thank you. Actually, you're going way back. Yeah. Oh, gosh. I am still in touch with my middle school and my high school art teachers. I've been blessed with wonderful art instructors throughout my elementary school years, my middle school years, and my high school years, especially my middle school and my high school teacher. They're still in touch. They're just so supportive. And they definitely were nurturing to every student, but they definitely took a lot of the special kids and made sure that we, you know, we had a little extra support, especially when, you know, you get a rough project and you're not doing well, a lot of emotional support. I was a perfectionist and had a lot of hard times finishing projects, and they were really pushing me to not only just to get it done, but also to kind of work through that creative process where you do get stuck and you kind of start giving up. I was growing so fast I feel like I would finish a project or get halfway through a project and realize, oh, I can do this better now, so I have to start over. And no, no, no, just get it done, which took longer, but it actually ended up making me a better artist because it does take a lot to just get the project done and give yourself the opportunity to start a new one after that one is finished. So what started as a lot of support through middle school and high school, I continued to develop through college, and I have wonderful instructors at the Academy. Again, I'm still in touch with a lot of them. They're one of those people that don't just leave you alive after you're done working with them. They stay in touch and they continue to support you, which is what makes teachers so wonderful and underappreciated. But, yeah, I was very blessed with working with wonderful teachers. So what brought you to Northwest Indiana? I don't know sometimes. I really don't. I was one of those Illinoisans that was like, oh, Indiana, what's in Indiana? And, you know, I regret saying those words. I love Indiana now. I'm a true Hoosier. I've lived here for over 10 years now. But, you know, I went to school downtown Chicago. We're a hop, skip, and a jump from Northwest Indiana. And I had a lot of friends that were from Indiana that were going to school downtown, but, again, had that attitude of like, gee, what's in Indiana? Well, Aaron, right? Aaron was the one that changed it around for me. He was a couple years older than me in school, but he graduated, I believe, in 2011, if I remember correctly. And so he was graduating. He had a little bit of time in the military, so his schedule was a little off with that. And I ended up living out with him in Whiting for a while. He was originally from East Chicago. And I fell in love with Whiting, which is just literally right over the border. And my Polish roots were extremely happy to be able to participate in Pierogi Fest every year. You can't go wrong. We have a combo of my heritage, which is Polish, with the pierogies, and then my husband's with the tamales, and then we'd eat them together, and it was really, really special. And we ended up moving out to Duneland. I can't remember what year. I think it was 2014. But by complete accident, the building we were renting from sold and is now the Mascot Museum in Whiting. Oh, yeah. That's where I used to live. And we had to leave because they were actually making some construction soon, and we had less than six months to get out. And we found a beautiful space here in Porter, and we've been there ever since. And it's one of those things where I never in a million years would have chosen to live here, but I'm so happy I do. I got to experience the dunes, the state park, but then National Lakeshore, now National Park. And really I've developed a community that I never had in Joliet or Chicago, and I'm very, very, very grateful for that. So not only do I have a lot of birder friends that I go birding with, but I also have a lot of wonderful artist friends that are very supportive, and we try to support each other. And, you know, it's a great community. It's nothing I would have ever gotten in Joliet or in Chicago, and I love it. Every day. I appreciate it every day. Every day. I agree. Every single day. So you're becoming a Northwest Indiana advocate then by all means. Yeah. So, Christina, those first sketches, were you sketching landscapes and animals? Because I don't imagine you started out with birds but wound your way there. You know, it's weird. I definitely do mostly birds now, but at the time I was just a nature lover. I didn't do a lot of landscapes, but I did a lot of animals. Very interested in, like, horses and, like, wolves, going to the zoo and, like, sketching from, like, skulls and very natural environment focused. I remember taking a class. It was through the Joliet Lake Park District, and we just sketched outside, and that was the first time I ever sketched from life. And it was a completely different experience, but I found, like, I think it was a possum skull, and I sketched that. And leaves, I