(upbeat music) - On this edition of "Arteffects", a master wood carver reveals nostalgia through craftsmanship.

(soft music) - There's something about wood that pulls you in.

It's organic and I think it's in our DNA.

- [Beth] Wood, water and fire come together to form burned wood prints.

(soft music) - It's pretty amazing to watch fire and water and electricity and wood, kind of all the natural elements come together to create something that's readily available in nature such as trees and lightning and fractal shapes.

(soft music) - [Beth] The functional artwork of Roundwood furniture.

There's a total joy in being able to provide a second life for something - [Beth] And mosaics on reclaimed materials.

- I feel that the reclaimed materials I use add character to the piece.

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

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) - [Announcer] Funding for "Arteffects" is made possible by Sandy Raffealli with Bill Pearce Motors.

Meg and Dillard Myers.

Heidemarie Rochlin, in memory of Sue McDowell and by the annual contributions of PBS Reno Members.

(upbeat music) - Hello, I'm Beth McMillan and welcome to "Arteffects" Raymond Kinman of Grass Valley California is a master wood carver musician and painter with an eclectic background.

If you've ever been to Disneyland you've likely passed by his art.

Let's meet the man who's carved thousands of colorful and charming wooden signs.

(soft music) - Playing music is my passion.

That's where I lose my mind and I'm in the present moment, and that's really my thing.

(upbeat music) Every musician wants to be a rock star when they grow up.

I figured that's what I was gonna do.

I remember I had this conversation with my dad one time.

I was like 14 or something and I asked dad, I know what I wanna be when I grow up.

He's going, oh, what?

I said, a drummer.

(drums playing) He said, "Raymond, that's great, go for it.

But you might want to think about having something to fall back on in case the drummer thing didn't work out."

Thought about it for a while.

So I took up the bass guitar as a backup.

(upbeat music) I was living in King Beach at Lake Tahoe.

and Marty, a friend of mine was gonna open a restaurant.

just off the top of my head I said, "well who's gonna make your sign for you?"

And Marty looked at me and he goes "do you know how to do it?"

I told him, "yeah, I can carve a sign for you."

And I think about it now.

It's like I had no money, no tools, no woodworking experience.

I'm a working musician barely making it and a baby on the way.

But I was pretty sure I could do it.

When you're young your kind of, that works to your advantage sometimes.

So that's how I got my start.

(soft music) I borrowed 30 bucks from my dad and I bought my first two tools which I still use every day, A mallet and a gouge.

The gouge itself used to be about this much longer than it is now.

By sharpening, it's gotten shorter and shorter.

You can just see the soul in it.

My studio in my home.

When an artist says studio, that's code word for garage.

So I've been working out of my garage for 46 years now.

It's in Northern California in Grass Valley nestled in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

Most of the wood I use is a Malaysia hardwood.

It's called, get ready for this jelutong.

It comes from a rubber tree in Malaysia.

(machine whirring) It's the type of rubber that they use for chewing gum.

So it's hard to find and It's expensive, but it carves like nothing else, it's beautiful.

Nice blonde colored wood.

So it goes from raw wood and then there's a stain slash sealer, penetrating oil stain that goes on it's just like really a lot of it.

So the wood just drinks this up.

(soft music) It goes from a drawing to transferring it onto the wood.

What I do is called relief carving.

It's an illusion.

There's some things you can do to fool the eye into thinking that it's deeper than it is.

One of those tricks is the use of perspective.

There's a specific process for doing that.

(machine buzzing) Cut in your outlines.

Take away the background, put in your layers, add shapes, add detail.

A good composition will have many layers of overlapping objects.

For example, if you look at my chest here as a level and when I put my arm over my chest, now there's two levels.

Then I put my other arm over here that's three levels.

So the more layering that you get the greater the illusion of depth to the viewer.

Objects that are closer to the viewer are larger and more detailed.

And as they get further away from the viewer, they get smaller and fuzzier.

And then to take that into the color stage which is where it really comes to life.

'Cause you can do something for color that increase that illusion of depth too.

