- In this edition of aRTeffects, the Reno Chamber Orchestra.

- Music is interesting because you can't see it and you can't touch it, yet you feel it so intensely.

We are thirsty for music.

- [Beth] Creating animal habitats.

- [Woman] You want it to be as natural as possible, yet you want it to to be an area that is safe for the animal.

- [Beth] An environmental artist.

- All of my work has burning of some kind in it, and I think it does reflect both sides of creation, creation and destruction, and that's what nature is all about.

- [Beth] And the patinas of artist 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.

(downbeat music) - It's all ahead on this edition of aRTeffects.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] 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 - Hello, I'm Beth Macmillan, and welcome to aRTeffects.

In our featured segment, the Reno Chamber Orchestra opens up its 47th season by welcoming a new music director.

Let's see one of their performances and learn why their special festival season is so unique.

(lively music) - The Reno Chamber Orchestra is a wonderful musical organization that provides intimate, inspiring classical music performances through both our chamber orchestra and our chamber music festival.

Our chamber orchestra is about three dozen people, our chamber festival is often two, to five, to eight people at a time per piece, so it's much more intimate, you hear individual voices much more directly, and there are many people vis-a-vis a large symphony orchestra who really enjoy getting into that connection feeling, that directness, and also getting to know the personalities of the musicians as well.

(lively music) The traditional orchestra will have a music director, as we did for the entirety of our history, however, we actually had the opportunity with our chamber festival and our chamber orchestra to explore two different artistic leaders who could really have specialty both in performing chamber music and presenting festivals, and leading an orchestra and developing an artistic vision for the chamber orchestra season.

- This is a new beginning for the orchestra, and it's I think the beginning of an even closer bond between the orchestra and the chamber music festival, and that's very important going forward.

- As it turned out, we found two fantastic leaders who respectively have decades of experience in their roles as a conductor or a chamber musician respectively.

- My principal role as an Artistic Director is to think about the programming, put programs together and to invite the musicians, and then to think which pieces would go well together, and then which performers would be the best advocates for those pieces.

And of course, I'm a player as well, and so I'm often to be found playing in some of those programs myself.

(soft music) - My name is Kelly Kuo, and I am the third Music Director of the Reno Chamber Orchestra, having just been appointed in July of this year.

I love playing piano, I think it keeps me honest as a conductor because as a conductor you make absolutely no noise whatsoever, your job is to inspire other people to make beautiful sounds on their instruments.

So, unless I'm yelling or just being primal scream because I'm so happy with joy, I shouldn't be making any sounds whatsoever, and so piano is an outlet for me to be able to make music with my colleagues.

(lively music) - We have a wide range of players, some younger, some more seasoned, and all coming together to make beautiful music together.

- These weekend's performances are my first as Music Director of the Reno Chamber Orchestra, in that capacity I will be conducting three pieces, opening with Quinn Mason's "Princesa de la Luna", Mozart's "Piano Concerto No.

22" with James Winn, local legend, followed by Mozart's "Jupiter Symphony", an unbelievable mammoth work to conclude the program.

(lively music) - By selecting two different artistic leaders we are attempting to have two different entities, so to speak, two different specialties, as well as an overarching theme where we bring chamber music and chamber orchestra together under one umbrella.

So, going forward, I think our goal really is to get Kelly and Clive deeper roots in our community, a deeper understanding of what makes Reno tick, and in the process I think they will be very helpful in trying to craft programs and explore really interesting artistic ideas that are not only based in classical music, but really relevant in connecting to Reno and Northern Nevada.

(soft music) - Music is interesting because you can't see it and you can't touch it, yet you feel it so intensely.

You can feel it at a rock concert, you can feel it when you go to the opera, you feel it when you turn a CD on at home, or hit play in the car.

You might go to a concert and make friends with somebody that you didn't know was gonna be there and you become friends for life, it's happened to me before, because you're brought together for such important reasons, we're thirsty for music.

(lively music) - I think, especially in this moment in the world where there are a lot of divisions and a lot of views of things that are very polarizing, I think music and the arts, and classical music especially, has an amazing ability to bring people together on a really neutral and joyous middle ground, where people can from all perspectives, share and enjoy this experience together.