loved sketching leaves. But, you know, I learned a lot about anatomy from learning about horses and their bone structure and their musculature structure. If anyone's ever painted animals, they understand, like, you're looking at what's underneath the skin and the fur. That really is what makes it believable as a realistic animal that's living and breathing. So, you know, that really, I think, worked into the bird life that I do now, but that understanding of anatomy and understanding the underneath the skin structure really helps, I think, to create that detail-oriented work that I try to focus, at least try to achieve with my work. And some of your work is about extinct birds. How does that process work? Because you can't, I mean, you have to work from other things and research. But tell us how you go through discovering that and then how that gets to the final rendering. That's a great question. I have to admit, there's a lot of work that goes into those paintings. I do love doing them. They take a lot more time than they look. There's not just the painting time. There's the research and the sketching phase. So that probably, arguably, takes the longest. And what I usually do to start a piece is I'll kind of come up with a rough sketch or rendering and kind of making sure I know what the layout looks like. I'll have kind of a rough idea of what the piece is about. And there's usually a story involved regarding the actual species that is extinct. So before I can even get to that stage, though, I do need to read about the species. Like, for example, like a passenger pigeon, they're one of those species that we used to have so much of here, especially in North America, that, you know, it's amazing how much history we don't have on it for something that we had so many species of. But a lot of it goes into reading. I pull out library books. I have a lot of my own books that I've accumulated over the years. But it's hard to get a reference photo. Right. So while there's some great renderings that you can trust and research off of, I also try to do my own research, which will require going to, like, the Field Museum or the Peggy Notarbart Nature Museum and basically renting out their space for a couple hours to a day to study their specimens. And there I can get accurate measurements, get reference photos, and then also sketch and draw from life with the skin, which is basically just a stuffed bird. And you can get a great deal of information from that, just that skin. And basically use that information to translate it to a painting. So then once I get that information, it also usually requires a little extra work. So, like, for, like, a passenger pigeon that is a pigeon that has been extinct for over 100 years now, I'll use more modern pigeon reference photos and then kind of alter those to match the passenger pigeon's more, you know, specifications, whether it be color, like tail or wing length, bulk, things like that. So I can usually kind of, like, combine those items together to create a new sketch, and then the rendering starts, the coloration starts, and that's when I can usually start painting and drawing. So it's a pretty extensive process. What I do like, though, is I learn a lot about the species as I'm painting it, but also their story of how they basically became extinct, which is, I think, really relevant to today with conservation efforts with birds and any sort of natural element. It just is a great lesson to learn for people that are, you know, that are going through life and not really thinking about those kind of things. Great. Interesting, because your paintings are so detailed. But I found, and this is just my personal impression, and I'm only, like, right now I'm only imagining a few of them, but there's such a softness about the extinct birds that you do that are very different from, like, current work. It's kind of almost otherworldly. It lives in, like, this in-between place that I really love about them. And I just wanted to ask, too, about the birds. What part of the bird anatomy do you, especially in the beginning, did you find the most challenging to depict? I think all birds are like this. I can tell you what I do like rendering, which is all birds' feet. I love their claws and their little reptilian, like, scales, and that is probably my favorite part to paint, if I have a foot involved. I think they all possess their unique challenges. And as a birder, I found that, like, gulls are really hard to paint, because if you paint a gull with the wrong primary covert, you have a completely different species. So not only applying that information as a birder to painting, it's making sure, if I get a compliment from a birder that my work is accurate or represents a species, I feel very, very good about that. I think just capturing the essence of the bird is hard, especially if you don't know what the bird is like in real life. That's the challenge. I think the hardest thing to capture, not only getting all those field marks correct, whether it's the wing