Coming your way on Art Rocks, a self-taught painter gone as high praise in his point.

Copy Paris home.

I paint in oils, acrylics and pastels.

Videos lauded for their worldly views.

We started off shooting locally and then it was thought of of maybe expand ing the content to larger parts of the world.

Traditional Native American beading.

I often first start with the essence of the piece.

And 150 something year old paintings still moving viewers emotions.

These stories are next on Art Rocks.

West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LPI, be offering diverse exhibitions throughout the year and programs that showcase art, history, music and more.

West Baton Rouge Museum Culture Cultivated Art Rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Art Rocks.

With me, James Fox Smith from Country Roads magazine.

Let's begin by crossing the Mississippi to new roads in Point Cappy Parish.

That's where Norman Lecoq was raised.

Drawing and painting every chance he had, there was less time for paint or pen.

Once Lecoq grew up and became an accomplished welder, a career that took him to Houston, where he continued to paint as a hobby.

Look up, chose to return to Louisiana when he didn't feel his aging mother could live alone any longer.

So now, back in his boyhood home, Lecoq passion for creating art burns as bright as ever.

Let's take a look.

I'd paint it and all era ladder in.

You can see the water hit the glass.

But there's a heart shape on outskirts of the glass where somebody at Eden later heart.

I have two marbles right by that lantern.

When I was a kid, I used to play with marbles.

When the lights would go off, we would use those old lanterns to light so we'd be able to see.

That's how I came to the concept of painting that one.

It's a beautiful painting, a real detail.

I have a version of The Old Man in the Sea.

This painting is an oil.

It's my depiction of Ernest Hemingway, picture of Old Man in the Sea.

It's just a spectacular.

The detail I have with the swordfish.

And he's striking it in the water.

I have a flying fish on the side.

You look various details.

The line broke.

He has a spear ready to drop into the swordfish.

That painting is one of my favorites.

It's the colors, the tones, the little boat he's in.

It's it's really showing a lot of detail.

This is kind of mind boggling.

It's a picture of a goldfish.

Another thing, I had goldfish when I was a kid.

And I'm always into different things with with art just to see whether or not it would work or how it would work.

The flame is not a flame of fire, but it's a flame of water.

And the fish is trying to survive, is surviving through what was flames but nice water.

But you see, the candle is melting.

But again, you have different keys on a doorknob in a handle on a block of wood.

So with that part, you have different keys to open different sides of the door, which key or which knob you're going to use to open what door you want open for yourself.

So that one is kind of different.

It's kind of deep water is one of the easiest things down for me to do.

Bruce Lee saying be like water, it flows is going to take a path and just follow the contours of the shape that I have in.

I just let it flow.

White in various tones.

And that's it.

I have another painting in there right now I'm working on.

This is oils and that one is pastels.

And you can see it almost identical.

They look the same.

Looks like water.

My favorite subject matter are people.

People and animals.

Everyone going to have a particular type of facial expression features skin tone, hair tone and textures.

Thing with animals.

Every animal's going to be slightly different.

They may be the same species, but they can be slightly different just as us.

We're all different with the same species, but each one of us is totally different.

And that's what a beauty come in.

And everything is kind of hard to please people.

You have to know exactly what they want.

That's why you have to interview them.

Where is this picture going?

What are you using it for?

Is it for personal use?

Just you.

Or it's a gift.

I usually get three or four photographs from that person.

I review the best photographs they have and find out if that's what they want in plenty people.

If they don't have jewelry on, they may request a particular type of necklace that won't cost extra because I have to research and then they have to present me with what type of necklace they want.

I can add anything on.

Then there's a background.

You have to have different things to go with the picture itself and the background to make everything unison to come together as a whole.

Always get your deposit.

Always have to get a deposit.

I'll paint in oils, acrylics and pastels.

I love all the mediums, but oils seem to be my favorite.

Pastels the next.

And then there's acrylics.

I enjoy the oils because of the resin and a resolution you can get with creating your pictures and everything else too.

But the pastels, it's much quicker than oils.

And when I do pastels, it's immediately gratitude.

You can see everything coming to life right then and there.

Oils, you got to wait a little bit, let it dry, come back.

Different layers, you'll do the same type of layer effects.

But would pastels work quicker?

Oil painting is always more elite than acrylics and pastels because the value of the oils is much more expensive too.

But a lot of people won't have that kind of money at the time, so they resort to pastels when they can kind of get about the same resolution as the oils with less price.

I start painting about the age of ten and it wasn't a painting, was an actual drawing.