So, I think it's really important now more than ever, and getting to see people back after this period of time during the pandemic, it just reinforces how important this is as part of our community.

(audience clapping) - To learn more, visit renochamberorchestra.org.

This next segment was produced by students at St. Petersburg College, in partnership with WEDU Tampa.

At Owl's Nest Sanctuary for Wildlife, in Odessa, Florida, founder and director, Kris Porter and volunteers, work closely with sick and injured animals.

Find out why they consider rehabilitation to be an art form.

(light music) - I'm the director and founder of Owl's Nest Sanctuary, I'm actually a retired zoologist, I've worked with animals pretty much my whole life since I was eight years old.

One way or another, went to college, got a zoology degree, interned for Bush Gardens when the pandas were here, and pretty much never looked back.

I left college and went to them, and worked 11 years in the animal nursery, but left because my first daughter was born premature.

She was an emergency C-section, and it was either gonna be the little four pound munchkin, or my career, so I did leave.

And 14 years later, I got conned into one of my zookeeper friends telling me I was wasting my talent, come raise some baby squirrels and bunnies, and within three months Owl's Nest was founded.

I had all the permits that you need to start this.

So that was six years ago now.

(light music) - So, there's an art to everything I believe, in life, and when you're treating an injured animal, when you're looking at them, and you're you're evaluating them, and you're having to get creative in some instances where you have to figure out if there's a a piece of a puzzle that you can put together to actually determine what their initial injury is, it's almost like creating a piece of art where you're you're doing all of your triaging, you're evaluating the entire animal, and then you're putting the puzzle pieces back together, it's just like painting a picture.

- Yeah, this is a red-shouldered hawk that came in yesterday, we got a large patch of blood on the chest, which usually signifies that somebody possibly shot him.

We have a huge rush of people shooting birds lately, not lately, ever since I've done this, but in the last couple months it has definitely ramped up.

- Medicine in general is an art.

When doctors are going to school, it's the art of medicine, and when we have to do it, it's the same concept with the wildlife.

It is the art of the medicine and ultimately it's the medicine that's healing them.

- So, he'll get all this, I don't need to wrap the wing, it's pretty decent and what it looks like, doesn't look like, so I don't need to wrap anything.

Hang on, you're gonna bite something, bite that.

Thank you.

When I talk about people or they talk about me, you have to have a touch with animals, in other words, you can't be a nervous wreck, you can't be moving quick, people that raise and do animals, they have a way about them.

And while I could never be like my husband in the computer AV world, I could never do what he does, (laughs) he could never do what I do.

So, obviously I use syringes, and there's so many things, bottles, and things like that, but I think the most important thing that I use is my background and my know-how of what an animal needs by looking at it.

- [Samantha] Come on.

(Kris laughs) (otter whimpering) So the habitat is all Kris, she does a fantastic job in that based on her past experience and knowing the animals and the types of environments that they need to be in.

Enrichment is actually very important even for wildlife that you're rehabbing, you want it to be as much as a natural setting as it can be, for the animal to cause the least amount of stress.

And when Kris envisions the habitat she thinks back to the days of when she actually cared for these animals prior to starting the sanctuary.

You want it to be as natural as possible, yet you want it to be an area that is safe for the animal where they won't cause any additional harm to themselves.

(light music) ♪ Jack and Diane made their first debut ♪ ♪ On 82's American fool ♪ You made yours almost 30 years later ♪ ♪ But this time I was the fool ♪ It was small spots ♪ You had your walls up ♪ So from the side we never saw ♪ ♪ But I thought you'd finally give in ♪ ♪ And let me in - Slow down your life to look around because art honestly is all around you.

There is nothing more inspiring than nature, truly.

(soft music) - The main thing is, that I like to try to spread the message about, and this is why I do the community outreach, is to help educate, is the human impact and what happens to our wildlife.

A lot of it is caused by humans, a lot of it is caused by trash, car hits, and when that happens it breaks our hearts because a lot of times some of those injuries are non-recoverable for these animals.

So, the big message is, everybody please take care of our environment, we only have one, and we only have so many of these precious animals.

- To learn more, visit Now let's take a look at this week's art quiz.

Which 18th century artist, an early member of the Royal Academy of Arts, had to make a choice between art and music as a career?