length or the color, the bill shape, what have you, but just capturing the way that they move throughout the space, like what environment they're usually found, that's also really challenging. You want to make sure it really accurately represents that species. Whether it is extinct or not, you're not going to put a woodpecker in a wading pool. That would not be where you would find one. You'd find one on a tree or hanging from a tree trunk or something like that. It would be a very specific way that they'd angle their body on that tree trunk. So looking at woodpeckers helps me make sure I put them in that space where they belong. It seems one of the biggest challenges with the extinct birds is color. Even if you're looking at a museum stuffed bird, the colors have to be somewhat muted or faded, so you have to reinterpret that. Then if there's no rendering of one, and there's just descriptions like, how do you find the subtlety to get the color? That seems like the biggest challenge. I will say that skins are, some of them are really colorful naturally, even as the skins. If you look at a Carolina parakeet, they're still very, very colorful. But if there's some species, you just don't have any record at all. I had made up a completely different bird with a ruku kingfisher from Japan. They're not even sure it's extinct because they're not even sure it's a species at this point. At the same time, you just kind of have to trust your gut and use your research to go with whatever direction you can. So any birds that you would like to do that you have not yet rendered? Ooh, that's a good question. There's a lot of other extinct birds that I would like to paint. Recently, I think the boxwings warbler is one I would like to continue working on. And there was another dusky seaside sparrow that recently became extinct, according to the USDA, I believe. But there's so many, unfortunately, for me to work from at this point. So anything extinct recently, especially recently, I would love to work on. I mean, same question about a living bird. A living bird that you have not done that you'd like to do. A living bird. Yeah. I just got photos and got to experience a mangrove cuckoo two months ago. And I would love to paint that bird. It was my nemesis bird for about three years. So I would love to paint that bird. Do you have time for commissions? I try to squeeze them in. I'm working on a few right now, including a rosy and spoonbill. So I am open for commissions and excited to work on any animal, bird. I'm working on some pet portraits right now, too. So if anyone's interested, I'm happy to paint a bird or a pet for them. I'm going to switch to a framing question. We only have a few minutes left. But what's some of the challenges of doing high-quality framing? When someone brings you a piece and you look at it, what's the challenge there? What do we have to do? I think the challenge for that framing has a lot of challenges. But I think it's putting aside your biases and your tastes in art and conforming them to your client's tastes, which are different than yours usually. We do have some wonderful people that trust you and will let you do what they want in terms of, like, design. But it's going in their home. And I always try to remind them that it doesn't have to look good for me. It has to look good for them in their space. So as long as they're happy and making that person happy, that, to me, is the biggest challenge but also the greatest reward because, you know, once it leaves the frame shop, it's going home and hanging up. And that's what's most important. I love seeing artwork hanging in a client's home or office or in a gallery space. And it really just is doing what it's supposed to do, which is hanging and displaying work professionally and to the best design possible for that space. You're just so excellent at it. I mean, attesting to your years of experience in it and being a professional artist as well. You really give the best advice. Thank you. So let's talk about Ancillary. Sure. So how did it come about? I mean, I think it's been in the works for maybe, you know, like a dream for quite a while, I would imagine. Well, since I started framing back in 2011, it's been, you know, I've learned so much throughout those years that eventually you get to a point where you can't really go much higher on the wrong ladder until you start to own your own business. And so I was very lucky to be able to learn as I grew and changed locations and changed businesses. You get to learn a different skill set every time. And I was very lucky to work at Framing Concepts in Chesterton when they were here. They had multiple locations at the time. I got to learn so much from the owners there that I really fell in love with it and they reconfirmed to me how much I loved framing. And, unfortunately, they didn't stay here in Chesterton and I'd miss them every day. But, you know, I got to work at some other locations. I got to learn some more skills. So it's been great to be able to grow and be