♪ [ Art Zone theme song ] ♪
(NANCY GUPPY) Hi and welcome to Art Zone.
I'm Nancy Guppy, coming to you this week from the fabulous
Seward Park Clay Studio.
Located in a charming brick building near Lake Washington,
Seward Park Clay Studio has been
championing the ceramic arts since 1970.
With a roster of highly acclaimed teachers
and resident artists,
the studio offers classes in wheel
throwing and hand building
to adults and children working at every level --
beginner to advanced.
Add in special workshops, lecture series, collaborative
shows with local galleries,
and their annual holiday show and sale going on now,
which features
beautiful ceramic pieces by over 100 artists,
and you've got a dynamic art hub where everyone is welcome.
Check out Seward Park Clay Studios Holiday
Show and Sale open daily except for Christmas Day,
now through Saturday, December 28th, from noon to six.
More information is at SewardParkArt.org.
All right.
Since this is our last show of the year,
we're going to take a look back at a
few of our favorite stories from the past season.
♪♪​
Baso Fibonacci,
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Margaret Savas,
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Michael Stasinos
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and Metro number seven.
♪♪​
So relax, put your feet up,
and enjoy these highlights from Art Zone 2024.
♪♪​
[ Brakes squealing ]
-I am Baso Fibonacci.
I'm a painter who lives in Seattle.
I live right by these train tracks in the Bemis Building,
which is a 100-year-old building
that's filled with mostly artists.
Baso Fibonacci is a pseudonym.
Baso is an old Zen Buddhist from early Zen days in China.
And Fibonacci was a mathematician from Italy.
Zen is a very illogical philosophy,
and Fibonacci is a mathematician,
and math is a very logical thing.
So those two parts of me
are pretty prevalent in my life, I think.
♪♪
Mostly I doodled when I was younger,
but then I got into graffiti when I was around 18
and lived with an artist
who kind of showed me what art could be.
♪♪
A lot of my early paintings were based around nature.
I'd paint, like, a lot of animal life.
Me and this artist, John Nagai,
painted a wolf that's running south
with the city burning behind it.
And it's on SODO Track, so it's like the busway
where the buses run and the light rail runs.
The wolf is the artistic community.
Artists are moving south 'cause it's too expensive.
I grew up on Tiger Mountain.
It's a small community outside of Issaquah.
It's very woodsy. There's trees, ferns, animals.
Kind of an isolated childhood, in some ways.
My brother was, like, living on the streets
of downtown Seattle in the '80s,
and he was addicted to drugs from a very young age
and just lived a life of being an addict.
And so I grew up knowing that that was a thing and knowing
that that could completely destroy someone's life.
And eventually, he was down in Mexico.
I think he was a coyote,
running drugs and Mexicans across the border.
The autopsy said that he was in jail
and he went into an alley and overdosed.
I remember when my dad got the call that he had died.
I remember him just, like, answering the phone
and then, you know, bursting into tears
and running up to his room and crying.
And my dad did not cry.
That was the first time I think I ever heard my dad cry.
And so I was, like, freaking out.
Called my mom. Said, "It must be Eric,"
'cause that's the only thing
that she could think that would make him react like that.
♪♪
What happened -- I was, like, drinking and writing graffiti
and fell off a bridge and broke my back, lost my arm.
I think I was creative before,
but I wasn't really focused on art.
I skateboarded, so I spent a lot of time skateboarding.
And I think not being able to skateboard
and, like, live my life like that,
I kind of, like, found a new outlet for my creativity
and got more focused on painting and creating, being expressive.
Part of, like, the stuff I'm doing right now
is based around the fentanyl crisis and downtown culture.
It's something I see a lot.
Like, I spend a lot of time downtown,
and it's something that has kind of taken over the city.
And, I mean, part of the reason I know what withdrawals are like
is that I was on morphine for 10 years after my accident.
And trying to come off the morphine was extremely hard.
And so I kind of have, like, a small inkling
of what withdrawals are like.
I know they're a lot worse when you're on heroin
or if you're on fentanyl than what I had,
but even with, like, the small amounts of morphine
I was coming off of was really, like, a struggle.
So, these are the foils
that people have smoked fentanyl off of.
You can see the little lines that the blue pills make
as they slide across the foil when they're smoking them.
Each of these will eventually have a painting on them.
I am painting skulls in the foils
'cause people are dying from the fentanyl.
And I'm trying to quantify it. Like, people hear numbers.
They hear 200 people die downtown this year, about.
And that doesn't really tell you anything.
It's just a number that you hear.
When you actually see 200 skulls,
you can start to, like, understand
how many people that is to die
in, like, you know, basically,
like, one neighborhood.
♪♪
But I don't really have a point I'm trying to make,
'cause I don't know the answer.
