 If you enjoy watching Common Ground online, please consider making a tax-deductible donation at lptv.org. Lakeland Public Television presents Common Ground brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota. Welcome to Common Ground. I'm your host, Scott Knudson. In this two-segment episode, join us at Bemidji's Nordic Showcase where groups like the Sons of Norway exhibit culture from the old country. Then Diane Johnson invites us to her studio as she creates A Painting a Day. I'm Jan Kittelsen, greeting you from the Nordic Showcase, which is sponsored by Bemidji Lodge 500, Sons of Norway. We are at the Calgary Lutheran Church and people are flooding in to taste our tasty treats from Norway. The purpose of Showcase is threefold. It is to show the people of the community and all who come what it is that we enjoy and experience in Sons of Norway and hopefully to interest them in joining our lodge and also to develop camaraderie among members. And one of my personal goals is to get every member of the lodge involved in doing something for Nordic Showcase and we've done pretty well. We have a lot of members here and we have a lot of guests here. It is turning out to be a fantastic day. Everybody here will want to taste our samples of rosettes, krumkake, kransekake, rumigrit, rumibrud, smurbrud. My tongue doesn't like to roll around those Rs. Many of you are familiar with lefse but some of these other tasty treats were new to me even today. The people who have made and are making the foods are mostly members but one member will get another one and a helper and so that's a good thing. And a few people who are not members have volunteered and some of them we have asked. If I know someone, if somebody on our committee knows someone who does some Nordic craft, we ask them, would you like to participate in Nordic Showcase? So we have people here participating from other towns. The dancers are from Detroit Lakes and the crocheter and the felter are from Rushford, Minnesota and Bob Paulson is from Shevlin and I have seen guests come in from Bagley. So this is good. We like this. The goal is to let everybody in the community know what Sons of Norway is about and also to help interest people in joining Sons of Norway. We had a very successful Nordic Showcase five years ago in June of 2010 and we're hoping that this will be equally successful or more so. It's not something we could do every year. The committee has been working on it. I think we started in October and really ramped up after the first of the year. So it's a big deal. There are about 30 booths here today. Each booth has at least one Sons of Norway member manning it and some have more than one and some have recruited helpers outside of Sons of Norway which is just fine with us. I'm George Olson. My wife and I Karen Olson are from North Home. Today we're here to make potato lefse. It's a mixture of potatoes, flour, sugar and butter mixed together. We start over here. We roll the mixture into a ball about the size of a golf ball. My wife flours it and then rolls it real thin. I come along with my lefse stick, lift it off of the pastry cover, fold it first one side on the grill. Then we have to wait until it cooks on one side and we'll flip it over on the other. Besides potato lefse there are many other lefses, at least 20 that do not have potatoes in them. So in Norwegian this is called potet lefse. The bubbles on the top of the sheet of lefse, you can tell that this has been rolled good because it's cooking evenly. I check underneath once in a while to see how it's coming. Then I flip it over and it'll cook on the other side. A lot of times at home we have it fresh off the griddle with butter and brown sugar. Here today we're having butter and sugar. Sometimes people use cinnamon, sometimes they roll it up with a hot dog and it's called vormapulsa. I put my pickled herring in it, actually. Some people put scrambled eggs in bacon and roll it up. Then when it's done flip it over and you have your sheet of lefse. That's pretty much the process there. I'm actually president of the Bemidji Lodge and the cultural director and we decided it was time for another event. So Jan Kittelsen is good enough to head it up again and I think she's done a fine job. It's a great crowd today. I'm interested in anything that shows off the Norwegian and Scandinavian heritage. So this is a great representative sample of everything Norwegian and Scandinavian. It's a great day. It brings to the forefront our culture and people are more aware of it. It's a win-win situation for the community, I believe. Hi, my name is Susie Rowland. Jeff Turn is my name. I'm actually from Melbourne, Australia. And we're at the Norwegian Showcase in Bemidji, Minnesota. I'm here visiting Janelle and Phil Teig at Bemidji. They've actually bought me along today because Janelle's Swedish background. And she bought me along this event today to see what happens with this festival. I'm not involved with the Showcase but I belong to the Sons of Norway in Boston, Minnesota. And we wanted to come