- In this edition of arteffects, colorful and emotional ink.

(upbeat music) - [Woman] It's liquid, it's fluid, it's going to move, it's dynamic, it may dry faster than you'd like.

(air whooshing) (upbeat music) - [Woman] A modernist painter!

(suspenseful music) - It's a lot of fun kinda decoding works.

And Jonson just kind of takes you out on this, I don't know when I look at 'em it's like, they just make my eyes feel fun.

(air whooshing) - [Woman] A monument celebrating voting rights!

- [Woman] This memorial really, I think everyone can find a piece of themselves in the memorial, there's the story of everyone in this, in this piece of art.

- [Woman] And conversations on canvas!

- When you speak to her about her work, it's not just about lines and color and form, but it's about conversations between people.

(air whooshing) - It's all ahead on this edition of arteffects.

(bright upbeat instrumental music) (air whooshing) - [Man] Funding for arteffects is made possible by, Sandy Raffealli, The June S. Wisham Estate, Carol Franc Buck, Merrill and Lebo Newman, Heidemarie Rochlin, Meg and Dillard Myers, the annual contributions of PBS Reno Members, and by, (air whooshing) - Hello, I'm Beth McMillan and welcome to arteffects.

For our featured segment, meet Nicole Eldridge, an abstract multimedia artist, who uses alcohol inks to create vibrant and colorful works of art.

Eldridge uses this artform to calm her mind and express her inner emotions.

(air whooshing) (upbeat suspenseful music) - So my favorite color is white.

You would never guess that based on all my artwork.

(laughs) And I love that blank canvas feeling, it has so much potential and it's so pure.

But then when you look at a finished piece, you're like, oh man!

It was beautiful and worth it to kind of disrupt that piece, and to see this finished piece that you have, and it's that time that I do love it, that's all that really matters.

(air whooshing) (upbeat suspenseful music) I have three young children, and a lot of my time was spent on them, and I really needed to find time for myself and to do self care, and to just have a mental break.

So when they were getting a little bit older, we were just out of diapers, I was scrolling through social media, I'm in this rabbit hole of alcohol ink, and there were a lot of artists that were giving away free advice and free tutorials, and I'm like, I'm gonna try it.

I immediately tried it, opened it up when it came in the mail, two years later, I have way too much alcohol ink.

(laughs) It was, it was really just that time where I needed to focus on myself, and my kids were becoming a little less dependent on me, and I could separate being a mom from being myself, just a little bit, just as far as the couch, and the dining room table.

(upbeat music) So alcohol ink is concentrated ink.

It's the ink that you find in markers.

There's many ways you can use it, you can paint it, you can just let it flow freely, and you use it with alcohol solutions, so isopropyl alcohol.

And you use it to move the medium around, and you can blow it or again, you can paint it or you can just let it dry naturally.

(air whooshing) So usually I start, I layout trash bags, to protect my work surface.

I select my canvas, so typically I use a gesso art board.

I'll pick one main color, and I'll just go from there and see what flows.

Sometimes I'll throw in a robe color, and try to test myself.

(air whooshing) So there's two ways that I do make a piece.

One is where I try to have negative space, and that's where I'm looking at composition, and I want to try a certain movement or a certain shape on there.

Other times my whole goal of a piece is to completely cover the canvas.

That's the intention of the pieces to be very colorful and very full.

(air whooshing) (upbeat music) The really cool thing about alcohol inks is that you can't control it.

It's liquid, it's fluid, it's going to move, it's dynamic.

It may dry faster than you'd like, (air whooshing) and then you have to work with it.

It may just sit there in a puddle and become this muddy mess.

And I can create these boundaries on paper, and I can move it and manipulate it as much as I want.

But ultimately the ink is doing its own work, and it's creating its own art by itself.

(air whooshing) So my work is different from other artists because I try to focus a lot on my own intention and my own feelings at the time.

A lot of my art is focused on balance in my life.

