♪♪
(NANCY GUPPY) Hi there and welcome to the show.
I'm Nancy Guppy and we are closing out 2023 with a highlight
reel of some of our favorite stories from the past 12 months.
♪♪ [Projector reel clicks]
Carolyn Hitt,
Brian Sanchez,
Roy McAlister,
Wynia Lang,
a nd The Hideout.
So sit back, relax and enjoy Art Zone's
year-end celebration of artists in action.
(CAROLYN HITT) I just feel really compelled to create spaces
that are safe for people to exist because I find that it's
a very difficult world to exist in if you're a little bit different.
So it's a compulsion.
If I have to put obsessive energy into anything, because I can't necessarily
make it go away, so it has to be focused.
So this is how I've chosen to focus my energy.
♪♪
Hello, friends.
I am a Seattle based artist and community organizer.
I run a handful of art studios on Capitol Hill.
I'm a painter.
I do a little bit of small set design.
♪♪
I have been an artist for probably as long as I can remember.
I mean, my earliest memories are of building blocks and Lincoln logs.
I always made little things. I was.
I mean, I've just always been an artist.
I feel like it was inevitable that that's what I was going to be.
(chainsaw grinds)
There's a lot of house
themes in my work, and I think it's like my own.
It probably definitely stems to a childhood of moving around a lot
and not feeling that stability.
My creative process
is to try to continuously be in the moment and to allow the art to make itself.
I find that when I try to force any art
that it's usually terrible.
♪♪
So much of my art is about connection.
It's about making sense of the vastness of the universe
and the complexity of our connection to everything.
You know, I put things out that are in various stages of
like, that's done enough.
Like that seems done.
Like, the more abstract my work gets, the less finished it ever is.
But some of my work is more graphic and linear
and has a start to finish puzzle situation.
It's like this is clearly done.
♪♪
I'm involved in a lot of things and I feel like I've built
a lot of these things
out of purely my interests of like, Oh, I want somewhere where I can build stuff.
I want somewhere where I can paint big, but I don't want to be the only one there.
So we'll just keep this. This is just my stuff.
I'll put it in my area of stuff.
(laughter)
I like the camaraderie of community coming and going.
I like to create with other people or collaborate with other people.
There's so much in the studio that's kind of my stuff, but everybodies stuff.
And then there's very few things that are just my stuff.
♪♪
I currently run Blue Cone Studios and what's always been important
for me is community engagement. In the style that I run it
we host a number of like open drop-in nights, variety of those, you know,
low barriers to access, meaning that anybody can participate if they can get here.
Tuesday, 6 to 9 Japira hosts ceramics.
-If you haven't got the pine cone, you've got to try the pine cone.
-This is so perfect for you.
♪♪
We have
two other studios and I built them out and I manage those.
So we're headed down to So Below Photo and Design,
which is another one of our studios where we build a dual corner cyclorama wall.
And I just finished a major remodel.
(door opening)
We built this studio in particular to provide
a unique photography videography studio.
A handful of our clothing brands
that we are connected with shoot their products here.
We really wanted to make it affordable.
We really wanted to offer somewhere for people to practice their craft.
♪♪
My future goals are definitely to acquire
more space so that we can support more artists.
I'm pretty proud of where I am in community.
I'm proud of the work that I do in community and
that I've managed to hold space
in a way that is important to the people that
that come.
♪♪
-(NANCY GUPPY) Follow Carolyn on Instagram
and drop by Blue Cone Studios every second
Thursday of the year-round Capitol Hill Art Walk.
♪♪
-(BRIAN SANCHEZ) Art is life, and I'm constantly collecting information
and basically putting it in my knapsack.
And then when I come in the studio,
I just empty that knapsack and this is everything that's there.
I am a painter, abstract painter.
I work with color theory and color relationships
in abstraction, yeah.
This one has a reaction with the blue
as well as this one -- more subdued.
A little subdued. Comes forward. Comes forward.
Very forward.
Typically, a painting will start from an idea,
maybe something that I've seen in life,
maybe something that I photographed
and catalogued on my phone.
There's so many different ways where the spatial aspect
of a painting can develop.
I'm constantly thinking of how to freeze time
in a rectangle, essentially,
and have that information that activates that space.
Usually, each painting starts with a study on paper.
Then I'll just start to experiment with color.
Mixing colors is a very intuitive thing for me.
It's not something that I plan or map out.
One of these paintings,
it may look like there's six colors involved.
Typically, there's between 20 and 30 colors in each painting
that you can't even really see unless you're up on it
and you're experiencing it and you're living it
and you're welcoming that curiosity
to investigate and explore.
I know that it's working when I'm on it and I'm working on it,
and I am fully engulfed in color.
That's when I know.
♪♪
I'm not really thinking at all.
I'm really just appreciating the flow of the brush.
