(Mary) Coming up on State of the Arts, human spirit hidden in sculpture, an artist's unconscious muse, and exploring collective memory.

These stories and more on State of the Arts.

Hello, thank you for joining us this week for another tour of the art world.

I'm Mary Paul.

We begin right here in southern Arizona.

Kurt Brill is a Tucson-based sculptor.

Since the 1970s, his ceramic tea bowls and bronze sculptures have been widely collected across the U.S., Europe, and Japan.

He is inspired by movement, humor, and the human spirit.

His work reflects a tactile connection to materials and a search for serenity.

♪ Peaceful Music ♪ (Curt) If you come at art with the attitude of that realism is this exact reproduction, then art never measures up, because the real thing would convey itself much better.

So the art has to go further and be something of its own.

Usually, if I do a portrait or do a figure, there is something about it that is so intriguing to me that I want to be able to convey to a viewer what it is that I see.

My mother was a painter, and my father was a truck driver.

And from an early age, I always got art materials for birthdays.

My first experiences were with clay, making dinosaurs.

Almost every culture has had clay as a way of expressing themselves.

So in our modern society, we are dependent on so many electronics, primitive cultures made pottery.

There is just something, I don't know, primal about clay, and I just felt very comfortable with clay.

I had always wanted to hike, so I came out and hiked the Grand Canyon, and then built a pottery wheel don't know, primal about clay, going to be a functional potter.

But I didn't last long as a functional potter.

(Julie) Of course, he does his Japanese tea bowls, and that's because he's had a long interest in Japanese art, Japanese culture.

He's gone back as a scholar, artist in residence in Japan, and so there's elements of that Japanese simplicity and beauty and form that still informs his work today.

(Curt) I'm unclear, inquisitive about the nature of being human, but there are some common things that seem to weave their way through our lives, and I'm not sure what they are.

It's a constant exploration for me, and that's part of the reason I got into figural sculpting.

(Julie) When you look at his bronzes, they might have lots of movement as if you can just feel the clay that he's working with to create the form.

What comes to mind for me: Willem de Kooning's very expressive three-dimensional form, or Rodin.

Feeling of motion in his work, in his figurative studies, and in his landscapes, it's always there, a sense of being in the moment.

They are about to move or about to turn over and look at you, and I think that's very intriguing, and not easy to capture like that.

(Curt) When I first started, the first pieces I did were these sort of odd, very big-hipped little-headed things.

I would find the most interesting thing was when models were on break.

I would do quick sketches.

I never posed my models, so the model was just sitting as if on break, and that's when I do most of my work.

So this was a quick study of someone seated, and this was the size of it.

This was one of the first monumental scale pieces I did.

The bronze casting process is a labor-intensive process with many steps.

So without going into all the details, basically this was the original intent, and what I wanted was to produce a piece like this that was bigger than human scale, so when you approached it, it had some other life form to it.

(Andrew) We all know him through his work.

I've never seen anything he's done that doesn't make me think about in new ways about what sculpture's about.

(Julie) One time he entered and got into the Arizona Biennial, life-size figure made out of sisal, and so it looked like a big hairy beast, but it sort of had the feeling of an African ritual dance.

Recently he's returned to sculpture in the form of ceramic portraits.

(Curt) To think about realism, we all see things differently, and we all respond to things differently.

A lot of times what happens is that we get so caught up in trying to reproduce the technology we have now, we can scan.

So if you wanted someone's portrait to be realistic, you could take a mold or do a scan, but there is something more in each person, and I think that a good portrait actually does more.

Somehow you have to bring life back into an inanimate object.

♪ Peaceful Music ♪ [ POTTERY WHEEL SPINNING ] I've always seen my artwork as just part of my life.

♪ Peaceful Music ♪ [ POTTERY WHEEL SPINNING ] And I realized that all cultures had art going on.

Before we had big-screen TVs, before we had powerful stereo systems and cars, every culture had their artwork.

A lot of it, a lot of times was clay.

So someplace in our nature is the desire, the drive to create.

So I thought about art as therapy, more than art.

It also can be rehabilitative, but as I taught classes, I realized that people just, they'd fall into a zone, and time would stop and their troubles would stop and they got involved in doing artwork.

And I believe that's been part of it for me all along, anyhow, without knowing it.

Have you ever had a really vivid dream that you wish you could somehow capture?