It was of a Batmobile in a so that for the amount of $0.25 back there at St Augustine School and I never stopped since then, it's mainly self-taught.

I had teachers, I went to a small college in Baton Rouge by a name, a commercial college.

I got there.

I presented what I had to paint and draw, sketch.

And at the time I was a young kid.

They had me actually teaching some of the classes more or less, and then my talent got better and better.

The more I did, I was learning more.

And that's how to escalate to do different paintings like this.

You see right here I look at the various tones, how the light is actually hitting the subject, where it's going to be less tones combined with more, and then a light hitting off a subject is going to reflect on the subject, in effect, the colors that surround its subject itself.

I enjoy teaching.

I get a lot from teaching people, students, young and old.

I teach STEM Academies and have recent art classes where I teach various students.

I get some commissioned work from some of the displays that I have and doing the YouTube channels.

They're pretty fun.

I film myself actually in high speed, doing several different types of art, mainly pastels.

I can do the pastels real quick sometime on or even after the speeded up.

And some time I might do oil and I talk about road maps.

I'm always talk about road maps.

You have to know where you're going to get where you want to get to.

And the same with every painting.

Have a starting point, lay it out, start to finish.

Fine art delivers beauty and inspiration to creator and viewer alike.

So here are some of our picks for notable exhibits coming up soon at museums and galleries in our part of the world.

For more about these and lots more events in the arts visit LP dot org slash art rocks.

There you'll find links to every episode of this program, so to see or share any segment again.

Visit LP Dorgan, Art Ross.

You can also find only the Louisiana segments on LP's YouTube page.

Now we're off to the pepper mill resort properties in Reno, Nevada.

As if the accommodations were not enough, guests can also choose to view IMAX scale video of breathtaking scenery taken from all around the world.

Vast video screens deliver inspiring footage of landscapes, culture and wildlife from all seven continents.

So here we go.

Essentially, windows in the world is taking video images and presenting them like still images, finding beautiful shots that you normally would shoot a photo with, but add the emotion of video.

A photo is an instant in time.

Windows of the world is moments in time.

We started off shooting locally and then it was thought of of maybe expanding the content to larger parts of the world.

And that actually happened when the owner of the pepper mill we're considering putting in an aquarium.

The aquarium that they were talking about putting in was a big deal.

It was going to cost them $1,000,000 and it was going to cost them 80 grand a year in maintenance.

The owners came to me and they said, Well, Joe, do you think you can do that with your cameras?

And I said, Oh, yeah, I wasn't sure how I was going to do it, but I said, I think I can.

We found a way to get those red cameras underwater and we went to a Belize and we shot underwater and it became a big success.

And then we started traveling all over.

I've been to hundreds of countries.

I don't know how many, but from Mount Everest to Antarctica to all over Alaska, China, Vietnam, Thailand, New Zealand, Australia.

India.

The key to the success of this is having as much content as you possibly can and playing it completely random.

Right now we have over 50,000 different images and we play it in about a half a dozen formats.

That's the power of it because you never know what's coming next.

And then you just add content to it.

You see all the shots, but also now you're seeing new ones that on occasion and by the time you get to over 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, 50,000 images, it just becomes this this library, this this plethora of content that just you never know what's going to show.

Up next.

This experience with traveling with windows of the world and creating these images allow me to bump into different cultures that I wouldn't have expected.

We're literally working in these countries.

We're not tourists, but more importantly, the people and cultures that we've experienced really are the true treasures that we take home from these trips.

We have three mountain gorilla treks scheduled in Rwanda.

We were hiking way up in the mountains and we went up there.

We get to the very top and you get one hour with these gorillas of this group of gorillas for about 20 gorillas, a family of them right behind the tree.

You know, as you walk through that little canopy, that's where they're all kind of hanging out.

You know, you don't want to they don't let you bother them too much.

Well, we got there.

And so so you get about do you get enough time to get you have to build your cameras again because they're all in backpacks you get already.

Okay, bam, they let you go there in the clock starts ticking.

The one hour we go there and oh, there's one.

And it looks like a little chimpanzee.

It was a young one or a mother.

They're just walking through, but they they're just walking away.

And all I was getting is their butts.

All I saw was their butts.

And I was starting to worry a little bit.

There was one the big patriarch of the whole family, the big silverback was hanging and a big, heavy kind of tree in the back.

And I had my my big $50,000 lens zeroed in on them.

But it was the leaves were in front of me.

I didn't get a straight shot.