Dark recedes away from the viewer and light comes forward.

My favorite part is the very end when I'm putting the color on, it's like, wow, that looks really good.

That's really magic.

(upbeat music) I was getting near my forties.

I get a phone call.

It was from the senior graphic designer that top guy at Disney Imagineering.

He saw some of my work at a restaurant and he got my number from the owner of the restaurant.

And that's how I got that lead.

That is just a lucky break.

I've done quite a few carvings for Disneyland.

Last time I was there, I counted there was 14 still there.

So those would include the Indiana Jones Adventure, Country Bear Jamboree, Country Bear Playhouse Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, Pooh Corner, Splash Mountain, Hungry Bear Restaurant and more.

The work I've done for Disney, their theme parks have been seen by hundreds of millions of people all over the world.

This is part of people's childhood.

It's a powerful thing.

In addition to the signs that I carved, there's doors, fireplace mantles, doing these serving platters right now.

I've recently gotten into doing tiki's just 'cause I was want to try it.

I'm not pretending to be a Polynesian tiki carver, I'm just playing with it, super fun.

(soft music) I've been doing this a long time, 46 years now.

And you can kind of look back and learn some things.

So what I learned there was your greatest asset isn't your education.

It's not your a ability, it's not your good looks.

It's not the quality of your work, it's your persistence.

And here's another one.

Always do your best work 'cause you don't know who's gonna see that.

And that turned out to be true in my case.

Everyone is an artist whether you know it or not.

Part of the human condition is to create.

And when we do that it really puts us in touch with our core spirit.

And we are, that's why we're here.

We're born to create.

(upbeat music) - To learn more about Raymond Kinman, visit woodcarverguru.com.

Water and fire usually don't mix.

But Ben Rodgers of Reno has found a fascinating way to control both elements.

This artist encapsulates the characteristics of nature into beautiful pieces of wood he calls burned wood prints.

(upbeat music) - I would describe my work as taking a piece of wood with the natural wood grain, the natural feel, the smell of the wood, and burning it with fire.

Then taking imagery and applying it right over the top of the wood, like painting onto a wooden canvas.

My name is Ben Rodgers and I create burned wood prints.

I'll choose maple plywood because it's very strong and it's very flat.

And take that piece, cut it down in my workshop.

(machine whirring) And then I'll router the edges.

(machine whirring) And then I'll flame the edges.

So I take a torch and actually burn around the piece.

And then I'll take a bit of water and baking soda solution and spread that over the top to help the electricity conduct.

And it also helps it stay on the surface of the wood rather than going through the middle.

The next stage is to burn it with electricity.

The process of electrocuting the wood is pretty amazing.

So I have a machine that I created in my workshop.

(electricity buzzing) And I'll take that and run an electric current through the wood, which travels along the surface of the wood burning natural shapes into it.

People call it fractals or tree limbs or lightning all reminiscent of what these burn marks in the wood look like.

No two are alike on those fractal shapes.

They're totally unique, just like nature just like a tree branch or lightning, they can never be reproduced.

Sand everything down so it's nice and smooth and looks really crisp.

(machine whirring) And then run it through a big flat bed printer.

And that puts ink directly onto the wood, creating the imagery that is the final piece.

During the printing process, I'll take an image into Photoshop and I'll take a photograph of the wood and overlay it in Photoshop so that I can see that tan canvas.

because basically I'm starting with wood instead of white like you would on paper.

In recent years what's also helped is a printer that has the capability to lay down white ink.

And so as the prints move through a layer of white goes down first before the color is applied over the top.

And this allows the colors to really explode on the wood canvas.

Growing up in Lake Tahoe, I've got a ton of Tahoe imagery and I use combination of my own imagery but a lot of stock imagery, a lot of trees, bears, Tahoe mountains and chair lifts, key resorts, stuff like that.

I love creating custom ones.

People love to have their own unique picture, that family photo and have it in a unique canvas that I can create.

(upbeat music) One thing that stands out that surprises people is when they pick up a piece of my art oftentimes they'll smell it.

