Oregon Art Beat; #103

Tonight on Oregon Art Feed, meet glass artists Linda Etheer, one of the pioneers of glass fusion. Artists like Linda are using glass in entirely new ways. We'll talk with Will Vinton, the man behind claymation, and find out how Vinton Studios make clay come to life. And watch as choreographers Jamie Hampton and Ashley Rowland bring the Portland Opera production of Carmina Barana to life. Oregon Art Feed, next on OPB. OPB thanks you, the members whose gifts of support made Oregon Art Feed possible. Good evening. I'm Mike Pipi of the Regional Arts and Culture Council, along with Casey Cowan. Welcome to Art Feed. And let's get rolling right away with a story about a Portland artist who works with stained glass. You know, the words stained glass rather evokes images of a church window or perhaps a Tiffany lamp. But artists today

are using glass in entirely new and amazing ways. Tonight, Jeff Douglas introduces us to Linda Etheer, one of the pioneers in glass fusion. Linda Etheer's work is so different from usual glass art that many people don't even recognize it as glass. Take a good look at the fireplace at the Portland Center for the performing arts. There's the, those sort of life -size figures that, you know, you can see from quite a distance. But then as you get closer, there's other parts of the piece that have smaller images in it. And just all around the actual fire box, I made some small tiles with little tiny images on them of different people that I liked. A tap dancer, baritone cough, and Bonnie Rates in there. So it was really nice to be able to do that. And sort of the layers of the curtains being pulled back, revealing

more and more detailed imagery. Layers of imagery are a common theme for Linda. She calls this piece on the PCC Cascade campus the gathering. The glass looks just like veins of quartz in the granite, until you look closely. And then the images in that piece are very primitive cave -type images that are kind of from all over the world. You get a little glimpse of part of an image, and then from the other side you get another little glimpse of another part of the image. And I wanted to really have that talk about the sort of experience of being in school. You know, you're constantly discovering, but it isn't all laid out for you. You have to go find it. You have to look at it, and you have to think about it. Linda creates her three -dimensional pieces in her studio in Northeast Portland. But she spends only a fraction of her time cutting patterns from sheets of glass, the conventional skills of a glass artist.

She's far more likely to be at the bench, looking more like a sculptor. Oh, I'm definitely a sculptor, yeah. The glass is just the material that I use. And really the glass comes last, because I work mostly in wax to do the actual sculpture parts. And then those get translated to glass. And why glass? I think these wax sculptures are quite nice. It'd be very easier if I stopped here. What I love is the transparency of the glass and the fact that I can layer up images and create whole worlds rather than just a surface. If this was like a bronze sculpture, this is what you'd see your eye would stop here. In these pieces you see this, but then you also see what's beyond that. So it's a whole new world of inner secret place.

Like most glass artisans, Linda began by making leaded glass windows. Now she works almost exclusively in glass fusion. Fusing, heating the glass up in the kiln so that it melts back together. So you can take two pieces of glass, get them in the kiln, and heat them up. And they become like honey. And they just melt back together. Not long ago, this kind of work was nearly impossible. Various colors and types of glass cool at different rates. So combining colors in a single piece would create stress and cracks. About 20 years ago, Bullseye Glass afforded to help pioneer a line of compatible glass. Different colors and textures that could be combined. That opened the door to all kinds of creative possibilities. Molten glass

can be manipulated into complex shapes. Here, Linda is melting strips of green glass to make fine curved filaments. These will be the stems for a leaf pattern. She makes the leaves by blending small bits of ground up glass called fritt. I'm making the shading on the leaves. They're going to have some reds and oranges. And this will just appear as a very light shade. Then I'll back it up with some different greens. So they'll be kind of autumny, maybe organ grape kind of looking things. Bullseye has taken essentially sand and colored it up and turned it back into sand. Yeah, that's about right. Only it's really expensive sand. And really pretty. When the leaf design is ready, Linda lays the arch -shaped piece of glass over the top. Then sprinkles more fritt on top to add subtle color. I'm making the outer shell for a