I'm making art just based on what I see
and what I think is interesting.
I hope just to create some kind of conversation.
There has to be, like, compassion.
They have to, like, look at these people's point of views
and, like, understand that these people are suffering.
They might not have had a nice upbringing.
You know, you have to have compassion for people
that are living on the street for sure.
It's, like, a rough life,
especially going into the wintertimes.
♪♪
This is like a moment in time, and I'm trying
to kind of solidify moments in time with my art.
And I'm just trying to, like,
talk about something individual a way
and hopefully have people have some empathy for these people
that live on the streets.
People just, like, want them to go away.
A lot of people just want them to die.
They want them to be in jail. They don't want them to exist.
For the most part, I'd rather hang out
with people on the streets.
I'd rather have an interesting conversation with them
than, like, drink a beer in a beer hall
and play Ping-Pong, you know?
♪♪
-I'm Margaret Savas and I am a chocolatier.
I grew up with my dad telling me stories
about working in the candy and ice cream store in Chicago.
My grandfather and his brother came over from Greece
and the uncle started the candy store in Chicago.
And my dad grew up working there.
His siblings all grew up working there.
Back in the days when Chicago
had a candy and ice cream store every other corner.
And many immigrant families found their way into confections
in order to make living in a new place.
And at the time of hearing all these stories
as a kid growing up, I did not necessarily have an impulse,
"Oh, that's what I'm going to do."
But I'm delighted that the universe took me down this path.
After college, not sure what I was going to do
with my very useful theater degree,
and I got a day job working
at the original Fran's Chocolate store
in the Madison Valley.
And Fran herself took me through how to taste chocolate,
how to talk about chocolate, and I learned from the best.
And at the time, I did not think I would ever do it on my own.
But looking back, that's how I'm able to do all the parts myself.
If you're not careful in your sourcing of chocolate,
there may be issues with farmers who aren't treated well.
They're not getting paid well,
there have been issues with child labor as well.
So knowing the person who connects with these farmers
means a lot to me.
The chocolate that I use right now
is Conexión chocolate from Ecuador.
And I was fortunate enough to travel to Ecuador last summer,
and I met the woman who owns the company.
It's a very sustainable business that she has built,
connecting with a lot of different family farms.
And the chocolate is amazing in flavor.
It has to taste good.
I love caramel and I found a recipe after much tinkering
that I love.
You start with sugar, caramelize it.
I do it slowly bit by bit.
I use a dry caramelization method.
It's easier to see exactly when the caramel is at the color
that I want, which means it's at the flavor that I want.
The cream is added to the caramel,
bubbles up, comes to a certain temperature,
is poured out, and then the next day is available
to be dipped in chocolate.
I make four varieties of caramels --
lemon rosemary, vanilla,
espresso, and a Honeycrisp apple cider.
And then I have a selection of truffles
that are a creamy, smooth center.
I make a bittersweet chocolate, milk chocolate,
dulce, which is a caramelized white chocolate,
and then a caramel latte.
People ask me, "What's your favorite?"
But they're all my favorite because I only make what I want.
What do I want to make? Hmm.
What would my favorite candy bar --
What would my ultimate candy bar be?
My dream bar, my first bar, Meg's Mocha,
a layer of caramel but espresso caramel,
and a layer of nougat,
once I figured out what that actually was
and learned how to make it.
Bittersweet chocolate on the outside,
and everything's better with salt.
So a little bit of espresso salt on top.
Everything in moderation.
But, dark chocolate,
there have been studies that it does good things for you.
I believe them all,
but I also believe that allowing yourself a treat
is good for your -- your soul.
♪♪
I found boxing
when my sister was going through a very, very rough time.
And it was recommended to her
to help get through this rough time.
And like a dutiful little sister
who couldn't do anything else to help,
I came with. And it did help.
And I saw it help other people.
And it was kind of life changing, and I never left.
The community of Cappy's is -- it's hard to describe,
but that's why most of us are there.
And when there was an opportunity to train as a coach,
it just seemed very natural to do.
We welcome everybody into that space.
Everyone's a boxer when they walk through the door.
And I have boxing clients who range from 75-year-old Peggy,
who just started and just was just interested --
She just walked through the door one day --
to people in their 20s. Everything in between.
Keep your balance when you miss.
And with every goal in between,
from becoming more confident to down the line,
training to spar and to compete.
The connection that I see between the two
very different things that I do --
chocolates and boxing --
believe it or not, is joy.
The joy that I see in boxers
when they complete that combination
for the first time... There it is.
...when they master the speed bag,
when they just do something really hard and they do it,
there's nothing quite like that.
It's a smaller, delightful joy
to taste something that just leaves you speechless
and to be able to taste something
that maybe brings back a memory from your childhood,
except it's the best version of that that you've ever had,
that's joy.