And it smells like burned wood.

It smells like if they've ever been in Tahoe in the wintertime and they've had a fire in the fireplace.

It smells like home or it smells, like a campfire from their childhood or something.

And so that's kind of a unique side effect.

My favorite part of the whole process is giving pieces to people.

And watching their eyes light up when you show them, you hold it up and they go, wow.

The uniqueness of the art drives me and I get positive reactions wherever I go and it really fuels my desire to keep going and all the positivity that surrounds it.

- To learn more about Ben Rodgers and his burned wood prints check him out on Instagram @BurnedWoodPrints.

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

Henri Matisse's painting Le Bateau was installed upside down at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City for how many days in 1961?

Is the answer A 11, B 23, C 35, or D 47.

And the answer is D 47.

Roundwood Furniture is a collective of wood sculptors on the North shore of Lake Tahoe.

This team creates artistic furniture inspired by nature.

Let's visit the Roundwood studio and see how they give repurposed materials a second life.

(soft music) - Roundwood Furniture is located on the shore of North Lake Tahoe in Kings Beach, California.

And is sort of an art collective of individuals that pour heart and soul into building functional art.

Predominantly one of a kind artistic furniture.

Functional art to me, is a beautiful sculpture that functions in a way that you use it every day in your life as opposed to something that's static and non interactive.

Something that provides more than just visual enjoyment and has a three dimensional purpose.

The location of the Sierras and Lake Tahoe in general to me, has felt like a cathedral of mother nature's explosive diversity.

And 20 years ago I was coming outta one backpacking trip out of Destination Wilderness and being completely immersed in the visuals of all these different branches and roots.

And repeatedly looking at a stump that turned into what looks like a couch inspired me to start building functional art furniture out of that stuff.

(machine whirring) (soft music) There's nature's uniqueness in each piece.

So the ethos of Roundwood furniture is basically celebrating the beauty in the organic source of wood.

We're predominantly repurposing what's available to us that's sustainable and has a story behind it.

Because there's a total joy in being able to provide a second life for something.

(soft music) If the piece came from appear in Lake Tahoe, let's say, and it saw 60 to 80 years of bright sun and smashing water and sand blasting from the beach, it has character, has nature's tattoo in it.

And that makes it absolutely unique to nothing else in the world.

It has its own very identity.

Driftwood is super, super fun to work with because you not only have the piece that's unique, but a drastic exposed story of what happened.

Well, waves and rocks shaped that piece.

In my beginning years, I actually foraged the forests for deadwood and brought that into sculpture.

These days we're working with farmers down in the Sacramento Valley that are replanting English and Clara Walnut from orchards.

So as walnut orchards are being retired and replanted the 80 year old trees that they're retiring have so much story and beauty wrought within 'em that it's a perfect platform for us to try to expose the twisting of the grain and the rolling of the fabric of the wood.

Any character in the wood itself, in the tree, in the slice in the barrel that has a unique fabric to it.

(soft music) There's these dynamic rarities that we're trying to find that make the piece really draw you in at the end.

(upbeat music) There's something that nature does so well with asymmetry but balance.

I would say that nature driven furniture design is a central core of how I look at designing pieces.

So not just the wood itself and revering the harmonious vibrance of the wood.

(soft music) With an epoxy pore process, for instance.

I have special tricks at different times to trick that epoxy into behaving more like Mother Nature does.

So I want bubbling molten different colors.

You've got fire, which is represented by the Magma Series.

Water which is the Aqua Series.

Astral series takes care of air.

And then Terra for Earth.

And so you've got all those fundamental properties in Mother Nature, again, sort of nature driven design.

I think my, one of my favorite parts in the creative process is it's all about what I haven't figured out yet.

I usually go in with about a 50% game plan so I don't mock out to detail anything.

Kinda like building a song.

And you add layers and you step away and you come back in and I really can lose myself and any thoughts in the world to that process.

And I feel like the vibration in me is its happiest it's ever been.

Every piece that comes out of this studio has a three dot logo somewhere on it.