piece. So this will all get fired. And all these colors will blend together, kind of like this piece. And this will be the outside eventually of the piece. It'll slump down into the mold. And then I'll be able to, in the final process, grind down through part of this. Once she has all the components ready, Linda begins to put them together. The diamond -shaped pattern will be the back of the finished work. A partially transparent figure becomes the centerpiece. Tiny red strips of cane provide an accent. Then, Linda breaks thick pieces of clear glass into chunks to fill the mold. This is the jigsaw puzzle part of the activity. The tighter I get this packed,

the clearer it's going to be. But all these little cracks I also use as a design element in the piece. I'll put some fritt in and then add some color to it. And this will create a web -like pattern in the piece. So there'll just be this faint sort of halo around these pieces where I put this really small fritt. This portrait called The Girl in the Garden shows how heating in the kiln makes the small fritt look like an ethereal veil. And that's one of the things I like about layering up the images because they're sort of there and not there. And as you look at the piece from different angles, you know, it's a very different piece. Just like this. One of Linda's innovations is figuring out how to keep small glass pieces from losing their shape when they're fused into the larger work. If I were to just put this piece in and pile all the glass on top of it, it would just, as the glass all melted, it would just disintegrate. You

wouldn't really be able to tell what this was anymore. So I make another piece of glass which actually has a negative space. So these two pieces would go together and then I would fire this together to become one piece. And now, when I put it in the casting, it'll stay basically where I put it. Each of these complex pieces takes about a month to complete. So how can Linda make a living with her art? Well, you know, you have to decide what's a living. You know, and I like the life I have right now. So you just, you know, live a little more simply maybe. You know, I don't have so many toys. But I have a lot of toys. Some of her best -known work, including these portraits of students and teachers at Cleveland High School, has come from the 1 % for arts program. The percent for arts program makes it a very vital art scene here. So you actually have

the opportunity to make sculpture and put it in public places. Which, you know, we're used to here, but it isn't that way or most of the country. After about a week of slowly heating and then very gradually cooling, Linda's latest creation emerges from the kiln. She literally breaks the mold and then takes the 35 -pound sculpture to the studio for its finishing touches. She still has several days of cleaning, clipping the rough edges, and finally polishing before the work will be finished. So much work and so much of Linda goes into each of her creations that it's sometimes a little difficult for her to part with them when they are finally ready for the gallery. Sometimes that is a problem, actually. It's hard to send them out sometimes. But in the end, it's knowing that her pieces are out in the world, being appreciated by others.

That is Linda's biggest reward. Somebody said once that money is a way of moving goods and services through time and space. And I think art is a way of moving people's spirits through time and space. So it's my way of sort of having something that can kind of time travel out like a message in a bottle. In addition to the public art scene in this segment, you can see Linda's work at the Tuolity Hospital in Hillsboro and the Night Library at the University of Oregon in Eugene. You can also sample Linda's work as well as the work of other glass artists at the Margot Jacobson Gallery. We have a special guest tonight on organ art beat, the man who made claymation, a household word. Casey is with, Will Vinton. That's right, I am. Thank you very much, Mike. And thank you for joining us. That's pleasure. You're a bona fide celebrity in the Portland area. Please. Now, a lot of us, of course, who followed your career know that you really became, started to become a

household word when you won an Oscar for the short, closed Mondays. But I don't know how you actually got started playing with clay in the first place. Why don't you tell us that story? Well, I really began at the University of California studying architecture and my kind of my main love was filmmaking already. I started making short films and in architecture, the designing with clay, which I did with, it was inspired by some of these architects that did very organic structures. And designing with clay sort of merged or crossed paths with some of the filmmaking for some early experiments. I was just amazed at the vitality and the life that you could get out of a lump of clay. But did it take a lot of experimenting to figure out, you know, the stop action technique and how many frames before you move it and so on? A lot of experimenting. I mean, it didn't take much to figure it out. And it's interesting because clay animation had been around forever. People ask if we had invented it. No. But what we did is sort of brought it to the forefront over time by doing a lot of experimenting as you're suggesting. A lot