This had his legs kind of hanging off and everything, of course, on wild animals, you want them to look into the camera lens while I had this thing focused up and I wasn't getting anything, we're just were.

But I said, You know what?

I'm going to get it focused right on his eyes.

I can tell where his eyes were and I'm going to hit record.

And if if somehow he would expose himself, I would have that National Geographic shot that you just dream of a hit record.

And like it was on cue, he opened up an expose, his face looking right into the camera.

My hair stood up like this and I pinch myself and double check that my record light was on.

And I started crying inside.

And I think he felt that I just felt this joy and this like exultant of getting this incredible creature on film.

I love walking through the pepper mill and seeing people react to these screens.

I mean, just the other day, I saw a couple and they were kind of holding hands and looking and pointing and they were saying, you know, remember, my sister was there.

What a lot of people are doing when they're watching these screens is they're taking selfies of themselves with these screens in the background.

But it's so funny, you can have a $5 million action sequence it cost to produce and you can have that playing at the pepper mill and people walk right by it.

But if they walk by a shot of a river or a butterfly, that kind of floats down and or a glance of a mountain gorilla.

And you see the title and it's from Rwanda.

It's a real thing.

It's not a zoo.

Animals, a real wild animal.

They'll stop and look at it and it'll touch and move them more than anything else.

One of the most important things to me when I'm shooting is to find that subject in light that is timeless.

Shoot something that you normally don't see.

It isn't about having the perfect picture.

These don't have to be planet Earth hugely high budget shots.

You just have to feel something when you're shooting this content.

If the photographer or cinematographer feels something when they're shooting a shot, it will rub off and the audience will feel that.

Staying in Nevada, Teresa melendez practices the craft of Native American beadwork, a skill that she began learning at the tender age of 15.

Melendez is work has garnered acclaim for its eye catching designs filled with color and cultural significance.

Let's learn more about her technique and her vision.

My favorite form of indigenous artwork is paper.

I really enjoy beading.

I find it relaxing.

I enjoy thinking about the designs and the type of materials that I want to use a look that I want to create.

I also really enjoy making beadwork because it's functional artwork.

Beadwork is a form of traditional Native American artwork, so anywhere around the country, as you visit different tribal nations, you'll see different styles of beadwork.

I've been making beadwork since I was about 15, and usually when I design beadwork, I create beadwork.

It's for use for cultural events or ceremonies or powwows.

So I'm a power dancer, I'm a fancy shawl dancer.

I like the dance jingle and traditional from time to time too.

But my kids and I, we proud aunts.

And so a lot of the work that I make is for Pueblo outfit.

So our regalia so I'm coming up with people designs I often first start with the essence of the piece.

So I'm really thinking about the person that I'm designing for and then the use, the final product and the look that I want to create.

I like to lay everything out on graph paper and then I'll translate that paper to material and also it downs the materials so that I have a pattern to work with and then start beating.

Beadwork is incredibly time consuming.

As you look at these different beaded pieces, you know that each one of those beads was hand sewn on.

Artists will have their own techniques, and so I like to put on four beads and then go back through to every single bias touched by their artist at least once, but sometimes multiple times, depending how they take it down.

And so the larger pieces, they could have hundreds of hours of man time.

I would say one of my favorite parts about beading is watching the piece come together because you have this vision and what a time is.

Your vision is pretty true to the final product.

The suspense is not over, so it's fun watching the piece come together, but actually seeing the colors come together and the designs come together, it's really exciting and it provides me a lot of motivation because I'll be like Touma Hours and I can have this piece complete and I can finally see what it's going to look like when I make beadwork, I make it for really specific purposes.

So my husband and I got married about seven years ago.

I wore a traditional woodland outfit for our wedding and then my husband wore a small outfit for the wedding.

And then our daughters, they were some beaded pieces.

Also, my 14 year old, her name is Shehabi, which means Wild Rose.

And so you'll see in those pieces that there's a image of a rose and then pursuit of our little one.

Her name is Wild Iris.

And so there's an iris leading into her hair ties.

And then in my bandolier bag, there's several different flowers that are beaded, and that is a flower that represents me, my favorite flower and my husband's favorite flower.

And there's a hummingbird which symbolizes love.

And then going up the straps are the flowers of our kids.

So, Bishop, his name is Gregor.

I do that as a star like flower for him.

But one of the pieces I brought was the medallion I made when I graduated with my bachelor's degree.

I went to Michigan State University.

The medallions in the shape of the Spartan with a little sash across with an abbreviation SLC for sociology.

And then the year I graduate, because I graduated with a bachelor's degree in sociology.