Our next artist does just that.

Her paintings are an exploration into the mind's eye that she wants the audience to see as a puzzle.

♪ Upbeat Music ♪ (Madeline) My journey into art, I feel like I've been sort of drawn to it for as long as I can remember.

My parents were always super supportive.

I think my first sort of venture in art was at six years old.

I was copying Scooby-Doo comics.

And yeah, I always, I would go back and forth for a while, but I always knew that it was the main thing that I wanted to pursue.

I would describe my work as like esoteric, surreal, figurative art.

I work big.

I work in oils.

I like to take up a lot of space with the work.

A lot of it is focused on themes like femininity, dreamscapes, sort of the unconscious.

My color is very much based on my mood.

In the time that I paint it, I feel right now I'm in a kind of a blue period at the moment.

I've been really drawn to a lot of phthalo blues and some purples.

And I feel like those are sort of symbolically rich because they sort of represent, you know, that deep dive into a more like spiritual unconscious space, which is what I feel like I'm sort of in right now and what I'm trying to explore.

But you know, I also love the natural, more muted color palettes for when I'm feeling a bit more connected to the space around me.

So it swings back and forth.

When people look at my pieces, you know, they're not going to see a typical feminine body.

They're going to be a little bit awkward.

They're going to be a little ugly.

They're going to be a little weird looking.

And, you know, I think for me that speaks to, you know, the fact that us as women, we are typically portrayed as objects of desire.

But we're more than that, you know, and I think deep down, it could be hard for us to see that reflected in our work.

So I kind of hope to capture moments where someone might not feel beautiful.

They might feel a little bit more real and a little bit more wild.

I like depicting the feminine body almost as a creature versus an object to be reflected.

The one thing I really want to stress about my art is I find there's sort of an inadequacy of language and there's some things that can only be expressed symbolically.

And that's what I hope to touch on.

My least favorite question that I always get from folks is what does this painting mean?

I really want them to interpret my work almost like they are interpreting a tarot card reading.

A lot of the imagery that I paint is solely unconscious imagery, which is, you know, of course very specific to me.

But when I'm bringing it out into the world and into a painting and into a gallery, I don't really want it to speak about me in particular.

I want it to resonate with people on an individual level.

And, you know, one of the things I say is that I want my work to sort of be a puzzle for the viewer to figure out.

There's a lot of different symbols and sometimes a lot of clashing symbols.

And I think those speak to people in ways that I never would have even guessed.

But, yeah, it sort of brings us together to a sort of collective consciousness space.

♪ Upbeat Techno Music ♪ In addition to being a documentary filmmaker, Dennis Scholl is a visual artist.

As part of his studio art practice, he reflects on history and collective memory by acquiring and assembling archival material.

(Dennis) My practice primarily works with memory.

But it's not just my memory.

In other words, I'm not making work about when my dad got me a bike when I was 10 years old.

I'm making work about collective memories, big events in our history that didn't just impact me but impacted a lot of people.

My name's Dennis Scholl, and I'm an artist and a filmmake I've been a filmmaker now for about 15 years.

But the thing I learned very quickly is that it doesn't take one person to make a film.

It takes 15 people to make a great five-minute film.

And so as a director, mostly in my film practice, I find myself having to give away pieces of the film and take them back and give them away and take them back.

And I was really looking for something beyond that where I could just sit in a room and obsess about making things.

Having a creative practice that I could do 24-7.

And so about 10 years ago, I started to make studio art.

And I wasn't very good.

And I did it for about five years, and I threw it all away at the end of five years.

But then I found this thread that I've been working through, and I began to make things that I was happy with, that I felt were good enough to show people and interesting.

And it was a real revelation for me to become an artist.

And I've enjoyed it very much.

I'm the oldest emerging artist that you'll ever see at this point in time.

That is a very, very big part of what drives me, is to try to find a conceptual idea that you can also turn into something that's aesthetically pleasing.

I like to make work that works on two levels.

I like to make work that when you're far away from it, you see it, and you see, in my case, a lot of symmetry and a lot of repetition.

So then as you get closer, you see that there's more to it, and you have to dig into the work.

And that comes from using objects of desire, objects that are well-known, objects of culture, objects of history.

And so sometimes you'll get really close, and you'll see a newspaper that's part of the practice, and in a work, and you'll want to read the newspaper.