So sometimes you can see my feelings come through, whether I'm happy or I'm angry with my kids, or I'm just really just in the content place and focused, and you can see that across the board in all of my art.

(air whooshing) It's very emotional, and very liquid and fluid and you can see all the movement in there.

(upbeat music) I know that my artwork when I'm creating it and I'm putting all my emotion into it, you can see it, it's visual.

And if that same emotion comes across to you, perfect!

And if it triggers something different, because we're all gonna feel different things at different times in our lives.

If it triggers some kind of response in you, then that my work is done.

(air whooshing) - To find more of Nicole's artwork, visit ArtByColee.com.

A key figure in the New Mexico art scene, artist Raymond Jonson, spent his life painting nonrepresentational modernist works.

Up next, we learn more about the colorful pieces he created, and his focus on the human spirit.

(upbeat suspenseful music) - It's a lot of fun kinda decoding works, and Jonson just kinda gets you out on this, I don't know when I look at 'em it's like they just make my eyes feel fun.

(upbeat suspenseful music) Raymond Jonson really is my favorite painter.

(upbeat suspenseful music) These late period pieces are really a question to me.

We're looking at him at the apex of his spiritual expression.

(upbeat music) And we're looking at him as a mature adult, who's refined his techniques, he's no longer really experimenting with the technical aspect of art, but really what can he say?

(upbeat music) We look at this and Raymond Jonson has just gone through a tragedy in his life, his wife has passed away.

And instead of responding in this negative dark way, he's really celebrating her life and life in general.

I mean, this color palette is looking upwards, it's looking into the skies of New Mexico, and it's expressing something different, it's no longer tethered to the earth.

And we're really moving into a different spiritual expression, and a different dialogue with spirituality.

(upbeat suspenseful music) He is exploring the boundaries of the canvas more.

He has fully lifted the curtains, and now the works move off the canvas, it's off the picture plane.

As the viewer, when I approach one of these, I'm immediately wondering, where does this line finish?

Where is the conclusion of this shape?

How does this color fade resolve itself?

And within the picture it's complete, it gives you everything that you need, to feel a sense of finality in the work.

But it also then asks you that question of, well, what's going on over here?

(upbeat dramatic music) So in that, the conversation has shifted.

He's zoomed in, but by zooming in, he's allowing us to ask, what else is there?

(upbeat music) And I do love that, it just challenges people's preconceptions of what New Mexican art can be, and what it was.

And like these pieces are contemporaneous with all the cowboy and Indian stuff.

And this is as much New Mexican art as anything else.

(upbeat instrumental music) He really never stopped making art.

And in that these pieces are beautiful, and they're beautiful culmination kind of conclusion, for his career as an artist, but what he left us in that is the ability to look a little further.

It's the question of why?

(upbeat music) I feel Raymond Jonson really still has a lot to teach us.

(upbeat music) - Discover more at artmuseum.unm.edu.

And now let's take a look at this week's art quiz.

Which of these unconventional tools, would abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock not use, when he worked on a painting?

Is the answer A, wooden sticks, B, hardened brushes, C, basting syringes, or D, he would use them all.

And the answer is D, he would use them all.

Near the Utah State Capitol, there is a monument that pays tribute to the courageous women, who fought for equal voting rights.

In its design, the sculptor conveys the historic fight for suffrage.

Here's the story!

(upbeat suspenseful music) - We knew that the year 2020 was going to be a big year for these voting rights anniversaries.

It would mark the 150th anniversary of the first time Utah women voted, a hundredth anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which extended voting rights to many women across the country, and the 50, 50 anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, which broke down many more barriers, facing women and men of color when they were trying to vote.

So, as a nonprofit we approached the State of Utah and talked about putting up a memorial, to honor those anniversaries in this important year, and especially to honor the role of Utahns, in kind of pioneering ways in breaking ground, for the expansion of voting rights.

This new monument is called A Path Forward, and it's a beautiful sculpture, it's got concrete and bronze and stainless steel in it, and it looks a little different than normal monuments or the way that we're used to a statue of one figure.

