[Music] This week on State of the Arts, Painting the Southwest, and The Joy of Creating.

We share these stories and more on State of the Arts.

[Music] Hello, I'm Mary Paul, and this is State of the Arts.

Artist Tim Long is greatly inspired by where he's from, Oklahoma.

Adapting a neo-southwest style of painting, his artworks reflect the region's landscapes, histories, and cultures.

Here's his story.

[Music] I don't want to go completely out of my kind of genre, or what a neo-southwest, or whatever it is.

[Music] We're doing neo-southwest, that's it.

I'm running with that.

That's a great description.

I don't know exactly what that means, but it sounds great.

Where is Oklahoma?

Is it Midwestern?

Is it Southern?

Is it Western?

Is it Southwestern?

I don't know.

[Music] Neo-southwest is... [Music] Old cowboy hat.

[Music] Maybe hear jazz playing in an old beat-up pickup driving down the road.

There's definitely going to be some dust blowing around, and it's probably going to be hot.

[Music] Might be a cactus.

[Music] That's neo-southwest to me, you know, cowboy boots, maybe riding a skateboard, you know, something like that.

[Music] Sometimes I'll say like Western Pop Art.

Neo-southwest kind of has a nice ring to it.

[Music] I kind of like getting in on a painting and just starting and trying to finish up as fast as I can.

I find a lot of inspiration from Oklahoma.

I'm an Oklahoma artist, born in Duncan, Oklahoma, and now live in Mustang.

I consider myself a contemporary Western artist.

Maybe I'm just an artist.

I take pride in kind of being from the state, kind of wear it as a badge.

I'm a Okie.

My roots from the Anadarko area or like, you know, the Stephens County, like Duncan area, and I don't know, I just had that curiosity.

It was centered about where I'm growing up.

Definitely want to take that into consideration, but not get too far away from what you're kind of used to.

It just always kind of seemed like it stemmed right out of here, out of Oklahoma.

It made me want to be a painter.

[Music] That's Rock Hudson from the movie Giant.

This is Texas, mighty colossus of the Southwest.

I have this idea of my inspiration, and it would be an old house kind of sitting on the plains, pale blue sky, there's some red dirt.

You probably got Marty Robbins on the record player back in the back.

[Music] And on the wall would be one of my paintings.

I know what I want to paint, but I don't know what colors or, you know.

It's like a puzzle.

You're sitting there painting, and you're trying to, how is this going to, you're a viewer just as much as the person looking at it, right?

I like to leave my art a little on the undone side.

I'll have like a little voice in my head.

There's, hey you're done.

Or at least step back and stop.

Maybe I'll come back to it tomorrow.

And then if I come back to it tomorrow, and I'm happy with it, then I'm done.

[Music] I have a day job, and as much as I would love to be an artist full time, it just doesn't pay the bills, right?

So I don't paint when I'm at work.

I think part of that is art for me is therapeutic.

It's a hobby, but I don't want it to be a job.

The way I look at it, I would love to do this full time when I retire.

I never want anyone to look at my art and be like, wow, is that a photograph?

I want a painting to look like a painting.

[Music] It was a couple weeks before Father's Day, and my mom was like, what are you going to get your dad?

And she's like, why don't you make him something?

Why don't you draw him something?

She gets it matted and framed, and we presented it to my dad for Father's Day.

And it went straight on the wall.

His excitement at seeing it, my mom's excitement of seeing it, my sister, but I've kind of, all right, maybe this is something I can do.

I like how it turned out.

My dad's dad, my papa, he has some great pictures of him, you know, on horseback, you know, kind of raring up.

And I have one of my great-grandfather, you know, he's got his chaps on and his cowboy hat, but I'm not a mature enough painter to bring it the respect that it needs.

And that's one painting that I'm not mature enough as an artist yet to paint it.

Maybe that one will be in the cowboy hall of fame or something.

I saw a book that I checked out from my grade school, Indian Values, Past and Present, by LuCelia Wise.

A lot of kids maybe were seeing comic books and trying to draw Superman or X-Men or something.

I had this book.

Yeah, there it is.

That's "Koiwa Fancy Dancer" by David Williams.

My favorite.

I was practicing my drawing by some of these master Native American painters.

And the pictures that I saw on that, just, I was captured.

He would have had some muted colors, probably like a solid background color, done in tempers or gouache.

[music] It's the flat style or the Bacone school of drawing.

Almost an illustration style to it.

[music] But there is a sense of movement in all of that.

These artists are taking a very flat, based off almost ledger art from the 19th century.