able to have the opportunity to have a business here in Chesterton. I feel it's a very full circle for me. So I'm excited to start opening soon and taking orders. Where are you located? At 109 South Cali Met. I'm in Marjorie Crawford's old space. And I'm very happy. We're very, very lucky to be in this location. And I'm excited to showcase her work for our first exhibition. Well, tell us the address, contact information, website, all that contact information so people can discover you. So I'm at 109 South Cali Met. That's in Chesterton, Indiana. We're in downtown just south of Octave's Grill, if you're familiar with Octave's. Our name of our business is Ancillary, A-N-C-I-L-L, A-E-R-I-E. And you can call us at 219-728-9179 or just visit us online at Ancillary.com. I'd like to thank you for coming on the show. That's Christina Nolski, Ancillary. And you can come get your framing needs or whatever advice you want and also see her work all over northwest Indiana as an artist. Thank you so much for coming on Art of the Year and sharing your art journey. Thank you so much. You guys are wonderful. Thank you. Thank you so much. And best of luck. I appreciate it. Thanks. Art of the Year listeners, do you have a suggestion for a possible guest on our show, whether it's an artist, musician, author, gallery, theater, concert, or some other artistic endeavor that you are aware of or a topic of interest to our listeners? Email us at aota.brech.com. That's aota.brech.com. This is Curtis L. Chrysler, Poet Laureate of Indiana. You're listening to Art on the Air on Lakeshore Public Media 89.1 FM and on WVLP 103.1 FM. We would like to welcome Joel Sheasley to Art on the Air. Joel is Emeritus Professor of Art at Wheaton College. He is a painter whose work focuses on the landscape and addresses environments and ecologies. He has been the recipient of an Illinois Artist Fellowship and has exhibited his work in university settings and Chicago galleries, including a solo exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center. He is the first Shirley Hines Land Trust Artist-in-Residence and has over two years and in all four seasons visited Shirley Hines Nature Preserves and Beverly Shores properties to create a collection of 15 paintings. His exhibit at the Beverly Shores Depot Gallery will be July 5th through August 11th called Learning the Land, Stewarding Beauty. Thank you for joining us on Art on the Air. Aloha and welcome, Joel. It's a pleasure to meet you. Thank you, a pleasure likewise for me. Well, Joel, all of our audience always likes to know about the background of our artists. I always like to say their origin story, how you got from where you were to where you are now. So tell us all about that. Okay, well, I mean, it sounds like you want to go all the way back. All the way. I was raised in upstate New York in a small town, Stanford, New York, Oneonta, New York. My mom was an artist, is an artist. She's 99 years old at the moment, still going strong. But so as a kid, you know, I kind of picked some things up from her and lived in Oneonta, New York, where there are a couple of colleges, State University of New York and Hartworth College. And through those places, I got to know some artists and pretty much realized, you know, that I felt a kind of calling to art and really, you know, sort of decided just to pour myself into it. So I attended the School of Art at Syracuse University for BFA. And then following that, I went out to the University of Denver for an MFA. But then came back for a teaching job here in Illinois, Wheaton College, where I was for. Ready for this. Forty two years. It's incredible these days. But. So during that whole period of time, you know, my whole artistic sensibilities have undergone changes and, you know, my original kind of emergence into artistic work was, you know, through abstract painting, which, you know, I pretty much have maintained for, you know, a few years up until the 80s after I finished my graduate program at the University of Denver. But gradually I just found myself moving away from abstraction, not for any kind of. Dislike of it, but just, you know, called just found myself moving more into sort of figurative kinds of painting. And so then, you know, over a long, long haul of maybe 30 years, that whole kind of figurative painting is something that kept me going as it kind of morphed into increasingly, I suppose, people would call realistic kinds of ways of working. And, you know, in the midst of that, also, I found myself through a friend who was a landscape painter. In fact, I was at an artist workshop and talking to this guy named Douglas Gable, and he, you know, introduced me to the idea of painting outside, you know, in plein air. And I thought at the time, nobody does that unless you're kind of a dilettante or something. A Sunday afternoon painter, you know, nobody leaves the studio for any reason. But he kind of talked me into it. And so I thought, yeah, let me give it a try. And as soon as I tried it, I was just floored by