over and see what they do here because we're interested in doing something like this at our own Sons of Norway. I enjoy the Robograd most. It's so good. It's warm. And it reminds me of what my mother-in-law used to make many years ago. Some of the chip carving, the wood carving, the lefse making. The sandwiches are fantastic. They're like little pieces of art. So far I've had a walk around, had a few nibbles. It's very interesting. The different varieties of the food from the Scandinavian area. A lot of clothing on sale. Hand art craft type stuff on sale. There's a gentleman down here that's done wood carving. That was very interesting to see that he had a wooden stool there that he spent seven years during the winter months carving this wooden stool. I'm not sure what the name is in Scandinavia but there was very interesting to talk to him. The bunad making. I am interested in making my own bunad and there's a lady here that has made one for herself and her daughter and her granddaughter and I wanted to find out some more about it. The benefits for this community are that so many of them have Scandinavian heritage and they get to see everything that is all about Scandinavian more than just Norwegian. They're Swedish and Danish and it's just a good way for them all to be exposed to it. I think that it's a wonderful way for everybody to get introduced to it especially if you don't know anything. There's history, there's social part of it. It's just a great way for everybody to get involved. Anybody is welcome to join Sons of Norway. You don't have to be Norwegian. When the organization started you had to be Norwegian to join. Well then they got a little more lax and you had to be married to a Norwegian to join and then a little more lax and you had to know a Norwegian to join but anymore you don't have to know anybody Norwegian to join. We are about learning about the culture of Norway and I think education, showing people, demonstrating to people some of the Nordic traditions and culture. It makes me feel really good that there are so many people turning out for this because Bemidji is, I tell my kids, Bemidji is a happening place. There are always lots of things going on. If you are interested in our Norwegian culture, we're happy to have you join. I'm Diana Johnson and today I'm going to do something that I've been doing every day for a year and that's a daily painting. I'm going to paint an apple. Painting a day is a concept and it was started by an artist. His name is Dwayne Kaiser and it was maybe in the 80s. He just was having a difficult time selling paintings. He took a bunch of his paintings that didn't sell and had a party with other artist friends and they sort of bought each other's art and it tended to be smaller pieces of art. So he started then selling smaller pieces of art on eBay and that's kind of where he started the whole painting a day. The movement has grown to multiple websites featuring just artists who paint daily and it was something that I decided to challenge myself with. I've never painted on and off or ever but I've never really consistently painted. So I decided if I went to college or school for art one thing I would have to do is paint every day. So that's why I decided to paint daily and challenged myself to do so. I think painting every day is just like doing anything every day, practicing the piano or learning some new craft or art. You just get better. You get better and better and better. I think I was in awe. I would look at other daily painters and see Michael Naples is one that comes to mind. He started just doing pencil drawings and after painting daily it seemed like in three, four months he was producing beautiful works of art and I thought gosh, if he can do it maybe I can do it but I really didn't think that it would be as profound for me as it was. I learned so much about painting. I mean I didn't just sit down and continually paint every day. I watched videos and took out books from the library and really educated myself because I would get stuck. How do I mix colors? How do I figure out composition? And then when I started the daily painting, it was just like I think going to school. I learned a lot. What I have done here before I started this was to paint it in gray tones using burnt umber but just getting the values of the apple because then you can use the color and if you don't get the values right then you're just slugging along. So you want the darkest darks first. In other words, if you took a picture of this apple in black and white then this is a value of that apple. It's just the white and the black in different degrees. So I've painted that first because if you can get that right then the rest you're just kind of home free. And now I'm going to start applying the colors. And I've also done my colors in value lines meaning I start with a dark and I keep adding white which just makes painting go a lot faster because you're not mixing every single color that you see you need. You've got a line of values. They call them strings. So oftentimes