 Production funding for Common Ground is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. Hi, and welcome to Common Ground. I'm your host, Ashley Hall. Common Ground captures the creative process of various artists living throughout our region. Each week we delve into the veiled history of our area, plus we take you inside the cultural events that put the North in North Country. On this week's episode of Common Ground, we visit Grand Rapids, where John Downing creates a beautiful glass mosaic. Jerry Radke of Niswa paints a watercolor and shows us how Minnesota culture and nature impact his artwork. And finally, we head to Somme, where the men behind Somme Sweet Things give us a lesson in nut roasting. My name is John Downing. I've been an artist most of my life in some fashion or another. So the last couple of years, much like the rest of my creative life, just kind of fell into an interest that I never would have expected. And at that point too, I was just so intrigued with all of these little pieces that by themselves are totally inconsequential. But when you put pieces together and you form this whole image, I'm fascinated by that. I really, really am, and it has some connection to the work I do. I work in the domestic violence field, and I work with the men. And so they're, again, the pieces of their lives that come together to form a whole picture. In some ways, symbolically, I work through that at home when I do my artwork. I love Lake Superior, and so currently I'm working on some projects that involve coffee tables. And they're in the shape of Lake Superior. I contacted my brother Will. He does custom furniture and custom cabinets and what have you. And he contacted me and he had made four patterns like this. One of the first people I showed the first one that I did, she just looked back and she really liked it. And she said, is the shape significant of something? And I just kind of went, well, yeah, it's Lake Superior for crying out loud. Oh, it is, I'll be darned. You know, it just didn't occur to me that people wouldn't know that. I would paint this, I would just prime it in white. And once it's white, I go on the internet and just look for images that have to do with Lake Superior. And I tend to piece images together. I don't find something and copy it. I might find the first one I did, I found a kayaker and I like that idea, so I put that into it. I like a sunset, or actually it was a sunrise. I like camping up there. So I put all this stuff into it and found images on the internet and just kind of copied the images. And that one is called Sun and Daughter Rising because as it turned out, the kayaker looked very much like my daughter when she's in her kayak. And, you know, working with glass, there are some limitations to that in terms of getting things to look a certain way. This actually turned out to look just like my daughter from the back. And she's looking at the sunrise on Lake Superior. And it's called Sun, S-U-N, Sun and Daughter Rising. And I really, really liked how that turned out. Covering a space of this size with pieces that are roughly an inch in length to anywhere from three quarters to a quarter of an inch in width takes a while. But I guess if you're in a hurry, this isn't the type of artwork I would suggest you do. And as all art and artists, there's a certain amount of pain involved that I am working with glass. I have learned not to try and catch glass if I drop it, that kind of stuff. And I leave a little bit of DNA in just about every piece that I do. It's just inevitable. But it's fully sealed and I'm not going to get into the physiology of some of the blood-borne illnesses. But trust me, it's fully sealed and dried and what have you. So, after painting it white, and obviously it dries, and then I just get out my number two pencil and start to draw the images. Usually I start with the primary image. And what I've found in, because these take so long, ideas come to me regarding, like I say, a primary image. But then the ideas will come like, I'm going to do this, or I'm going to put this over here, or maybe I'm going to try that. So I don't worry too much about the whole idea because it isn't there. It takes a few months and it takes working on the core or the primary image. This is the second one that I'm working on. And because it's, again, Lake Superior shape, I painted this white and I've already started putting the glass on this one. But sticking with Lake Superior creatures, kind of the vibe of Lake Superior, it's really the only place that I've ever seen moose. And as you can see, there's already some blood stains on this one. I had the face where it's at and I was realizing that the antlers weren't quite what I wanted them to be. And so I was erasing, and like a fool, typically what I would do when I'm erasing is just take a paint brush and brush the stuff away. Well, this time I was in a hurry and so I just rubbed my hand and I was just going like this to get the rubber from the eraser off and it's glass. And every once in a while I'm like, John, it's glass for heaven's sakes. And sure enough, I was bleeding and got it all over. And if I forget that it's glass, it doesn't take long before it reminds me that it's glass. What I have up to this point has taken me about a month, I think. And I think totally I've done, I don't know, but it's less than 10 because each one takes anywhere from three to five months. I buy glass. We have a local glass shop in town here. And I just buy these sheets of glass and I buy the glass that has the most variations because I think that's what catches my eye, that's what catches my interest. And then depending on shape and direction and size, you know, it's just, there's no great science to it. I'll just snip it. I'll snap it. Sometimes they snap easily, sometimes they don't. And especially as the pieces get smaller, I've injured myself pretty badly trying to break off a smaller piece. And so as I work on this sort of stuff, this is what I do. I'll lay a piece down and say, no, I don't like that color. I'll sort through all the stuff that I have. I also have a little rule that the piece I'm looking for is already out there somewhere. I just have this kind of this guidance thing that the piece I'm looking for is already out there. Well, once they're all completely finished, I take them down to a little place in town here called Something Original in Grand Rapids. They're on Highway 2 across from Old Central School. And people come in there and look at them. I haven't had anyone come in there and buy them. And that doesn't seem