of different things, bringing really high level of filmmaking skills to the medium and adding, you know, some basic things like color and things like that that we really didn't see in clay animation prior to our work. And when you first started, you couldn't even get the kind of clay that you wanted. You had to make your own. That's true. Yeah, we had to pick, you know, we had to really make things and put in additives into the clay in order to make it harder or softer, depending on what we wanted to use it for. So it was the first 10 years of this organization of the company. Every project we did was a total experiment. You must look back at some of those and think how primitive now. Absolutely. Okay, well we have. We've got some tape that shows a little bit of the process and why don't we roll that tape so we can see it and you can kind of narrate it as we go along and tell us what it is we're looking at. All right. All right, so that off the top is we start off with the storyboarding which you see here is one of our artists doing a storyboard of third good who's in the PJs which is our television show that we've been working on for some time now.

This is a juicy original character design of juicy and then it starts out on paper and often then moves to a sculpted stage. And this is sculpted out of clay, these pieces. That's right. These are what we call Mac Kets which are done really to put inside of a mold for a casting purposes. And these, you can see here the mold actually a test model is being extracted from the mold just to make sure that the mold looks good. And inside are these armatures. Right, every animated character needs a very strong armature that is both movable and holds the weight and stays put when you're in between shots. So these are rather sophisticated armatures under the foam latex characters. He's assembling the clothing and the various parts are painted and assembled put together. An incredible amount of detail work. Yeah, lots. And you even do all of the set pieces? Every prop, every little brick,

every bit of mortar, every, in this case, I guess, cereal box has to be built. And you do the sets as well. Right. Now you've become really the standard to which everybody else must achieve. I'm guessing. I think so. In fact, stop motion animation. Here we're actually going into doing the animation which is really the heart and soul of this process. We've created an equivalent over the last year and a half of about, oh, I think, four or five feature films of which, you know, the likes of which has really never been done before in stop motion that much material. And it's so wonderful. It's really opened up this kind of artistry to a lot of people we were discussing earlier before the show. How my nieces love to play with Fimo and model things. And I don't remember doing that when I was a kid. It has kind of opened things up a little bit. It's interesting, though, because the company does an awful lot of computer animation. And it's interesting. This is really represents the roots of the organization. And it represents sort of the particular spin

on what we're doing also with computer animation. And we end up actually using about 20 % of even the PJs is actually created on the computer. So we're not seeing that side of the magic here. Now I really enjoyed the PJs. It's not on the air right now. It's on a hiatus. Tell us what the status is here. Well, we think it'll be coming on Fox this summer. But it's interesting because we have other suitors for it. Fox has neglected it a little bit. Oh, can't do that. So we may be moving on to another network actually with the PJs. Now, when you started, you were a very small shop. And now I think you were telling me you have three buildings in Northwest Portland? Actually, we have three buildings. Sometimes four. And many other productions. And how much of a staff now? Ranges from the height of last year. I think we were up to well over 300 artists and animators and staff people of all kinds. Now I think we're probably about half that. And briefly, what can we look forward to seeing from you in the future? Any special project? Well, we have another show that'll be launching a short order of shows. It'll called Gary and Mike that's going to

run on Fox through the summer. And we have a whole lot of new entertainment projects that are kind of in the works. And of course, we always have a lot of commercial work. M &Ms is one of our great sort of standby accounts that we've done for years now. So we will be seeing lots of you as the years go by. Well, thank you so much for joining us on Oregon Artbeat. My pleasure. Thank you. The Portland Opera has been doing some innovative programs lately that break out of the traditional opera mold. Melanie Rubin went behind the scenes to see how dance was integrated with Carmina Burrana. We're just intrigued with movement. We have a passion for it and the passion is what drives it. It's what makes you feel like you want to walk up these stairs and come in the studio here because there might be something new that you could find that would be exciting for you, exciting for an audience to see. Very good. Come on in, no traffic jams.