It's just gorgeous like the way his hands holding his whip and his fan and the look on his face, the movement you see.

But they capture a sense of movement that for a 2D painting, it's amazing.

I would have been probably 11.

You know, something at that young of an age that can stick with you, but that absolutely has done it.

It's still fascinating to me to this day.

It's, some of my favorite paintings are in that style.

It's gorgeous.

[music] I like my art.

I want people to see that.

Whether I ever played the guitar in front of anybody, I just, I like playing.

I like playing for myself.

[music] Do I listen to a lot of jazz?

A little bit, but the jazz side of it is just, that's what comes out kind of when I play.

It's this like clean tone, it's got some blues, it's got some jazz.

[music] You hyper focus on what you're doing or playing and yeah, it tunes everything out and you tune in that, you know, what you're trying to play.

[music] There's days that it sounds great and there's days that you're like, I'm going to put that up and I'm not going to play it for a while, you know.

[music] It just, it finds its way out on me.

So when I was about 15, I was begging my parents for a guitar, "Save your money and you can get one."

And so I did.

They ordered it from Sears catalog.

Here I am, I go to a lesson.

What do you want to play?

I want to play Chuck Berry.

[music] She's like, "Tonight you're going to learn Mary had a Little Lamb."

It hurts my fingers, you know, I can't really do it, so give up on it.

[music] So now I'm about 15, so I've been playing ever since then, or at least trying to play.

[music] I don't know that I'll ever learn it the way I want to learn it.

I just have fun with it, you know.

[music] [music] There's definitely a juxtaposition from working in the oil field to being a painter.

I can daydream while I'm out there in the heat or in the cold and I'm thinking about painting.

Been in the oil and gas for 16 years.

Regardless if those meet if it's oil and water, but that's just who I am, right?

That's just kind of how it is.

[music] As you drive that seven hours and you quit thinking about what you just did on days off and what you're about to get yourself into.

But yeah, you definitely have a mind shift from what you did with the wife and kids and the dogs and what you painted and back to what you're about to go do at work.

[music] It just so happens that most places where oil and gas are not, you know, it's not on the beach in California necessarily.

It's dirty, it's loud, it's long hours.

So painting is a great escape from that.

That juxtaposition of being in a hard industry to something that's visual and you know, the two don't, you don't hear very often of those two meeting up.

It's definitely hard work.

It's not as cowboy as it used to be.

[music] I find a lot of inspiration from Oklahoma.

I want to do a series of based on Oklahoma musicians because that combines history, art and music.

The three things that I really enjoy.

[music] How do you know when you're done?

That, you know, that took a long time.

I have paintings on the wall that I might be like, I should have done this or I should have done that.

But there's others that, you know, that's perfect.

Not another stroke, right?

There's times where I'm afraid that if I overwork it then I'll lose some of that magic.

I guess it's just as organic, I guess, as you can in this day and age, right?

That's kind of how I want it.

[music] Now here's a look at some of the arts and events happening around Southern Arizona.

It's special for me because I have a family that passed away and the idea to come is to celebrate and to honor their memories.

We are sisters.

This is our niece and we're here.

We're here on behalf of our, Wendy and I's dad and also our sister who is Megan's mother.

I'd like to introduce my parents, Pedro and Estella Navalles and they own El Tamarindo restaurant on 4th Avenue.

They were great, wonderful parents.

They were really adored by all of us and all the grandkids and so on.

I am honoring both my daughter and my son.

I lost, tragically my son and my daughter was murdered through domestic violence here in Tucson area.

So I'm honoring them and families and friends here.

[music] Tucson's mourning community is really significant.

I've noticed and I've seen over and over again when Tucson loses somebody, people come out, people adorn an altar, a roadside altar and it's just a beautiful thing.

And I think it's a really healthy thing for a community to talk and to look at death in the face and to deal with loss.

[music] This is our 36th year.

So I was started by Sue Johnson in 1990 and she ran the event for seven years and then I took over in 1996 and I and M.M.O.S.

which is a small grassroots non-profit organization have been running the procession ever since.

[music] Tucson is a place that's so rich and like and grounded in their geography and then also the culture of the surrounding community.

It is a great honor.

It is so heartfelt because we will never forget them and this is one of the greatest things they have done for Tucson and I'm very, very proud to be a part of it.

It's a big honor to see so much the community come together and support each other through this tragedy and at the same time a celebration of death, life.

And we're all here because we have loved ones that have passed and we're all here to share their story.