how demanding it was, how difficult it is and how rewarding it is. And I found for, you know, I probably practiced that kind of painting for 10 years while I was continuing to think my main work was still in the studio with, you know, larger kinds of works that had more of a figurative dimension to them. I looked at landscape painting at that point as a kind of exercise or calisthenic, you know, because you're forced into having to think about so many things when you're painting like that outside. And you're forced to resolve things quickly and think fast and, you know, gesture boldly. But about 10 years ago, I just thought, you know, I'm enjoying this. I really should just pour myself into it. So I had a sabbatical leave coming up and then I think it was 2014. I arranged with the park district here in Wheaton to paint a place called the Lincoln Marsh Natural Area, which is 150 acre natural area that they supervise and to have an exhibition of the work with them and, you know, produce a small book with them on it and so on and forth. And that really, I thought, if I can do this for a year, the marsh is only a few minutes from my house. I can be there every day for a year working like this. It'll prove to me that I either do or do not want to paint landscapes. So it proved that I did. I found it very rewarding and challenging intellectually, certainly challenging physically. And, you know, so basically what's happened is that that experience and that exhibition that worked out with them in a book that they published was 2014. Then following that, I, through some contacts with them, met Brooke McDonald, who's the director of the Conservation Foundation, which is also a group that's doing profound work to conserve and preserve land and rivers here in northeastern Illinois. And with them, I did about a two and a half or three year project painting the Fox River from in Dundee up in west Dundee down to where the Fox joins the Illinois River in Ottawa. We had a big exhibition in that areas where the Meg Barrow connection came in. She hosted that exhibition at the Shingothi Center at Aurora University. You know, the Edith Farnsworth House in Plano contacted me about maybe exhibiting in their gallery associated with the Mies van der Rohe Edith Farnsworth House. And so that led to a year's residency painting the riparian landscape around the Farnsworth House and an exhibition there, which then led to, you know, this exhibition that I just had last fall with the Forest Preserve District of DuPage featuring a river in DuPage County called the West Branch of the DuPage River. And that was a couple of year project leading up to Shirley Hines, the exhibition that's coming up. So that's kind of the trajectory of my work. And it's really become focused on landscape, particularly local landscapes that I live in and around, you know, all the time. In fact, you said in one of the documenting of those paintings, you said, I don't know what I'm looking for, and I never know if I've found it. It was so interesting because it just so fit that body of work, you know, where, like you described, you're out there every day painting. And so is it, you know, the direction you turn is, I suppose, intuitive? Or what is, you know, what is your, when you do a project like that, is there a particular objective that you've been given? Or is it just that, you know? Yeah, yeah, no, that's a great question. Yeah, it's, you know, when you're, any place where you are, just about, you can find beauty. So if you're in a forest preserve or area like that, you know, beauty is everywhere. So it's not a question of finding beauty. It's kind of a, I always feel like I'm looking for a kind of a crack in the wall of beauty that I can get into. And some place where I can feel invited and slip in and maybe have something to say, or at least to explore. And what that is, is always open. I really don't have much of an agenda other than that. Well, I mean, the title of the exhibition that's coming up with the Depot Gallery, the title of the exhibition is Learning the Land, Stewarding Beauty. So I suppose if I have any kind of an agenda, it is that I want to learn something about the land that I'm on through the process of painting it. And I want to, in some way, you know, work my way into some notion of what that aspect of beauty might be there. So that's, it really leaves it wide open. And sometimes I do, in fact, just feel like I'm stumbling around, you know. And there's always the experience of you spend two and a half hours or three hours on site painting something, and you turn around and you say, oh my gosh, it's more beautiful behind me. Why didn't I paint the thing that's right, you know, to my back? It's really, and I think what happens is the more you look, the more you focus, the more you pay attention, the more you start to find that crack that I'm looking for, that opening, you know, that lets you in to this kind of wall of beauty. You're listening to Art on the Air on Lakeshore Public Media, 89.1 FM, on WVLP, 