Ooh, that's perfect. Okay, stop. This year, the Portland Opera restaged their 1997 sellout program of Carmina Burrana. The choreographers and lead dancers for both productions were Jamie Hampton and Ashley Roland, a husband and wife team based in Portland. Jamie and Ashley are well known for their choreography and performance in cutting -edge modern dance, full -length classical ballet, and music videos for groups like Sound Garden and Sting. When we moved here to Oregon about five years ago, we kind of stopped working with companies and we just were doing what I would call freelance work. We did Carmina Burrana three years ago and met a fabulous group of dancers and started working with them in a new group and we named that group Bodyvox. Answering the question of what is our style is probably one of the hardest questions we get asked and I think the reason

is because we don't have a style. It's a choice whether you want to pursue a particular vocabulary of movement and for us, I think just the word movement itself is so broad and we like to explore every aspect of it. Carmina Burrana is a collection of poems by 13th century Bavarian monks set to music by composer Carl Orr. In this production, stage director Christopher Mataliano positioned Carmina in the second half of the evening as a thematic continuation of Paliachi, an operetta about a traveling performance troupe. The Christmas Paliano's whole take of staging the piece is pretty special. You occasionally see Carmina Burrana dance, but to actually see it staged and integrated as a theatre piece as part of another pre -existing set piece like Paliachi and the way he combines the two so that Carmina becomes the continuation of the story that was told in Paliachi.

That's very unique and very exciting. Paliachi and Carmina Burrana are both about desire. The physical, emotional and spiritual journey humans take in their lives to achieve happiness and the influence of fate. But I do think that Orr, I think his overarching statement is that in spite of romance, lust, greed, debauchery, achievement, failure, redemption, all of that that equals life's riches, it just pales against the sort of large turning wheel of fate. And that's what those people are crying out at the beginning and at the end, oh fortuna, oh fortune. Why must my life be fuel? Why are you always turning? I'm grinding in the grist mill. You get ground ashes to ashes dust to dust. At the conclusion of Paliachi, two lovers lie dead on the stage, killed by a jealous husband. When the curtain rises after intermission, the slain performers from Paliachi become the principal characters in Carmina, resurrected by their dance alter egos, Jamie and Ashley. My character in Carmina

has, I think, has a great longing. He has a longing to be with his female counterpart. I think the female character represents an innocence who is tempted to not be innocent. I sort of empathize with the feeling and the emotion that they're showing with their portraying with their bodies and feel that emotion is part of myself too, I think, in my character. For the dancers, working with the opera involves several very practical challenges, like dancing on a slanted stage with grooves cut in it. I'll never forget the first rehearsal we had when we got on that stage. It was quite shocking for all of us and our shoes were totally ripped to shreds. And for everyone working on this production, integrating the chorus, soloists, orchestra, and dancers required intense collaboration. I think when you have a collaborative team

of pretty high -powered people, there's the danger that, you know, you could get ownership issues, tension like that. I very seldom felt like we weren't on the same page in this process. It's kind of remarkable, but it's almost like we were all there to serve the piece. Conductor Lewis Salemno talked about working with the dancers. The challenge for me is interesting to see that I can make it work for them the way I see the music, the way I hear the music, the way the composer indicates. And I'm always asking my colleagues, Jamie, actually, how do you feel? You want to dance slow tonight? You want to dance fast? How do you want to dance? What's beautiful about the opera is everyone obviously has to watch the conductor, so they have monitors of Lewis Salemno all over the stage. And anywhere you look, any angle you take, there's Lou. It's great. Lou's everywhere is backstage. You fall on the floor, you look out, Lou's right above you, looking at you. The conductor's partnership with the stage