[music] I think that Tucson is just, it's so many artists.

There's a lot of artists and what artists get is artists get how to make something out of nothing.

[music] Growing up in a musical household, Sterling Elliott began playing cello at the age of three.

Since then he has grown to become an award-winning musician who has played with some of the country's major orchestras.

We head to his home state of Virginia to learn more about his robust career.

My name is Sterling Elliott.

[music] The way I started the cello is actually pretty interesting.

Basically it was handed to me but it was also destined to me from birth.

So when I say that I mean my mom always wanted a family string quartet.

She really wanted that string quartet and I'm the youngest of the siblings so all the other positions of the string quartet were already there.

My mom played violin and viola.

My two older siblings played violin and there was only one more spot to be filled in the string quartet which was the cellist.

So she said when I was in her womb she actually had a cello waiting.

Somebody had to play the cello.

I wanted my kids to have the love of music and have a gift that they would always have for the rest of their lives, something that nobody could ever take away from them.

And it just kind of blossomed into more of having a family group and bonding together as a family by playing music.

So we were always playing together.

We always practiced together at the same time.

Our musical lives were always pretty much connected.

If one person went to a competition we all went either to compete or support.

We're missing the other part.

Our first quartet performance was at the mall because I thought what's the best place to play to get exposure?

The mall.

Everybody's at the mall.

And then our biggest break if you will was we played for the Boys and Girls Club.

They had a competition and our quartet performed and we won.

And as a result of that they wanted us to play for their national Centennial conference, Centennial anniversary and it was our biggest audience.

4,000 people and there was Denzel Washington there.

There were all kinds of celebrities.

It was crazy.

And after we performed people were coming up, "Hey we want you to play in San Francisco.

Hey we want you to play in Boston.

Hey we want you to play in Atlanta."

And the next two years we played all over the place.

This performing music thing was never supposed to be my primary career.

I always wanted to be an engineer actually since I was very young.

I converted our entire backyard shed thing into a garage workshop with all my tools.

I've loved all math and sciences.

I've loved tinkering one day with my car and other things.

I've loved just the mechanics of everything.

And it wasn't until actually when I was like 14 I was doing the national Sphinx Competition that I realized this could be something much more than I ever intended.

And that was actually sort of when I really started taking it seriously.

You're in what year at Juilliard?

I'm a third year undergrad.

This semester I'm only taking three classes but I still find myself playing easily eight hours a day.

I have multiple chamber groups and we have rehearsals and sometimes coachings and then sometimes school orchestra rehearsal.

Two years ago I did a solo performance with the New York for Harmonic which was the biggest solo performance I'd ever done in David Geffen Hall in New York.

And that also led to me getting to play as a substitute cellist in the orchestra a couple of times.

It's nice being home, getting back used to it, remembering what my lifestyle used to be like at home.

It's nice and refreshing without the hustle and bustle of New York City.

Tonight I'll be playing Shachovsky's Rococo Variations.

It's a piece I've played with orchestra two times before I played this piece with the New York Philharmonic.

So I'm glad to be playing it again, closer to home.

[music] I must say that when I was rehearsing in this small theater I realized how much more intimate I could be with the music.

I could do smaller innuendos that could be heard more because the acoustics are pretty great with this theater in my cello.

It's a great mix.

March 1st I'll be doing my first concerto performance.

I'll be playing a Dvorak's concerto at Carnegie Hall.

Kind of the cello concerto as some people say.

35-40 minutes I think.

I'll be playing it with the New York Youth Symphony.

I've been lucky enough to have a solo opportunity just by myself for a couple minutes in the big hall in Carnegie.

And that will be absolutely terrifying but also an amazing opportunity.

I think a lot of people think I'm kind of a unique kind of person but I always just try to tell them, you know, I feel like I'm probably just like you, you know.

You can probably do exactly the same kind of thing I was doing as long as you just have someone that's keeping you going whether it's yourself or a parental figure or another role model.

As long as you continue to have that drive, as long as you continue to put in the work, you know, anything can happen.

In this segment we take a trip to Cuba to meet accomplished artist Manuel Hernández Valdés.

At 80 years old he still loves to create and finds immense joy as a painter, ceramist and humorous.

Take a look.

[Speaking Spanish ] [SPEAKING SPANISH] [MUSIC PLAYING] [SPEAKING SPANISH] [SPEAKING SPANISH] And that wraps it up for this edition of State of the Arts.

We look forward to seeing you again next week with more stories from the arts world.

Until next time, I'm Mary Paul.

Thanks for watching.