to bother me a whole lot. Frankly, when I get done with one, I just want it out of here so I can do the next one. What happens to them beyond this point is totally irrelevant to what I do and why I do these things. We have our pure maple syrup and we put a little maple syrup in a couple pounds of nuts and we put them in a wok. And Jack and Alan are the stirrers or you've got to keep stirring it in a wok. Then when they get ready, they'll put them in this container or something like this. And then I'll just put them on a tray like this. And it's actually a cookie oven that Alan's brother had of. A&W. A&W. And we got Otis Sponkmeyer cookie oven. And it's just right for these nuts. I think it's 18 minutes. And we roast them. And then where the technical part comes in, where all the work. I even have gloves so that I don't burn the hands. And we put them. Then I'll bring them back here. And if it's for the little bags or these eight ounce jars. And sometimes I throw some on the floor. We eat them, but it's just a little time consuming. Somebody called like a magazine or a craft magazine to my wife's home. And they wanted us to take out an ad in this magazine. I remember she said it was $60. My wife's answer was these three old codgers are more afraid of success than they are of failure. So they don't think they want to do any advertising. But it's kind of spreading because it's like, well, that craft show at Hampton Inn. They had tasted some of these nuts from the woolen mills I think it was. And they wanted it. So we got a few on display there. And we don't know if we want to really get too ambitious. But it's more of a hobby than a business really. It's just a fun thing. I started painting when I was very young. Either I started very young or my memory is going because I can't remember starting. But anyway, we lived at that time in kind of a suburb of Chicago. And I was fortunate. I lived just down the road from a professional artist. He let me hang around his studio. And I started out painting oils. And I sold my first oil painting when I was in fifth grade and sold quite a few paintings after that too. Well, then we moved to Minnesota. And as time went on, I started doing national exhibitions. But I was back in Chicago a number of years ago doing appearances at a series of galleries. And the Chicago papers had done an article, the fact that I had grown up there and been noted in art. And these two people came into the gallery and they were carrying a package. And they said, well, we saw the article in the paper and we were taking care of the estate of this lady. And we noticed your name on a painting and we thought you'd like it. I opened it up. I couldn't believe it. Because when they opened it up, it was the very first painting that I ever sold. And so I got the painting back 40 years later by coincidence in a Chicago gallery. And this was a little painting that I had done in the studio of that oil painter that lived down the road in Chicago. And there I worked my way through college and graduate school with the brush. And then in the 1970s, early 70s, started to be juried into national exhibitions around the country. And shortly after was published by the Hadley Company which owned the Wooden Bird Galleries. They owned 35 galleries. So my art got into a lot of places. Another area that has been a real interest to me is conservation. This is an example of a piece that I did, this one for Ducks Unlimited that was used nationally. And the funds go for wetland restoration and wetland preservation. Over the years, Ducks Unlimited and other conservation organizations have utilized about 90,000 of my prints nationwide. The title of this was Good Old Days and was trying to just capture the nostalgia of another era, another era gone by. The activity of conservation I think for an artist, and a lot of the artists I know that especially the ones that work in wildlife have really done a lot and dedicated their efforts to conservation. So that's an area that I really feel strongly about and have done. I think I've donated now about 140 original paintings to various conservations. I started out in oil painting and considered myself basically an oil painter. Part of grad school spent a year in Los Angeles and studied with a Chinese-American artist, Jake Lee, who was a water colorist. And I got fascinated with watercolor to the point that about five years later I hadn't painted an oil and I thought, well, you know, I tell people I'm an oil painter and I thought, you know, maybe I'm not anymore. And I just started picking up oils again about four years ago. And all the time in between because of I think the influence of Jake Lee, you know, got involved with just the excitement of watercolor. All's wondering, is this one going to turn out? I prepared a sheet to tell you a little bit about the technique. If you look at watercolor, there's a great difference between painting on dry paper or wet paper. The illustration here shows what happens on a damp paper. That's how the soft areas are created. This is the same brush stroke on dry paper. Look at the hard edges. Here's a line that I drew on damp paper, drew it across on dry paper. Look at the sharp edge. Look at the diffused edge here. That's how you get really the variations of color and washes in watercolor. This side would be a wash where you're using the paint and the moisture on the paper to get gradations of color. Watercolor is also transparent versus like oil, which is an opaque paint, meaning that the color you paint covers the color underneath. Here I've taken a series of colors, yellow, red, blue, orange, brown, green. And I've just painted after they've dried a strip of blue over the top. What you see is that because it's transparent, you get a resulting third color that's formed by the crossing of the two. So red crossed with blue becomes kind of a purple. Here you have yellow crossed with blue makes green. And that's one of the fascinating things about watercolor too is with the overlays of washes, you get subtleties of color that are made possible because of the transparency. I'm going to introduce you here to kind of the process in doing watercolor, at least the way I've done this one. You see these white areas here? Because watercolor is transparent, you really can't paint a light color over a dark because the dark will always show through. So this is going to be a birch tree and I've covered that with a masking material that can be peeled off after I've painted the background. Here the paper has been very damp and so you see as the color is put down you