At this monument is a series of door frames.

There's an interior space, a domestic space with a table and chairs, and a path that winds through doorframes leading towards the state Capitol.

So this monument is meant to represent Utah women's work for voting rights.

(air whooshing) The artists, Kelsey Harrison and Jason Manley had a beautiful vision for what this would look like, and they knew that they wanted to have additional doorframes, leading from the 19th Amendment forward to talking about legislation that expanded voting rights for different groups of people.

And so we worked with them to research and talk to local community members, for example, the Division of Indian Affairs here in Utah, so that we could make sure that we were characterizing that history accurately.

So you'll see as you visit the memorial that there's inscriptions on the insides of those doorframes talking about the laws that they represent in this widening of the path, this symbolic way to open up the pathway for more people to participate in the political process.

- Beauty and the brilliance, I think of A Path Forward, this memorial, is that it's a way to honor this long complicated history of voting rights here in Utah and in the nation, and it's not a statue of just one person or even a small group of people.

It's of a visual representation, and a commemoration of the work of thousands, even millions of Utah women, over the course of over a hundred years.

And so rather than being just one specific moment in time or one specific person in time, this memorial really, I think everyone can find a piece of themselves in the memorial.

There's the story of everyone in this, in this piece of art.

(gentle music) - After the monument was unveiled, my favorite part was that we had family members there representing the women whose work makes up different pieces of the memorial.

So Seraph Young, the first voter whose footsteps start off on that path, or Elizabeth Hayward, a state Senator in Utah, who introduced the bill to ratify the 19th Amendment when she was serving in our legislature, or the family of Alice Kasai, who worked to expand voting rights and make citizenship available to Japanese-American immigrants, and the family of Mignon Barker Richmond, a civil rights leader and activist here in Utah.

So as we heard a little bit from our narrator of our program about what each of these women had done, their families walked along that path carrying photos of these women, large photos and frames.

That was really touching to me, because I could see how the legacy of these women's work has played out in future generations.

We could see daughters and granddaughters and great grandsons of these women whose work we were memorializing, who were proud of their ancestors contributions to Utah, and who were making Utah a better place in their own ways today.

So that was very touching and meaningful to me, to see that contribution embodied in the future, in the generations that have come.

So every time that I pass the memorial now, and walk through the doorframes, I think about those specific families, and at those different points.

- My favorite part is the ever expanding doorways, and the ever expanding pathway, that's part of the memorial.

As I walk along that path, recognize that the doors of opportunities that are open for me, are not always open for everyone.

And maybe it's open for people who look or live, like me or live where I live, but someone else who really does have the same innate value and right to experience those opportunities, but because of restrictions or cultural norms or popular opinions, they're not able to walk through that doorway of opportunity with me.

And so that again, puts it on me in my community in whatever way, I am gonna make a contribution to make sure that I am looking around myself as I walk forward and say, who is not able to come through this doorway of opportunity, and how can I work to make it so that the doorway is bigger, or the path is wider so that more people can come?

- I think one of the things that's really important about the way we look back at voting rights now, is that sometimes we think one victory was all that it took, and once the 19th Amendment was ratified, for example, that everyone was able to vote.

And that's not true because there were so many different barriers in different places for people's voting rights.

So I love that the artists were willing to work with us as historians and community leaders in Utah, to make sure that we could represent that story, that we could talk about everybody's struggle in an appropriate way, and also in a way that helps us understand that there's a lot of work to be done, there are a lot of ways that our history and our past have created structural barriers, for participation in the political process.

And as we become aware of those and work to eliminate those, we'll have a better society, when we open up decision-making in government to more people in our country.

(air whooshing) - Abstract artist, Glenyse Thompson, depicts conversation through colors and lines.

In her symbolic paintings and drawings, she expresses the wonders and complexities of human interaction.

We head St. Petersburg, Florida to meet the artist.

(air whooshing) - I, way back when, as a kid, was a creative and didn't know what that meant.