This is a very tiny business,
and I want it to be just a part of what I do.
That's how I can have this balanced,
miraculously balanced life.
I make as much as I can make.
I make as much as I have time to make,
and when it's gone, it's gone.
I love that people buy it, and I'll make as much as I can.
♪♪
[ Train rumbling, wheels screeching ]
[ Traffic noise ]
-There really is no place in Seattle
that isn't worth painting.
There's always something in the landscape
that's giving a narrative to the location.
[ Seagull squawking ]
♪♪
Not just the buildings, but the garbage, the graffiti.
The way the space is used gives it a wonderful narrative.
It's a bit like doing a portrait.
♪♪
You paint Seattle,
and you can make it about what the lighting is at sunset.
But if you really pay attention, it's a living organism.
It's constantly changing.
That idea of documenting in a way is not documenting,
it's meditating on the place.
[ Traffic noise ]
When I go to a location, I don't know why I chose it.
Something catches my eye.
I want to discover what it's saying,
and painting it is what helps me know why.
I like telling stories.
My actual degree is in theater.
I didn't think of it as becoming an artist at all in my life.
But when I went to college and I thought,
"You know, I'm gonna take an art class"
and I took the drawing class and I flunked.
And he was like, "Well, if you come back to class,
and make it up, I will change your grade."
And I did.
The result of that is they offered me a scholarship.
Something happened in graduate school
that I didn't realize at the time was a moment for me.
I was doing a portrait of a model,
and then the model had to leave.
What I ended up doing is painting the model out
of the painting and just painting the room
that the model was in.
And so people knew more about that person
with them not being in the painting
because they paid attention to all the extra stuff,
all of the details of the room.
And when I started painting landscapes, made a connection.
It became not about the atmosphere of capturing
the light of this moment,
but what is the personality of this moment?
My painting process is really quite layered,
at least, I'd say three layers of color as I go towards detail
and general to specific.
As I do the second layer, it's going to look more realistic.
I'm trying to put layers so that when someone looks at it,
if that person that's at the gallery and sees it
and they're a construction mogul creating the buildings downtown,
they go, "Oh, look, he's captured the things
that I've been creating."
But I also want the person that was on that street
and eating a bag of Doritos to go,
"Hey, those are the Doritos I threw in the gutter."
I want the person that did the graffiti to go, "Oh, yeah.
That's me. I'm in there as well."
I'm hoping that the end result of that layering
really is inclusive.
♪♪
-One of the most exciting aspects
of having a realist painter
who works at the level of Michael Stasinos
is the excitement that people feel when they see his work.
-I think it's awesome. It just looks so real.
Like, I don't know.
Like, the scenery jumped out into the canvas.
And he's just putting the finishing touches on it.
It just looks magnificent. Wow.
-You can be 50 feet away from this,
and it hails you from that far away.
And as they get closer to the painting,
they realize how minute the details are in this,
and they will stand in front of this painting
for 10 or 15 minutes, just to see the level of work,
which is absolutely incredible.
-I think that art is my drug.
I go through withdrawals
and I get kind of antsy and upset
if I am not doing it.
It is a way that I'm able to connect to the world
that, um...[laughs]
...I don't think I can connect in any other way.
♪♪
It's so meaningful for me.
I think that's what painting does for me.
It's a way of connecting.
♪♪
[garage door sliding]
♪♪
-I grew up in Rainier Beach,
and I rode the Number 7 bus my whole life.
[bus engine rattles)
[announcement bell chimes]
I like to say
I learned about life riding the Number 7.
It’s such a long route,
and it traverses so many diverse neighborhoods.
It's a little sampling of the world
if you ride the Number 7.
Rainier Valley has changed a lot.
So I'd like to preserve a little bit of that history.
♪♪
The Columbia Hillman Arts and Culture District,
they started putting the word out
that they had these small grants.
So I decided to apply for one of the grants,
and that's how it came about.
♪♪
[paint brush strokes]
I've always made art, and I started doing it
professionally about ten years ago...
when I found printmaking.
I love that the printmaking process
is so involved and it's so meticulous.
[metal gears click]
Printmaking is really deep.
There's so many different methods of printmaking.
There’s dozens of different processes and you can combine them,
so I feel like I found my home there.
The colors worked! About 20 years ago,
I told my husband, “I need to write
a short story called ‘Riding the Number 7.’”
I never wrote that short story, but I did a series
of collagraphs, which is a kind of printmaking
of the Number 7.
I started that about five or six years ago,
and this is the way I've expressed
my story of riding the Number 7.
[brush tapping]
I set an intention
in 2021 to work bigger. (laughter) But I wasn't thinking I'd work
this big so fast.