So it's common in Indigenous artwork to see things like that that are symbols that are very specific to the individual or specific to that ceremony.

All my work that I create has a lot of symbolism.

It feels good to wear our traditional artwork because I know it comes from a special place.

I know that there's a lot of meaning behind the pieces, but I also think it's important as Americans that we see the indigenous people who live here and who've always lived here kind of out of their 27 federally recognized tribes.

That's a lot of tribes to a lot of tribes.

Most states don't have 27 tribes.

Sometimes when we think about indigenous cultures or indigenous arts, we think about them as history, something that's in the past and something that's not current.

There's all kinds of beautiful work that's being done by artists around the country where they're capitalizing on contemporary materials themes.

It's beautiful to see art evolving to even indigenous art, because what's indigenous is also contemporary.

Many students of art will be familiar with the works of Hans Hofmann, born in Germany in 1880.

Hofmann moved to the United States in 1932, where he became an influential early figure in the Abstract Expressionist movement, continuing to paint and to teach fellow artists.

Until his death in 1966, a fervent believer in the spiritual value of art, Hoffmann influenced many postwar American avant garde artists, including Helen Frankenthaler, Nell Blaine, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Louise Nevelson and Larry Rivers.

So let's visit the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts to see why.

Two artist Hans Hofmann process was as important as painting.

And he's not just.

Using.

A brush.

No.

On this one.

On this one, I think you can see a palette knife, you can see brush.

He may have squeezed pigment directly onto the canvas.

Once in a while we find prints.

This is Hoffman's Indian Summer, painted when he was 79, when he was in the midst of an artistic rebirth.

This is an amazing landscape or mind scape of what might be fall colors, this bright, bright orange and intense blue.

In fact, many of the works in this Peabody Essex Museum show, where we find Hoffman exploring the nature of abstraction, were completed toward the end of his life, says curator Lucinda Barnes.

All he did was paint, and the paintings that were sitting among these are paintings that he made in his eighties, and there's an enormous scale to them.

There's enormous energy.

Hoffmann was born in Germany in 1880.

In Europe, he was a painter and teacher.

He was also part of an artistic circle that included Picasso and Matisse.

That would prove to be hugely impactful.

There were a number of German ex-pats who were in in Paris at the time, and they'd kind of hang out at the same bars and they'd go to the same exhibitions.

You see that influence of Picasso and Matisse and so on very clearly.

In the 1930s, Hoffmann moved to the United States, escaping Nazi occupation and World War Two.

Here he took the teacher track, ultimately in New York and Provincetown, where Hoffmann set up a studio and classroom called the Barn.

In that barn, he taught generations of students for over 20 years.

He returned there every summer to teach and also recharge his own artistic practice.

Lydia Gordon is a curator with the Peabody Essex Museum, which is putting the focus on Hoffmann as an artist.

But it's hard to ignore his impact as a teacher, whose students included some of the most well-known artists of the 20th century, including Louise Nevelson, Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell.

Hoffman was inspirational as a teacher because he encouraged that individual creative practice, so it actually didn't matter what the end result looks like.

But it was how his students got there, how he got there.

And you can really see that in his own paintings that we have in this exhibition.

They're really full of movement.

It's almost as if he was dancing when creating them.

In Provincetown, Hoffman thrived.

He tapped into an artist community, just like in Europe.

And then there was the beauty of Cape Cod.

He goes out, and the landscape outside of his own studio, outside of his window, is very evident.

And the early landscapes that we have, he's very much using those fauvist colors, those purples and those yellows to demonstrate the energy, the spirituality of nature that he's after.

Many of the rules around painting were moving away from a pictorial or photographic image of the world.

And how do we delve deeper into the soul of the artist?

Hoffman closed his Provincetown school in 1957 and began painting full time for the first time in more than 40 years.

It was a total life commitment for much of the next decade until his death in 1966.

He was an unrelenting force, says curator Lucinda Barnes.

The experimentation, I think, in his late paintings was more in a way of pushing the boundaries for himself.

You see much more use of dark color and ranges of black and velvety greens and and that's not easy to do.

And that is that for this edition of Art Rocks.

But remember, you can always see or share episodes of the show, an LP dot org slash art rocks and meanwhile country roads magazine makes a useful resource for discovering, thought provoking coverage of events, the arts people places all around the state.

So until next week, I've been James Fox Smith and thanks to you for watching.

West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LPI.

Offering diverse exhibitions throughout the year and programs that showcase art, history, music and more.

West Baton Rouge Museum Culture Cultivated Art Rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.