I thought I was gonna be a journalist, and then I thought I was gonna be a photographer.

Put that away and had a kid, (laughs) got on with life.

And then I'd say about 2014, 2015, I started having difficulties at work, communicating with couple of people, and took a break, and went on vacation.

It was my grandmother who said, why don't you sit down and start really thinking about what you wanna do next and try something different.

And I picked up some watercolors and started drawing again.

Hey, I'm Glenyse, welcome to my studio.

My name is Gleynse Thompson, I am a visual abstract artist, from St. Petersburg, Florida and I also am a designer.

(upbeat music) - When you speak to her about her work, it's not just about lines and color and form, but it's about conversations between people.

And she says that the washes of color in the background, is about the general ebb and flow of a conversation, but then the detailed lines on top of it is the actual words that you're saying in the conversation.

And the color she chooses and the lines that she makes, have to do with this specific conversation.

Maybe it's an intense conversation, maybe it's a friendly conversation.

- We have to understand that conversations are so important, to who we are.

We're nothing without each other.

We're meeting each other, and the lines represent that.

It could be a party, it could be a Zoom call, it could be a grocery store run.

You're always thinking, or having to speak with someone to get something done.

And we need to pay more attention to what that means day to day.

- Well, first I encountered Glenyse herself, before I encountered her work.

We were in France, of all places, (air whooshing) and just happened to run into Glenyse, and started having a conversation.

- [Glenyse] We decided to keep it touch.

It was me and my guy, and him and his lady friend, when we met.

And then we get back to the state, we decide to get in touch with them, and realize they live right in Miami, live in our backyard.

- And my fiance and I happened to be in the Tampa Bay area, so we look them up and got together, and got to finding out a little bit more about art.

We got a chance to actually see some of it, and I was smitten.

- I had created a piece about our burgeoning friendship, and that was the piece they ended up purchasing.

(laughs) (air whooshing) It's in the blues and golds, but it's got a lot of lines on it, in comparison to some of the other pieces.

Just because, who would've thought a continental meet, would have turned into such a amazing friendship.

- I think Glenyse as a person is special, and that's what makes Glenyse as an artist special.

(air whooshing) - I was reticent to participate, in the social justice movement with my art, only because I didn't know what to do.

And I was approached by a curator.

I said, I wanna make that part of my studio practice at least twice a year, creating a piece of art for a charity.

- Citizens in another major city were angered by the death of an African-American woman at the hands of police.

- [Man] Somebody kicked in the door and shot my girlfriend.

- SayHerName!

- SayHerName, is about black women, and depending on who you support, trans and lesbian women, that have been assaulted or killed by the police, or another person, because of who they are.

(gentle music) We're always first to support and always last to get supported.

So we need more recognition, we need more pay equity, we don't get enough, and we give so much.

(air whooshing) I have two different focuses in my artwork at this time.

I am working on the conversations pieces, and then big shoulders.

The conversations are inks and inks, and it's liquid ink that layer upon layer, put on paper or a panel, and it's usually between five and 20 layers of ink.

So each layer dries into itself and that takes seven to 10 days, because each layer has to dry.

And then I come in and I add the lines.

The big shoulders pieces are the large, largely colored right pieces.

And big shoulders is all about the fact that we stand on each other's shoulders, to move about the world.

And all the colors represent, all the different shapes and sizes of people we have to interact with, to move into our next, whatever we're gonna do next.

And it all goes back to conversations at the same time by saying, we can't function without one another.

- See more at glenyse.com.

And that wraps it up for this edition of arteffects.

For more arts and culture, or to watch past episodes, visit pbsreno.org/arteffects.

Until next week, I'm Beth MacMillan!

Thanks for watching!

- [Man] Funding for arteffects is made possible by, Sandy Raffealli, The June S. Wisham Estate, Carol Franc Buck, Merrill and Lebo Newman, Heidemarie Rochlin, Meg and Dillard Myers, the annual contributions of PBS Reno Members, and by, (air whooshing) (upbeat instrumental music)