painters paint the darkest darks first. You know the one thing I know is that there's no rules. It feels, it felt like when I started that there were rules I didn't know. There was something I should be doing and I didn't know what it was and I would be making a mess of something but that's not the case. There's no rules. I've probably watched a hundred, two hundred videos on painting and the one thing I know is that people do what works and what works for one doesn't work for another and you just try, try until you find something that works. Some painters do the background first. Sometimes they do both. So here's an example of not having to go mix this color because I see it. That color is right there and it's right there. Makes it a lot easier. I never use black either. Well, okay, never. But I hardly ever use black. I tend to mix a black. Mixing the black value versus from the tube produces such a richer black and the black just in and of itself is where an eye tends to stop. It's sort of a dead, lifeless color and so your eye stops there, which is not what you want when you're painting. You want the eye to travel. Go on a little journey. I love painting apples. Get that dark. This is going to make this look like an apple. That little dark bit right there. Without that, it's not going to look as apple-like. Let's get some green with that. Shadows are another thing. It was something that I learned in this whole little journey was shadows. There's so much color in this shadow. I mean, you first look at it and you think it's a shadow so it's dark and it's one color. But there's this beautiful lavender in there and there's a beautiful green there. Very little black. That's kind of a dark ultramarine blue. Yeah, let's put that in there. I loved painting, well, I still do, but pastel paints because you get to use your fingers a lot. Something I like to do. That beautiful purple. Now we're going to work on that background. Lost and found edges. Sounds like a book. If somebody was thinking about painting, I think my motherly advice would be to just do it and not be self-critical to the point that you keep yourself from doing it. Criticism is a good thing. It makes us better. But in art sometimes we feel that there's people who just have a natural ability versus somebody who just works really hard at it and makes it look like they have a natural ability. So just paint. That needs to be deader. So the color is too bright and you want to bring it down notch and you want to add its complement, which would be green in this case because we're working with red. A little more green here. I think I kind of like that white streak there. I also blogged. Did a blog about my painting a day because I guess I thought if I didn't I would probably just at some point maybe become frustrated or feel like I was lacking feedback and maybe quit. So the blogging really helped in that regard. It wasn't until I put it on Facebook that really helped because then people made comments. There's a lot of little steps in this whole process. From taking the picture, printing the picture, painting the picture and then taking a photograph of the painting and posting it and then I decided too an initial challenge was that I would say something that I either liked about the painting or didn't like about the painting or wished I had done differently so that I would, in my mind I would be growing or learning as I was painting. So there were a lot of little steps and doing the blog was very helpful because it held me accountable but putting it on Facebook made all the difference in the world because I had people who said every day when I would post something I like this or it reminds me of something or I like the subject matter and it just kept me going. It just, I didn't want to let anybody down and not post. So after eight months there were times when it was difficult I just kept going. I think I'm going to step back again and look, see? What I wanted ultimately was to have a show a body of work I guess because to me that meant I had accomplished something I had more than just the occasional painting that I had had up until that point at least I had enough so people could like one of them maybe or dislike some and still like another one. I think that's it. I like it. People say you paint for yourself but really you don't. I think if you painted for yourself you would never show anyone you would never hang them up you would never have an exhibit you would never, you wouldn't care if anybody saw them. We paint from ourselves we paint from within ourselves but we don't paint for ourselves. You have an idea for a common ground piece that pertains to North Central Minnesota email us at legacy at lptv.org or call us at 218-333-3014 To view any episode of Common Ground online visit us at lptv.org We order episodes or segments of Common Ground call 218-333-3020 Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people November 4th, 2008 If you enjoyed this episode of Lakeland Public Television's Common Ground consider making a contribution at lptv.org