Is the answer A: Angelica Kauffman B: Pablo Picasso C: Joshua Reynolds or D: Monet Stay tuned for the answer.

For four decades, ecofeminist artist, Mira Lehr, has been rendering abstract artworks that reflect on nature and our environment through mediums such as painting, sculpture, and video.

She conveys her message to the world.

We visit the artist in Florida to find out more.

(earthy music) - The beauty is very important to me but I have to take the bloom off the rose.

I'm Mira Lehr, I'm an artist.

All of my work has burning of some kind in it, and I think it does reflect both sides of creation, creation and destruction, and that's what nature is all about, it's always related to the environment.

I always drew when I was a little kid, I never really knew I would be a professional artist.

As I grew older, I decided I was gonna study art history in college.

I was so lucky because at the time I graduated, the abstract expressionists were holding fort in New York and it was a major movement.

So I was right in the middle of this really wonderful scene, so from then on, I did art.

And I was not really into the environment as much in the beginning, I just did nature, a lot of nature studies, but eventually I heard of Buckminster fuller, a man who was very much about the planet, and I saw an opportunity to work with him.

In 1969 I went to New York and I worked with him on something called the World Game, and that was about how to make the world work in the most efficient way and doing more with less.

So from then on, I was hooked to it.

(slow music) I'm feeling two urgencies, one, I'm getting older, that's an urgency, how many years do I have left?

And the other urgency is how many years does the planet have left?

So we've converged.

Every day I get up raring to go.

And the Orlando exhibit, it was called High Water Mark because that's where we're at, and that's where they felt my career was at.

So, that show had very, very large sculptures of mangroves, and you could walk through the mangroves and feel you were encased in the roots, the roots system.

There's something about being enclosed in the space that makes the viewer very much more attentive to what's happening.

And so I watched people walking through the mangroves and they were all moved by it.

So that's really the first time I've done that kind of large scale sculpture.

I love doing it, the smaller I get and the older I get, the bigger the work becomes, it seems to me.

(laughs) And so now I'm back in the studio and I'm turning to something I'm calling planetary visions because I'm doing images of earth masses.

I've also added writing, which some of it is from Bucky fuller, about the planet, some of it is just poetry about nature.

(light music) I've always felt abstraction is the highest form, even though I like representation, but to me abstraction gets the the essence of everything, and you can take it and go on with it, and it's more spiritual to me.

I think, like Cezanne, at the end of his life, his paintings became kind of dissolved in light, like light entities.

At the end of Rembrandt's life also, his work became less literal and more also dissolved in light.

So light is very important, and that to me is the height of it.

If you have a light entity in your work, I think it's profound and meaningful.

The light on the big sculpture, yeah, those are special lights that grow corals in the laboratory.

And the sculpture is a shape of a wave, and it's mesmerizing.

If the world pulls apart and people are concerned just with their little everyday existence, I don't see a great future.

But I'm hoping there's still time, the clock is definitely ticking.

And I'm not a politician, and I'm not a scientist, the way I can express it is through my art, and that's what I'm trying to do along with having a wonderful experience making it.

(slow music) - See more at miralehr.com.

Now let's review this week's art quiz.

Which 18th century artist, an early member of the Royal Academy of Arts, had to make a choice between art and music as a career?

Is the answer, A: Angelica Kauffman B: Pablo Picasso C: Joshua Reynolds or D: Monet And the answer is, A: Angelica Kauffman.

In our final segment, we go into the studio of artist Pat Wallis, who captures the scenery of the Lake Tahoe Basin in her artwork.

See how she uses unique blends of acids and metals to create beautiful patinas to illuminate her landscapes.

- 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 patinas 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 verte 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, 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 and the illumination that the copper gives the painting.

(downbeat 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 only 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.

(downbeat music) 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 spawn 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.

(downbeat music) What I'm looking for with the fish is an undulation, a movement, then I start applying boil paint on top of the acid, working with the darks first, and then the building up the color for the salmon.

(downbeat music) 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 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 about Pat's work, visit patriciawallis.com.

And that wraps it up for this edition of aRTeffects.

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

Until next week, I'm Beth Macmillan, thanks for watching.

- [Announcer] 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 (bright music)