director was also critical. The director and the conductor are responsible for the entire opera from the first note to the last note, the first word to the last word, so our preparation separately involves the entire opera. It's the ultimate collaboration. I mean, the art form itself is dependent on so many parts being fused, and we're ultimately responsible for that happening. In fact, there were several intriguing partnerships behind this production. I think Jamie and I have a rather unique creative process. The fact that we create together, we work together, we live together, we make a family together, makes it very different. And when we get into a project like this carmina brawna, we sort of live, read, eat, sleep, everything it. We'll even wake up in the middle of the night and we'll say, you know, that's section with the girls. It'll be two in the morning and we'll go, are we having a meeting? Yes, we're having a meeting. The close

synergy among the performers was also striking. To me, I just can't imagine carmina without dance. I mean, I think movement and feeling, it's all emotion and the words are so strong. And if you don't convey those physically, I just, I lose something, I think. One of the dancers in the production is Greg Bielemeier and he and I do a completely improvised duet. We know what the pattern is on stage, but we have no idea what the moves are. So the intent is very clear, the pattern is very clear, but the moves change night to night and it's absolutely thrilling. And dangerous. And dangerous, but I think it's very true to the piece. Get a load of this, we get to improvise with the opera, you know, which is great, because our duet is improvisational and that's what I love doing the most. It's my favorite part of the evening. I think what I found most gratifying about working in this particular production is the ability to go back and re -explore movement that we've done before. When we created carmina burano, the

opera told us that we would have four performances at the Civic Auditorium. And what has happened since then is that this piece got legs, and it's been purchased by three other opera companies. And Portland's mounting it again. And for us, we have created a piece that can go on. I've never seen a production of carmina burano that looks like this. And I will, after having seen this, it will be hard to look at it any other way. Throughout carmina, the audience witnesses lives pleasures and temptations. The male lead longs for the female, and the female is torn between innocence and desire. In the end, the two merge, but only for a moment. An amazing thing is by the end, no matter what kind of redemption both have found, they both get swallowed up by this tidal wave of fate. For some of this, that will do this, we can come down

from beyond. There's something to us, there's something to us, simply come down from beyond. The Portland Opera will continue their innovative series with their next presentation. Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mercado opens on May 13th. Instead of being said in Japan, this version takes place in England. And being Gilbert and Sullivan, of course, it's all sung in English. Meanwhile, Bodyvox is working on their next presentation. It's called A Thousand Little Cities, and that opens in June at Portland State University. For more information on the Portland Opera, or Bodyvox, visit the Oregon Artbeat website. Just go to opb .org and click on Artbeat. We've got the information about tonight's program, as well as links to other arts information. And one of the things you'll find there is a link

to the Crystal Ball Room. Peppy and the bottle blondes are playing Saturday night, along with Jamie Hampton. Yes, the same multi -talented Jamie Hampton just seen dancing with the opera. He'll be singing and playing guitar with the full -scale action figures. The Oregon Symphony goes on the road next week. Norman Layden conducts pop concerts in Medford and Brookings. Then, Mary Siddland takes over the classical performance in Klamath Falls. And don't miss the new performance by Imago Theater, Frogs, Lizards, Orbs, and Slingkes. It's great for all ages. It plays every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday through May 28th. Next week, on Oregon Artbeat, we'll visit the Bullseye Factory, where Linda Etheer gets all her glass. And find out how Bullseye revolutionized glass art. Jazz legend Nancy King and Glenn Moore let us in on a rehearsal and talk about why they love to collaborate. We'll meet Mexican artists Arturo Morales Compos and preview Cinco de Mayo. That's all next Friday at 9 .30. Well, believe it or not, we're out of time for this edition of Oregon Artbeat. If you have any

comments about the program, please write us or visit the Oregon Artbeat website at opb .org. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next Friday at 9 .30. Good night. Good night. All of her, yes. One, two, five, seven, one, two, five, six, seven, eight. One, two, and three, four. Now, turn and hit, and then go all the way to it. It's okay.

Good. Good night. Good night.

Good night. Good night.