So I want you to look from far away and see the symmetry and the repetition.

Then I want you to come really, really, really close and look and see what's going on.

And hopefully I can trigger some interest in your life about what I'm showing.

The one question I always ask people is, "What is your most vivid collective memory?

What is it that you remember like it was yesterday that we all also remembered at the same time?"

Now, for me, it was the Kennedy assassination.

I was eight years old.

I was in the Christmas play rehearsing.

My teacher came running down the stairs.

She was crying.

I'd never seen a teacher cry before.

And I went home and sat in front of the TV with my mom for like three days in a row.

Those kind of memories are things that really have shaped our nation and also shaped how we feel about each other.

When you have those collective memories, the country tends to come together in various ways.

And so a lot of the practice is about me out there trying to find these historical artifacts and assemble them in a way that will trigger a collective memory for the viewer, to draw the viewer in because we shared the same experience that day when that happened.

It's about trying to remind you, the viewer, what happened that day when you were in class and you were 14 years old and they trotted it out a television and put the Challenger launch on and then right before your eyes, you know, it explodes and those astronauts are lost.

Those are things people don't forget.

They never forget that stuff.

Using memory in my practice has been almost therapeutic, if I can say that.

I'm not somebody who looks back a lot.

I have always been looking for the next idea, the next opportunity, the next ambitious thing that I wanted to pursue.

And yet when I started making art and I sat down and I began to think about what is it that I want people to see?

It was about memories.

And maybe it's because I'm getting older, I'm not sure.

I'm trying to take these big moments in time, the 1972 Munich Olympics, when the terrorists came and took the Israeli athletes hostage and we lost them all.

The space landing, when we landed on the moon.

I'm trying to take those memories and kind of bring them back to the fore.

The most interesting thing I think that happens is when somebody walks up to a piece and looks at it and they say, "Oh, I remember that.

Let me tell you where I was that day and let me tell you exactly what I was thinking."

Boy, that's a win for me.

I love when that happens.

And I ask everybody I meet who is interested in the practice, what is your most vivid collective memory?

It's about assembling these objects, whether it's newspapers or it's cypress knees, all sorts of different objects.

But there's an underlying architecture to the practice.

And that is I work with the dodecagon, which is a 12-sided figure.

Now I've chosen that because the 12-sided figure represents the hours on a clock, the months in a year, the zodiac.

And the dodecagon has a long history of being very important in architecture and religion.

And so I use that as the underlying infrastructure, if you will, of the practice.

And then when I get these objects, I acquire them at auction generally.

I just have to go out and search for them and search for them.

But when I get these objects, I build them on this idea of this grid, this 12-sided figure to give you, I guess, the feeling of time passing, thinking about the months in a year, the hours on a clock, the zodiac.

So it's really about using that as the underlying infrastructure to show you that time is passing and I'm taking you back in time.

I don't start the day with a paintbrush in my hand or a chisel with a piece of marble.

I start my day by looking at 30,000 objects a month on the internet at auctions.

And all I do is I get my iPad and I go whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.

And I'm looking for that one object that I can make into a piece of art.

And I would say at the end of the month, I probably found about 10 things that could be a piece of art.

The problem is I didn't find them on the street.

I can't pick them up and bring them back to the studio.

I have to actually bid on them at the auctions.

And so at the end of the month, I really wind up with about one or two things that I can turn into a piece of art.

Sometimes it's a group of things in one lot where I can acquire them and voila, it's a piece of art.

Instantly, as I scroll through and I scroll through and I scroll through, I say, that could be something.

Or maybe that could be something.

Anybody that knows me knows that I've been an art collector for 47 years and I've acquired over 2,000 works of art during that time period.

So it's a natural extension of my collecting practice in the way that I'm making art now.

It would have been disingenuous, I think, for me to become a painter and announce that I was a painter.

But this is really taking the skill set that I've developed over so many decades and now turning it into a studio art practice.

I'm basically just transposing my collecting gene, which I can't do without.

I mean, I would stop breathing before I would stop collecting.

And so I've taken my collecting gene and I've been able to turn it into a studio art practice.

And people are responding, which is really joyful.

I've been able to show in London, in Berlin, New York.

I'm going to do a show at Piero Achigari Gallery in Miami.

So it's been an exciting time.

I knew that I wanted to show elsewhere for a while before I came home with my practice.

