- In this edition of "ARTEFFECTS," colorful and thoughtful techniques from Jill Altmann of Reno.

- I think the initial inspiration, creative process is kind of a lifetime thing where you pull everything together.

- [Beth] The possibilities of clay.

- [Amy] Ceramic is, it's kind of an intensive process.

I learned early on not to get attached.

- [Beth] And unique painting techniques from Pat Wallis.

- It's always a surprise how it's going to end up, and I like that, I like that process, because it makes me move out of my box.

- It's all ahead on this edition of "ARTEFFECTS."

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Funding for "ARTEFFECTS" is made possible by Sandy Raffealli with Bill Pearce Motors, Heidemarie Rochlin, in memory of Sue McDowell, the Carol Franc Buck Foundation, and by the annual contributions of PBS Reno members.

- Hello, I'm Beth Macmillan and welcome to "ARTEFFECTS."

In our featured segment, we meet Jill Altmann of Reno.

Using her own dyes, created from flowers and vegetables from her garden, Altmann combines weaving and knitting techniques and textures that result in beautiful, one of a kind pieces.

Let's head to Altmann's studio in South Reno where she brings her inspiration and creativity to fruition.

(upbeat music) - I'm Jill Altmann and I live in rural South Reno.

I have an amazing view of Mount Rose to Peavine.

I find inspiration where I live.

I'm a textile artist.

I weave on a loom.

(loom bangs) And I use a knitting machine.

I use the same yarns on the knitting machine that I do on the loom.

We have an acre of grapes where we make wine from our vineyard.

They're getting there.

And we have a garden where I grow edibles and flowers that I use for dyeing my yarns that I use in my work.

(upbeat music) I hand make everything that comes out of the studio.

I buy my yarns from suppliers that get yarns from all over the world.

I mostly work with cotton and linen, and then I work with wool, wool alpaca blends, and things that have nice texture and nice hand.

I take the human body that is a form of sculpture and I drape art on it.

My fabrics are my artwork.

I shape my textiles, my fabric into clothing that people wear.

(upbeat music) The uniqueness of my work is a compilation from a lot of my travels and seeing what other cultures have done, and specifically, I have to say what is worn in Japan has greatly influenced me, because they're based on shapes that were cut from cloth, that there was zero waste.

They had manipulated the cloth in the technique called shibori, so they were folding, clamping, stitching, pleating, and then putting it in the dye baths.

And when they brought it out, that was the design.

This dye pot is indigo.

It's all done with natural materials, which I have outside.

So it's indigo, it's calcium hydroxide, and it's fructose, so it feeds on fruit sugar.

So to keep it really active, you use banana peels.

(upbeat music) You have a lot of control, but then you lose it when you put it in the dye bath, because the dye bath seeps, and then there are different colors that happen.

And you never know until you take it out of the dye pot what you're gonna have.

I think it's very, very important that individuals educate themselves, that they see a lot of art shows, they see the techniques being used, and they use the inspiration that other artists have used in their work in their way, and that's what I try to do.

I keep binders of inspiration ideas or museum pamphlets or other artists' work.

I use buttons that are handmade primarily.

I use silversmiths buttons from Genoa.

I had him make pre-Euro coins into buttons for me that I used on my work.

I like to have artisans work on my work, the way the Navajo used coins and the buffalo head nickels as their closures and as their artwork and on their jewelry.

I wanna connect myself with past cultures and past artisans and people.

And it's important that not only I learn from that, but newer people who are coming into the craft feel that connection with the past going forward in making their own work.

I often get a question, "How long did it take you to make this?"

It has taken my whole life to create these one of a kind pieces.

The best moment of all is when it's cut, sewn, I try it on, or the customer comes in, picks it up, and they stand at my front door and they go, "Yeah, you got it."

That to me is the ultimate compliment and affirmation.

- To learn more, visit jillaltmanndesign.com.

Amy Sanders de Melo is an artist based in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

As someone with visual impairments, she finds strength, peace, and purpose in creating ceramic works.

Many of her creations include her utilization of Braille on porcelain.

(birds chirp) (siren wails) (dramatic music) - It's really important for me to ground myself.

I don't have solutions for many problems in our society and world and I think about those problems.

It just feels so hard and heavy sometimes.

If I focus on here and now, that, at least for me, is really important as a human being is just feeling purposeful and feeling capable.

Ceramics is, it's kind of an intensive process.

I learned early on not to get attached.

I literally had a professor from day one tell us not to get attached to our work because things go wrong at every step.

I'm gonna shape it now and it's pretty thin so it might collapse, but we'll see if I can avoid it.