And that comes from the ellipsis of to be continued, so dot, dot, dot to be continued.

Where that was born from was me realizing that even though this piece is completely done there's at least three more projects, sister pieces ideas that were born from building this piece that I'm dying to try.

So this idea is not finished yet.

The piece is done, the idea grows up.

That's what for me defines me as an artist because that artistic process of learning just never stops.

That's why it's, in my opinion, one of the funnest things you could be doing with your life is creating functional art.

- For more information visit Roundwoodfurniture.com.

Up next, we visit mosaic artist Elizabeth Wright of Reno.

She creates colorful mosaics with stained glass rusted metal, old wood, anything she can get her hands on.

The result is a beautiful mosaic with intricate texture and a strong message.

(soft music) - Mosaic art is anytime you take smaller pieces of a hard material, glass, tile, stone, to create a picture or an image with those items.

So anything in that description is considered a mosaic.

I don't think I'm a typical artist in that you don't look in mine and go, oh, she does this one thing.

That's what absolutely pulls me into mosaic is that I can go in so many different directions.

But I use rusty things I find in the desert.

Dishes, pottery, beads, stone the biggest thing I use is cut stain glass.

The first thing I think of is what substrate am I gonna put it on?

And that substrate is the bottom.

What am I gonna create it on?

We were out in the Santa Rosa mountains in Nevada and I found this big deposit of these flat rocks and I was like, oh my gosh these are going to be perfect for mosaics.

But then I get down to my little pieces on nipping.

So I hand nip, nip, nip, nip, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut.

I'm gonna use silicone to glue those pieces down and then I'm gonna tape it off.

Here you have this beautiful piece of art you've created and you're gonna take a black route and you're gonna smother the whole thing of your beautiful piece you've created which is a little unnerving.

And then you clean and you clean and you clean and you clean.

The cleaning will be toothpicks and Q-tips.

You wanna get everything out so you can see every piece of glass in that piece.

So it is a little crazy when you see this process when I'm doing that, but it's very meditative and it's, I get some good music going and it's just, I can just get lost in what I'm doing.

So it's a wonderful way to relax.

(soft music) Cutty has over 50 colors of glass.

To get the the shades and all of the inspiration.

I actually have to mix the glass, almost like a painter where if I put two colors of glass next to each other they will start to give the illusion of another color.

And cutty also has seven different colors of grout.

And I took the time and you have to tape it off.

Grout one section, pull that off.

Grout the next section tape the rest of it off.

It's a really intensive process.

I like that as my art has evolved, I use reclaimed materials literally in everything I do.

It's not about the economics of it.

I feel that the reclaimed materials I use add character to the piece.

So let's say I wanna make a sunflower.

You can put it in a simple frame and that's okay, that's okay.

But to put it in a, with a rusty piece of metal we found out in the desert, and then to put it on an old piece of barn wood just makes that sunflower so much more special.

And it makes it where you can envision that sunflower near an old barn or out in a field.

It's amazing the rusty things we have found in the desert.

And you're like, What is this?

What was this?

But what I see coming from this is, I can see it in my mind.

I see something happening.

And it's not just what people think.

You don't just smash dishes and glue onto something not to make it art worthy.

You need to actually cut those into shapes and create things.

And it makes a beautiful, colorful piece.

And I think people really are like, wow that's, those were old dishes and they can see that.

But I just think it's also environmentally a good thing to do.

If I'm taking something that's just rusting away in the desert and why not?

And that adds something in its character.

And I'm also just taking some garbage out of the desert and I'm making something out of it.

It's amazing when you put some cut stain glass and some beads and it just turns it into this old thing you found in the desert into something very beautiful.

- To learn more, visit ElizabethWrightMosaics.com And that wraps it up for this edition of "Arteffects".

If you want to watch new "Arteffects" segments early make sure to check out 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.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Funding for Artifacts is made possible by Sandy Raffealli with Bill Pearce Motors, Meg and Dillard Myers.

Heidemarie Rochlin.

In memory of Sue McDowell and by the annual contributions of PBS Reno members.

(upbeat music)