get very diffused lines here. The same with the tree line in back which gives kind of a hazy quality. Here we've got some ground fog and that's again because of the dampness of the paper and the paint actually diffuses and that's how you get the soft parts. Here on these blades of grass, of course the paper is dry and you get the sharp lines. Now here you can see as the painting has continued the birch tree, here's one here, becomes this working over the white paper, putting in the details. And on dry paper getting some sharp lines over the foggy diffuse back giving some detail of branches, trees, leaves and additional grasses added over the top of these. Notice that these grasses still show through here because of the transparency of the watercolor here. And detail is always added towards the end or sharp lines because they all need to be on dry paper. So this gives you a little idea of again the process in the watercolor. What I'm going to do now is a small watercolor and it's kind of in the tradition of Audubon where they could print the black plate and that's what I did. I did a reproduction of the ink etching that I did and then each one would be hand watercolor. That's why the original Audubons are so valuable because each one was actually hand painted. And so that's what I'm going to do here. I'm going to hand watercolor the original ink drawing that I did. What I'm doing first is some of the branches here. This is of course, you all know, the cardinal. And it's kind of a fun way to do a little piece to actually do the black line either etching or something like that before you start. My artistic journey has brought us to Niswa, Minnesota, which is really a crossroads. People from all over the country come through here so it's really fun to be in the Lake Country but also the variety of people that we meet. Even while I was published by the Wooden Bird Galleries and had my work distributed nationally by them, moving up here I started to concentrate too, quite a bit on Northwood scenes. And we truly live in a gorgeous country and so in the gallery you're going to see a number of loons and pine trees, white birch. Well, really, people that come from all directions of the United States recognizing that this is really special and it's a paradise for an artist as well. I'm going to add just a little green to the branches. That's a nice color with the red of the cardinal. And that'll give the branches kind of a little perkiness too. So I just added a little bit of green to that. Now I'm going to add a little color to the leaves. This is just a basic color and I'll add some. This will, again, provide just a little liveliness to the scene overall. What I'm going to do now is just add just a touch of color so the leaves just aren't a plain yellow and this gives them a little variation. So I'm putting in a little bit of orange in these leaves, a nice fall color, which is a season that we all enjoy. I'm just adding some shadows into the leaves that will give the leaves a little bit of dimension. You know, when you're painting, the only way you can really achieve depth or dimension is by shadows and highlights, light and dark. And that's what's happening here. I'm putting in just some color, some shadows that give those leaves a little more dimension. And you can see what's kind of happening now with those leaves. I'm going to show you the effect of that. And now just kind of an overall color of the bird and I'll come back over that later with some, again, some shadows and highlights to give that dimension. But since it's transparent, remember, again, we're working with watercolor, so what we paint underneath is never lost. It'll always show through us. So this is just kind of a base color that I'm laying down to give the, really, a color to work over the top. I think it's difficult for an artist to paint everything and so really a need to paint some things well. And I try to really understand and study the subjects that I paint so that if I paint, for example, a flock of ducks, I know what that particular kind of duck, how they flock, how they fly, because it's different. Sometimes you can tell if somebody's really never ever seen a loon because they don't get the lines quite right. So a passion for really observation, I always tell people that the artist's most important tool is his eyes. Watercolor is, it really isn't forgiveness. Once the paper is stained, you're kind of there, you can alter some, but the thing of watercolor does so well as atmosphere and mist. The oils, on the other hand, you get some of that brilliant heavy color and texture. So there's really, both mediums have something to commend themselves to, so I really enjoy doing both. I've probably done a lot more watercolor. Okay, what I'm doing now is the thing that gives dimension. I'm putting in shadows and that should bring the bird kind of to life. And what I'm using is kind of a blue over the top of it. And remember, again, the idea with watercolor of the transparency, so I'm not really losing the red that's underneath. I'm just putting in color that will give it some dimension. And so we're almost ready to look at the final results here. This will accent some of the feathers and give them a little dimension as well. And it makes the bird, the bird no longer will have just a flat look. The bird will look like it, you know, actually has some round shape to it. So that's basically, we're basically finished with that. And I think what we would want to do then is put that in a frame to see how it looks. I've got a little mat here, and we'll put the frame around it. And that's the result of a little watercolor. A good watercolor, people will say, is a combination of skill and happy accidents. A mediocre watercolor is some bad accidents and skill, and a terrible watercolor is no skill with bad accidents. People tell me that when they look at a painting, it's like they've been there. And to me, that's the ultimate compliment. If somebody looks at a painting and says, well, I think I've been there. Then I know that I've really kind of captured the kinds of feelings that that particular area or that kind of landscape generates. Thank you so much for joining us. We hope that you enjoyed the show, and we look forward to seeing you next week right here on Common Ground. If you have a segment idea for Common Ground, please contact us at legacy at lptv.org, or call us at 218-333-3022. For individual segments or copies of Common Ground, please call 218-333-3020. Production funding for Common Ground is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.