103.1 FM. Your outside painting, are you able to finish? Or then what do you do when you get back in studio? Have you, kind of hard to document the light of the moment, I think, sometimes. Oh, it is. And, you know, I mean, so I suppose you'd have to say that I'm not a purist as a plein air painter. I start every work in plein air, outside, in front of the scene. And like I say, that's usually a two and a half to three hour period. When I first got started in this business, I tried to make everything happen within that amount of time. But I soon found that I really wanted more. So I started taking a lot of photographs during the process. And so what I typically do now is begin with that two and a half hour, three hour block of time on site. And then bring it home to my studio, work with my photographs, work with other information that I can find. Sit with a painting and really start to determine what I want from it. And it becomes like any other kind of painting. Photography is there to help, but it's not a photo-based kind of work as much as it is using photography to support what you feel like the painting wants. Right. Do you prefer being plein air? I mean, you just told us a little bit about your process, kind of the same question I was going to ask. But do you find your work is maybe more informed when you do the photo than that? Or do you still do any plain, or I should say pure plein air painting where you go out from the beginning to end and it's all outdoors? Yeah. No. I mean, these days, I'm working on canvases typically that are just plain too large to complete in that amount of time. Everything changes so drastically in three hours in terms of the light that it's very hard to keep going outside. And in our climate up here, we don't have consistent weather from day to day. You can't count on the same light two days in a row. Moment to moment. Yeah. So it's not like I can go back. I used to try to do that, see if I can go back at the same time in the evening or the same time in the morning and work more. It never really has worked out. And it seems best for me to bring it back to the studio and just sit with it as a painting. I've had this encounter with nature and this encounter with the land that is important to me on site. Now I've got to think about this as a painting. And, you know, what is it asking for, you know, just as a work of art? Hines has a lot of nature preserves. How did you choose which ones to focus on? Well, that called for just as much exploration as I could. I knew I was going to be around the Beverly Shores area, so I tried to stick to, you know, their preserves that are fairly local to that. So I ended up painting at the Great Marsh there, at the Dale B. Enquist Nature Preserve, J. Timothy Ritchie Nature Preserve, Keith Richard Walner Nature Preserve, the Meadowbrook Nature Preserve, the Ambler Flatwoods and the Barker Woods. Those were the scenes that I – areas that I came back to more often and worked at. And that involved, you know, of course, making trips. Fortunately, I have a friend who lives near Michigan City who put me up overnight, you know, several times. And Meg Barrow, who was kind enough also, who lives in Beverly Shores, to vacate her premises and let me stay there for, you know, a couple of nights on different occasions so that I could, you know, do the exploring I needed to do and to get up early and get out and then stay late and get out late and that kind of thing. So it was great for me just to see the intricacy and the complexity of that environment. I mean, it's really kind of Eden of sorts. I mean, at least as I, you know, imagine it prior to industry and development and so on. It's just a wonderful complex ecology there. Do you have any future projects after this one that you're working on? You seem very project-oriented in how you're doing these. But is there the next after this exhibit? Yeah. Well, I'll tell you. I mean, right now, right coming up shortly, I have an exhibition at the Water Street Studios in Batavia, Illinois. And that'll be a group of landscape paintings. That'll come just prior to the Home Depot show. But I'm very excited right now about an opportunity that I've been given at the Willowbrook Wildlife Center in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. They're building what they're saying is going to be the largest and most complex animal rehabilitation center, perhaps in the country. I mean, I'm not sure if that seems quite a thing to say, but they've asked me to paint a very large painting, 25 feet wide by 16 feet tall. It's mural-sized work. And so that's the thing that's coming up for me at the end of the summer that I'm really thrilled to have been invited into and to be looking forward to making. Spent the whole year just designing it. So I was really attracted to the prairie paintings, but also your interiors from back in the early 2000s. So do you ever go back to doing an interior just to get away from all the green? Well, you have to learn to love green. And I feel that I