I'm trying to land in one area,
and by the time I think I've figured out that area,
my eye has caught another
and I've drifted off into another place,
and that motion is continuous.
I'm really just kind of moving with the painting.
I mean, it's kind of like your hair is in the wind,
to be honest.
♪♪
Something that I care about
is kind of erasing the brush stroke
so that there's no conflict
with the information that's being seen.
It's all about the push-pull dynamic.
There's this saying that sign painters use,
is "Slip, slide, grip, glide."
[ Laughs ]
My process is actually a very painterly process.
The way that I paint is very aggressive and kind of erratic.
But at the end, the paintings are seen flat.
And that's really important to me, that they're --
that they're flat and legible and there's no glare
so that you can really experience
all the transitions of color
that are happening in the piece
and you're constantly navigating and exploring the work.
♪♪
-(NANCY GUPPY) Follow Brian on Instagram and check out his website.
2eyes10fingers.com.
♪♪
(guitar tuning)
(acoustic guitar playing)
-(ROY MCALISTER) There's something deeply, almost spiritual
about making musical instruments that
it's about as close to creating life
out of raw materials, wood and
strings and tension and steambedding these things.
But they really take on a life of their own.
♪♪
I’ve been making guitars for about 40 years.
Professional woodworker for almost 50 years.
I began playing at ten years old, playing the guitar.
♪♪
At 15 years old,
I was offered a woodworking job in this woodshop, restoring old antiques.
That began me being around tools.
And immediately I started thinking of my guitars.
You know, how can I customize them?
How can I fix them? Start tearing apart.
How do these things get made?
A species of Madagascar rosewood.
It's absolutely phenomenal tone wood.
♪♪
In my heart, I really love singer songwriters.
So there was a tone that I could hear
that goes better with voice in my mind.
Making it speak.
(hollow thud)
Yeah. So um...
(hollow thuds)
You can just,
you can hear it.
German Alpine Spruce.
Different flavors of tone wood, what they do to add to the voice of a guitar.
(hollow thuds)
Beautiful.
There weren't too many luthiers making a living
so guitars were more of a hobby.
I was ultimately offered a job
at Santa Cruz Guitar Company.
It was fantastic,
made extremely high end guitars.
♪♪
It was my relationship with David Crosby that that really helped me out.
We built him a couple of guitars
and he saw some of my work while I was working there.
He loved the craft of lutherie.
And he was talking about a guitar that he'd always wanted but never found one.
(sanding wood) Well, I'm going to make him one.
And he ended up falling in love with this guitar.
(laughter)
Has used it on every recording, has toured with it.
(cheering and applause)
That changed my life right there.
An article had come out in Acoustic Guitar Magazine
of David Crosby speaking highly about my guitars, and the phone just went crazy after that.
And then within a week I got
a call from Marc Cohn, Graham Nash, Jackson Browne.
Since then, I had built for Michelle Willis and Becca Stevens,
guys like Jeff Pevar and Shawn Tubbs,
Warren Haynes.
When I first started working with Jackson, he likes to work face to face,
so he’d come up to my shop and we'd hand guitars back and forth.
He'd want this tone or wanted that tone.
He’d show me what he liked about certain guitars, playability, tone.
He was at our house playing.
He's joking around, “Oh, guitar can sound good when you play it quiet, you know?
But when you... when you...” He’s kind of just joking.
“So you play it really hard is when you...”
And he just starts strumming that the hell out of the guitar
and my daughter's right behind him and it started startled her.
She's only about two years old and she puts her
hands over your ears really fast, you know, while he's playing.
And but it's hilarious.
He loves the photo.
He's got one in his house.
(sandpaper scrubbing)
One of my favorite songs that that he wrote was a song called “These Days”.
He wrote when he was 16 years old.
He used my guitar to play that song
every time,
every concert for the next, I think 15 years.
It still chokes me up.
♪♪
I built David, probably a dozen guitars for him
and a lot for his friends.
We really became close over the years.
He really was one of my biggest advocates.
And then I got diagnosed with cancer.
And so we were both in this
nursing ourselves
and keeping an eye on each other.
You know, up to the day he passed,
he and I had been talking regularly.
We were really concerned about each other
and we had been talking and laughing just days before he left a message on my
my cell phone, I think two days before he passed.
And his last words were, “I love you.”
Last time I hear his voice is him saying, “I love you.”
And so it ripped me apart.
When when he died, I really lost a dear friend.
The music world lost a very creative
and driven man.
♪♪
When you finish one, it goes out in the world
and you hear it come back to you.
A piece of furniture doesn't do that.
You build a piece of furniture, you take a picture of it
and you enjoy the picture of it and a guitar is different.
You've created this thing that will then go on and develop
and have a voice and and you'll hear it
in different ways.
♪♪
It's very rewarding.
You know, I never get tired
of making the guitars because you never know where it's going to go after that.