I'm Amy Sanders de Melo.

I am a ceramic artist based in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Wheel throwing just involves the pottery wheel.

That's where I create my functional work, so cups and bowls, vases.

I really appreciate that time just 'cause it gets me a little bit out of my head and into my body and into this piece that I'm making, that I can kind of just get lost in the physics of it.

(soft music) Kind of weird looking.

I don't really like it.

I tend to work in batches, so I try to create between 4 to 10 pieces at a time.

Yeah, right now I'm centering, which this is the hardest part for most people.

I grew up on a farm so it was very active and very much about problem solving and there's always this appeal about manual labor to me, just knowing that you can kind of create something for yourself or for your loved one.

I'm kind of a maniac 'cause I like really thin walls, which can be my downfall sometimes.

I'm just gonna do that.

I know that.

But those textures will just leave like spaces where the glaze can pull, and in some cases, like it's just a really nice variation like for where you can hold a piece.

And then the way I do this is, I don't think the smartest way, but it works for me.

After I've thrown my piece on the wheel, I let it kind of sit to the side for a couple days so it becomes leather hard.

Then you can flip your piece over and trim the foot on the bottom.

My least favorite part, but it's a necessary part.

I just hold it in place by putting these little lugs of clay on the side and do the middle first.

Yeah, it's kind of satisfying to watch the little shavings.

(upbeat music) What to do?

And then I'm writing in Braille on those pieces.

When people first meet me, they can't tell that I have hearing loss and I lip read a lot, or that I have severe vision loss.

So this was a nice way for me to kind of put that on display and say like, hey, disability looks different for everyone and blindness is a spectrum.

The reason that I began using Braille on ceramics is because of my vision loss, which is a result of Usher syndrome, which is this genetic disorder that I have.

That's what's causing my hearing loss and then that's what's causing my vision loss.

So very slowly I'm just losing my peripheral vision and it's kind of tunneling in.

So I think right now, I have between 10 and 15 degrees of vision left.

You're supposed to have 180.

That just forces you to adapt and kind of modify how you live your life continually.

So when I initially started writing on my work, it was an exploration of all the feelings, all the negative feelings, all the fear, the anger, the frustration, and then an exploration about the good things that I've learned from having this disease.

Now, it's kind of morphed more into meditation.

So a lot of the phrases that I use are phrases that maybe people have said to me or think that I want to embody more of.

Like this one says, "Look for beauty in the world."

Those reminders, I think, help me.

Once I've written the Braille on it, then it goes through its first firing.

Basically that just hardens the clay a bit more.

It becomes like a porous ceramic vessel.

And then I glaze the piece.

(upbeat music) - Red Heat is a community clay studio with a twofold kind of purpose.

One, for professional ceramic artists to find community and to collaborate, and the second, just as an outreach to the general community of Tulsa for people to pursue ceramic arts.

We started just with a few members and now you know we have over 40, 45 members and a really close community of people that support each other inside the studio and outside the studio.

- [Amy] I do feel really lucky because I have a community space where I have access to all kinds of people from all walks of life.

So there are a lot of really dynamic conversations that happen there and we talk about anything.

So that is a really wonderful way to stay connected and to feel human and to still feel connected to the work that I'm making.

And then it goes through its second firing, and I like to use the gas kiln.

It's a bit more atmospheric than our electric kiln.

There's something going on inside the kiln that's unpredictable.

Sometimes that can lead to failure, but it can also lead to something that's really magical.

- [Whitney] Amy is a member here in the studios, but she also teaches classes, which has been really wonderful.

- [Amy] All right, so now I will start the kiln.

- [Whitney] She's also one of my staff members hired to fire kilns, help mix glazes.

So she's very active in a variety of ways.

It's really important to have someone like Amy because Amy is an emerging artist and is showing her work on the national level.

- I had the opportunity to be a visiting artist at Pottery Northwest in Seattle.

It was my first time ever doing something like this.

I spent a few days in Seattle, installed my exhibition, gave an artist talk, I led a workshop live there.

It was brief and fast and a lot of work, but it was really wonderful.

After the piece had gone through the gas firing, that I'm adding gold luster to the surface of the Braille and it goes through one final third firing.

On this level, I have all the little tiny guys.

They're just so little and people love tiny things.

Some of these I put like right on the edge of the shelf so that the flame will touch it and it'll give it that like flash of purple, but typically it would look like this without that purple.

Some of them are my favorite because of the color variations that happen in the kiln and I don't think I can ever achieve that again.