Because this is my hometown.

It's important to me.

I revere the artists in my community.

And if I'm going to show work in my hometown, I want it to be something that I can be proud of and that people will want to come see.

So I've spent the last four years showing work pretty much all over the world.

And now I'm finally going to bring it home.

I'm nervous.

I can't lie.

There are so many great artists in our hometown.

And, you know, we'll see what happens.

I'm excited about the show.

It takes you back in an instant.

And that's what the work's about.

Just trying to bring you to that place that you probably haven't thought about for a very, very long time.

We wrap up today by meeting John Suess, a 34-year career librarian.

After retiring in 2007, he committed to pursuing his interest in art making, exercising his personal belief in lifelong learning.

(John) I'm always intrigued by somebody else's style and their perspective.

I want to expand and learn more and more about art, and I'm discovering that every day.

♪ Soft Piano Music ♪ A painting is partially about the link between the act of painting and the artist's way of seeing, or as in the case, reimagining the world with fresh ideas and eyes.

I don't know who said this, but I think that's a good definition of art.

To me, the idea is how simple your art can be and still move people.

♪ Soft Piano Music ♪ [ WIND BLOWING ] The last name is, should be spelled C-E-A-S-E, which is pronounced "cease."

I'm not Dr.

Seuss.

He's dead.

I'm still alive.

And he's still making more money than I am.

Most people look at the world in two ways.

Either you look at something or you see something, and I think there's a 180-degree difference between the two.

You and I could be standing next to each other at the riverbank and looking at the landscape, and you might be looking at the trees and the light and the clouds and so forth.

But what I'm seeing, shapes, forms, colors, values, textures, there's an infinite variety of things.

-No, no, don't.

Don't.

Hey, hey, hey, hey.

Hey, ow.

Chuck.

Did you get that?

(John) I was born and raised in Milwaukee.

I grew up on the Milwaukee's northwest side.

I really got my start in art when I, I think I was around three years old, when I was probably seven or eight years old.

My grandmother, she gave me a brownie box camera.

-There it is.

It's been 75 years.

My grandmother, she came over and she showed me how to load the camera with film and how to shoot it and so forth.

And I went outside like the kid in "Christmas Story" with a rifle.

I was just going around, just pointing this thing at everything.

Probably in 10 minutes I was back with two rolls of film shot.

I think it was like a fall day.

It's amazing, I remember it so clearly.

I took pictures of the edge of the garage with a fence on the side and I ran out in the alley and probably took a couple pictures of that.

Like I said, in 10 minutes I was back.

I don't remember a reaction, but I think she probably would have said, "You should have taken longer than you did."

And a couple days later the film came back and my grandmother sat down with me and she kind of critiqued what I did.

That was my first inclination that somebody enjoyed something that I created.

♪ Upbeat Guitar Music ♪ Out of high school I signed up for commercial art.

I thought that was the thing to do.

And one day, maybe the second or third semester, I get a tap on my shoulder.

The instructor pulls me aside.

All he said to me was, "You want fine art, not commercial art."

I paint primarily stuff that I see in southeastern Wisconsin.

I'll take photographs on my walks when I'm playing golf and I'll determine if that's something that's paintable.

And then I'll determine at some point if I want to paint that in an impressionistic style or a realistic style or totalistic style.

And sometimes when I start painting, I might start painting it in more of an abstract, landscape, color field style.

And then I realize this isn't working out, so I kind of switch over and get into more of an impressionistic thing.

I started out painting it.

Halfway through it, I decided this is becoming more impressionistic and this is becoming more color field.

So I'm combining kind of two different things.

It seems to be working out, but it's all about the light.

It's the light popping, the blues of the sky popping through the clouds here.

This is a lot more darker and I came back with a brush like this and brushed it out and made it blend a little bit more.

The principal thing of this is this main cloud here, but it doesn't really do anything until you add shadows to it to make it stand out.

♪ Folk Music ♪ At the Wautos Library, somebody left a comment, "I love it that you have so many styles."

And that's a really good compliment for me because I'm trying not to have a specific style.

That's sort of what kind of keeps me going.

You can never stop learning.

And I would love to continue following doing that as long as I can.

And that wraps up our tour of the art world today.

I'm Marty Paul, from all of us at AZPM, thanks for joining us this week on State of the Arts.

We'll be back with more next week.

(music)