[laughter]
♪♪
To be really honest,
I learned that I still, at my age,
like to bite off a little more than I probably should.
♪♪
Another artist said, “You should put people on the bus.”
And then I started thinking about it,
I thought, “That would be cool to put people on the bus.”
♪♪
Jayashree, I knew that her portraits
really captured people in a unique way.
-Every time I pick up the brush after the first few minutes,
something else takes over.
I stop thinking and get into that zone.
And it does feel like that
when you're a
passenger on a bus, you just get into your own headspace.
♪♪
My part in this mural was to paint the portraits.
The amazing thing was to learn about all these people.
-My dad is the last person on the bus,
and my aunt is the first person on the bus.
The driver is Leah, and she drove the Number
7 for years.
The family standing in front
of the bus are Suzy, Lew, and Mondo Banchero.
They lived
and worked in this community for several generations.
And Suzy is really special to me
because she was my second grade teacher
and we did a lot of art in second grade.
And then everyone else, I would call them
heroes on the bus
because they were all people who were so involved
in making our community a better place.
♪♪
So many of the people here really
kind of move the ball forward in our community.
Each of them has done a lot.
-So funny that I just finished
painting this and now I'm cutting it.
It's a little nerve wracking.
Ahhh!
-But if we get through it, the theory is that
it should come apart without
without any problems.
We'll see how it goes.
[electronic tool drills]
-He knows what he's doing.
If it was just me, I'd be terrified.
-Here it goes.
-There we go.
-Sweet!
-Ha!
Way to go!
[truck engine whirls]
-I’ve got plenty of room.
[power tool drills]
-Part of the arts revitalization project
was to, like,
bring some life to spaces that needed some life.
And the bus goes right by here,
so everyone riding the bus south will see it,
and all the pedestrian traffic here will see it.
♪♪
(laughing) You’re so welcome!
-Thank you. -Thank you.
-We just found out.
And so we were luckily in Seattle.
-Hi, are you related?
-Yes! -She’s your mom?!
-Oh, my gosh.
-She you wanted to see her mom's painting.
-I’m so glad you’re here!
-Captures her perfectly.
♪♪
-Yep. There she is.
-There she is.
-I'm touched.
It’s just nice to be recognized!
I'm 60.
So, thank you!
-It's just been really exciting to see what she's done
with this. I just really love,
love the mural.
-I think it's so perfect because
he rode the bus a lot.
He didn't drive.
-Without these types of things
-statues, murals- things
that help us know who we are as a community,
it would be a very boring place.
Every every other place would look the same.
♪♪
-I don't know if he ever rode the bus, so...
but it's representative that he spent 95 years
in Rainier Valley, so it makes sense.
♪♪
-I hope they say,
“Oh, it's the Number 7!”
And then they look at the people
and they think, “Who is that?”
And then they learn more about their community’s history.
I don't know where it's leading next.
It's a journey.
You know, we're we're all on some kind of bus.
I'm on mine.
♪♪
[announcement bell chimes]
(NANCY GUPPY) And that's a wrap.
Big thanks to Seward Park Clay Studio for hosting us
and a reminder that their holiday show
and sale runs now through December 28th.
And thanks to you
for tuning in all year long,
have a wonderful holiday season
and we look forward to sharing
lots more great art with you in 2025.
And now
[suspenseful music]
it's time to shop.
♪♪​
Dig that glaze. It’s like pinky and peach, like a little vase
with a cup. I don't know.
I want to look at this right here.
Darling little like four matches.
Perfect. I'm going to take it.
I need that for the bathroom.
Over here, come here. I want to see this.
This is amazing.
This gorgeous glaze. The glazes
here are so amazing, this gorgeous bowl.
I love that. And look at this one right here.
It's kind of a mottled green and blue together.
Beautiful.
It's perfect for my walnuts in the morning.
Oh, and look at these.
These adorable little houses like pretty birds,
made up birds
and my sister
would go nuts for these, but she's not going to get em...
they’re for me.
She's going to get a gift card
or some socks or something like that.
I want two at least I'm like...
Oh, oh, oh! Come here.
I.....
look at this.
So look at this mug. It's just adorable.
And just like the little touch of orange, I'm a little
like a little hope divots in it.
I'm like a little touch of orange right there. Perfect.
Morning coffee, tea, whiskey.
Who knows? Put that back in here.
Oh. I. So this is insane.
This is. Look at this.
Josephine is the artist here.
And these are...the glaze, it's super light.
There's a little. The seem is right there.
A little flower. That. That. Isn't that beautiful? My gosh.
I think this would be a little delicate
for my toothbrush in the bathroom,
but I'm going to give it a try.
Put that in there very carefully over here.
Like, okay. Oh, wow.
♪♪