have. But that is an interesting question. It's always in my mind. I sit in the morning having my cup of coffee, just quietly meditating on what's all around me, interiors leading on to outside views through windows and so on. So I'm not going to say no to that. I mean, anything could happen. But for now, I'm really still very strongly committed to, as I say, learning the land, just really trying to figure out the landscape. Those interiors are completely captivating. I really enjoyed that series of work very much. Thank you. Are you interested in ever doing something outside of that? I mean, you're currently in this vein, but maybe like portraits, figurative work or anything like that again? Tap dancing? Yeah. Well, I suppose, you know, as the opportunity might come up, you know, and as who knows, you know, as time goes on, your physical abilities change and your whole, you know, things shift. But I think as a plan, I'd have to say no, Larry. I don't really have a plan for it. But I don't I've I've done a lot of portrait painting. I've done a lot of, you know, as they're saying, the interiors and fascinated by the whole tradition of all that kind of work. So and even abstraction, I've never lost my love for abstraction, even though I haven't worked that way for a long, long time now. Did you find it difficult to move from an abstract to, well, like you even described it, more realistic form? Yeah, it was a slow process. You know, I when I first, you know, quite a few years ago, when I first started thinking I wanted to move towards a more figurative, representational kind of painting. I started out in a very expressionistic sort of way, dealing with the fact with a figure in a very, you know, loose kind of way. And it took me a number of years to slowly work my way towards a more realistic way of working. That is where I pretty much have been. But yeah, so it all takes time and there's all kind of historical precedent, you know, that I'm very interested in and that I look at and think about. And, you know, the meaning of each kind of way of working is different and its implications are different. So it's always a process. Even your puddle paintings almost delve into surrealism, like Surrealism Light. I really enjoyed that series as well. Yeah, those puddle paintings are very dear to me. I know you're an emeritus professor. Do you still have any opportunity to teach or maybe give individual lecture classes, whether at the university or maybe individual teaching of artists? Yeah, I haven't done much teaching at all. I do look forward to opportunities to give talks and to speak about painting and landscape painting in particular. And that's something that I enjoy, the sort of intellectual or conceptual side of the whole business. And so I'm always working on trying to understand better what it's about and then looking forward to opportunities when I can share that with other people. So we'll be giving a talk, by the way, at the Depot Gallery opening on the 12th at four o'clock, which I'm looking forward to, you know, talking about the whole business. So that'll be at four and then the show opens at five on the 12th and that'll get us rolling there. Right, and the show will run from, it's going to be available to view from, what, July 5th through August 11th. Is that correct? Well, I've got the date as July 12th. That's the public opening. Yeah, I guess it's going to be hung up there on the July, so someone can sneak in there and actually probably see it. Yes, I think so. It'll be ready by the 5th and it runs through the 11th of August. You're right. Very good. Because I talked at four o'clock on the 12th. Well, that'll be a great opportunity for people to investigate your work. Well, we appreciate you coming on Art on the Air. That's Joel Sheasley and his exhibit is coming up at the Depot, and, of course, that's on U.S. 12, just off of U.S. 12 on Broadway there in Beverly Shores. The exhibit is Learning the Land, Stewarding Beauty, and you can see it there. It's the Shirley Hines Artisan Residence. It'll be running through August 11th. Joel, thank you so much for coming on Art on the Air. Hey, thank you. I enjoyed it. Yeah, thank you. I've enjoyed the conversation. Thank you. Yeah, nice to meet you both. We'd like to thank our guests this week on Art on the Air, our weekly program covering the arts and arts events throughout Northwest Indiana and beyond. 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Your hosts were Larry Breckner and Esther Golden, and we invite you back next week for another episode of Art on the Air. Aloha, everyone. Have a splendid week. Express yourself you art, and show the world your heart. Express yourself you art, and show the world your heart. You're in the know with Esther and Larry, Art on the Air today. They're in the know with Larry and Esther, Art on the Air our way. Express yourself you art, and show the world your heart. Express yourself you art, and show the world your heart. Express yourself you art, and show the world your heart.