So again, that kind of reminds me of life, like there are moments when everything's aligned just right for you to just experience the most perfect little moment and that stays with you.

And then, this one's kind of fun 'cause I wasn't expecting that.

So it's just a little, just a little surprise inside your cup.

I try to maintain like a good work-life balance between the studio and being at home.

When there's deadlines, that kind of goes out the window a little bit, but I've really been working on gardening a lot.

That's kind of been my big project this past year.

I think it's just a continuation of like my desire to have my hands doing things and working with the natural world around me, you know, going back to clay, like why I like working with clay.

I think a lot about my own childhood.

I didn't see other kids with disabilities.

I didn't see adults with disabilities.

I didn't see a lot of people of color.

I didn't see a lot of immigrants like my mom.

I felt kind of different, like I felt like I didn't quite belong here.

And I guess my hope is that other children and families seeing work made by a blind, I mean technically a deaf, blind artist, maybe they can feel comfort knowing that they could be artists or that they could pursue something that is kind of against the norm.

(upbeat music) - Learn more at amysandersdemelo.com and instagram.com/amysandersdemelo.

Now it's time for this week's art quiz.

Which artist earned the designation "Mama of Dada" due to her association with the avant-garde movement of the early 20th century?

Is the answer, A, Gertrud Amon Natzler, B, Emmy Hennings, C, Hannah Hoch, or D, Beatrice Wood?

And the answer is D, Beatrice Wood.

Pat Wallace is an award-winning artist with a background in plein air paintings and aerial paintings in Marin County, California.

When she moved to Reno, she was delighted by a new palette of colors in the landscape.

She started experimenting with various patinas after learning about the effect of acids on copper.

She says her various collections are an adventure into the world of art.

- I'm Pat Wallis and I work mainly in oils and patinas.

I started out as a plein air painter doing mainly landscapes on canvas and board, and over the last probably 15 years, I have switched to working almost exclusively on copper.

And I have gone into patina's on the copper.

Patina is acid on copper, and when you put the acids on the copper, it changes it to another color.

I think we all know how copper will turn verde green naturally from the rain and the sun.

Well, I use artist chemicals to produce a patina and my chemicals come in different colors that will ultimately change the color of my copper.

The acid forms the background for my painting.

I take the sheet of copper that I've sanded lightly and I add acids to it, and I'll usually do one, sometimes two different acids.

Put it on the copper.

It's very liquid, it's just like water, and it's clear, so I'm not really sure what's going to happen.

I have an idea where the color is going to be, but it's never quite the same anytime that you put it on the copper.

So I put it on the copper and let it patina the copper.

I try to expose a little bit of the copper so you can see that glow in the illumination that the copper gives a painting.

(upbeat music) There's a lot of movement in the patina as it's drying.

It's just forming all different shapes and forms.

And again, it's something that I'm not really sure of and always surprised when I see the final product, and it doesn't always turn out.

So there is a little more that element of surprise when it comes to the acids, but I love when I have the finished product and I look at it and it's exciting because it's abstract, but then it looks like water, it looks like rocks, and it has all the different movement in it.

For a while I was unsure what to do with the acids on the copper.

And the patinas reminded me of what we have here in Nevada, the blues, the sky color here, the color of the water at Lake Tahoe, and I wanted to be able to use them in some aspect of my work.

I went out to Taylor Creek and saw the Kokanee salmon from Lake Tahoe that spun up Taylor Creek.

And when I saw the salmon, I thought, "That's it, that's my subject matter.

I'm gonna paint the salmon on top of the acids on copper."

What I'm looking for with the fish is an undulation, a movement.

Then I start applying oil paint on top of the acid, working with the darks first and then building up the color for the salmon.

It is always a surprise how it's going to end up, and I like that.

I like that process because it makes me move out of my box to come up with something new, an exciting look, or go in a new direction.

I hope to convey what inspires me and hopefully inspires other people to appreciate what we have around us.

- To learn more, visit patriciawallis.com.

And that wraps it up for this edition of "ARTEFFECTS."

If you want to watch new "ARTEFFECTS" segments early, make sure you subscribe to the PBS Reno YouTube channel.

And don't forget to keep visiting pbsreno.org to watch complete episodes of "ARTEFFECTS."

Until next week, I'm Beth Macmillan.

Thanks for watching.

- [Narrator] Funding for "ARTEFFECTS" is made possible by Sandy Raffealli with Bill Pearce Motors, Heidemarie Rochlin, in memory of Sue McDowell, the Carol Franc Buck Foundation, and by the annual contributions of PBS Reno members.

(upbeat music)