You don't know who's going to be playing it, who's going to be recording with it.
♪♪
It is more than just a musical instrument.
It can be a musical partner.
♪♪
-(NANCY GUPPY) For more about Roy’s gorgeous handcrafted guitars
and the artists that play them, go to mcalisterguitars.com.
♪♪
-(WYNIA LANG) My work is process driven.
Everything I do is finding a different process
to create a pattern. ♪♪
That's why my-my last show
called Pareidolia
because it's that tendency to perceive a specific
or meaningful image in random visual patterns.
I'm really drawn to organic pattern,
the kind of pattern that's created from natural forces
on the elements. (air blowing through tube)
I use wind,
gravity
and temperature primarily. (hair dryer blows)
So these natural forces are going to
they inherently produce these organic
patterns, might look like mycelium,
might look like waves or rays of sunshine
through water or Earth from above.
I'm really trying to
observe and understand the nature of a material
and then exploit those characteristics.
So glass is flat.
It's impermeable and it's translucent.
And then I've been playing with paper a lot lately, too,
because it has a whole different quality.
It's surprising how much this dye will migrate.
It's very, very fluid.
And so then I'm trying to
to corral it
or spread it across.
I'm always kind of choosing
whether I want to
move with what is or do I want to,
you know, impose my will upon it.
Let's see if I can get it to do something else.
♪♪ You know,
unlike with a paint brush or traditional
mark making tools, I'm not adding a line.
The air actually subtracts color.
It's pushing it away.
So I'm just I start pushing that color back and forth.
Essentially, it's kind of like this this dialog
or trialogue, I guess, between the materials
and the process.
And myself, I'm watching and seeing what's happening,
manipulating it and just trying to get it to behave,
which it never does.
But, you know, that's it's kind of this funny balance
between trying to control it and letting go
and just watching and seeing it surprise me.
It always surprises me.
One thing always leads to the next, the next.
And it's hard to get out of there
because there's always something
right around the corner.
There's always something new.
I want to try.
-(NANCY GUPPY) Learn more about Wynia and her myriad of beautiful
and eclectic artworks and projects at rhuby.com.
♪♪
And that's a wrap.
Heartfelt thanks to the artists who shared their time and talent with us this year.
And of course, thanks to you for tuning in.
We're going to leave you
with a visit to one of Seattle's great art bars, The Hideout.
So have a terrific holiday and we'll see you in 2024.
♪♪
[ Jazzy music plays ]
-(JEREMY BEAVEN) I'm Jeremy Beaven.
And I am the curator of The Hideout.
♪♪
The Hideout is Seattle's best art bar.
It is a dive bar with 100 pieces of art
on the walls and great cocktails.
♪♪
Of the 101 paintings on the wall,
84 of them are available for sale.
The rest are part of our permanent collection.
And anybody who comes in can become a collector.
The Hideout has a wide array of patrons,
from hospital workers to first Hill residents to artists.
So we create an atmosphere that is surrounded by creativity.
We have interesting paintings on the walls
that spark conversation and remind people
that we're living in a town with great art.
♪♪
Many of the artists on the walls
are what I would consider established Seattle artists.
They've had shows at galleries,
but I'm also always on the hunt for new emerging artists
that maybe haven't had a show yet,
but I get wind of their work or see it on Instagram,
and nothing's more fun than putting something up
for the first time for an artist.
One thing that is fascinating to think about is how many hours
and how much of people's lives
are poured into these paintings on the walls.
For some people, it's a lifetime
to get to the image you're seeing.
Other people, they're just discovering paint
and just starting to express themselves.
But every painting has a personal story to tell.
I was so happy to get the large Tondo painting
from Sullivan Giles.
It's the hands with the tattoos,
and it is just exquisite and massive.
Another piece that I really like
is Blake Blanco's "The Fallen One."
It's this red devil angel.
And he kind of looms right behind the patrons,
casting his glance down at them.
And also, I was really happy
to get one of Laura Hamza's viaduct paintings.
I have cataloged all the art on the walls,
and we put out a magazine roughly quarterly.
Everything's pictured.
You can find what you're looking for really easily.
The Vital 5 is a long-standing tradition here at The Hideout.
It is a magazine compiled with drawings by patrons.
So we put that out a couple of times a year,
and it's some of our favorite drawings
that were created right here.
The Hideout is definitely a cocktail bar.
Probably the most popular drink on the menu is the Andy Warhol,
and that is a cosmopolitan
and a Polaroid picture of yourself.
My advice for anybody that wants to buy art
that hasn't had experience with it
is just follow your heart.
Buy what you like.
The hardest thing with art is the ones that got away.
So if you really love something, figure out how to buy it
and then make it part of your life.
The Hideout is open every day of the week
from 4:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m.
and 6:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. on weekends.
It might look like a speakeasy,
but just open the door and come on in.
♪♪