- [Narrator] This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

- [Dalia] Funding for WEDU Arts Plus is provided by the Community Foundation, Tampa Bay In this edition of WEDU Arts Plus, artwork that's heaven sent.

- An icon while it is a painting, we don't call it painting, we call it writing because it's really meant to be the gospel or scripture in visual form.

- [Dalia] Photographing motherhood.

- [Megan] I'm inspired by visual ideas and ways in which I can imagine why kids can engage.

- [Dalia] The story of Malcolm X on stage.

- [Power] You tap into his energy, you know that's emanating off the page in the books, the speeches, the interviews, what you hear.

- [Dalia] And working with alcohol ink.

- [Nicole] It's liquid, it's fluid, it's going to move, it's dynamic, it may dry faster than you'd like.

- It's all coming up next on WEDU Arts Plus.

(bright upbeat music) Hello, I'm Dalia Colon, and this is WEDU Arts Plus.

In the beginning, Christine Hales was like a lot of artists, but then she discovered the path of painting religious icons.

Let's visit her Bradenton studio where faith and art intersect.

- I'm Christine Simoneau Hales and I'm an artist.

In high school in Quincy, Massachusetts, my art teachers thought that I should apply to art college.

And once I got in, it was like, I was in a world that was my world.

So ever since then, I've always been an artist.

Well, we're here to talk about the icons that I paint.

The only thing I knew about icons until about 25 years ago was in an art history class.

And they were just a slide that you see and so forth.

But my husband is a well known garden photographer.

He is a British garden photographer and he was writing and photographing a book called "Monastic Gardens".

And we went to a convent in France and the sisters there were like, "Oh, you're an artist.

"We have to introduce you to sister Miriam, "she's our iconographer."

And I thought, well, to be polite, I said, "Okay, sure, I'd love that."

When I walked out of there, my husband said I looked completely different.

It was like, the light went on.

An icon while it is a painting, we don't call it painting, we call it writing.

Because it's really meant to be the gospel or scripture in visual form.

It's almost like instead of being a painting, it's like a pictograph.

Remember like Egyptian art, how you would see on the walls they would have pictures of birds, but it would be a word, that's what icons are.

So that's really a language, it's a visual language - Icons in Christian art are actually a fairly ancient form of Christian art.

They are intended not just to be a piece of art or a beautiful thing to display, but actually a window into heaven.

Icons are intended to be used as a focal point while you pray that enables you to hopefully, more clearly hear and discern the will of God in your life.

- An iconographer is someone who seeks to be more in the background.

In iconography, we never sign our paintings on the front.

Never, if we do sign them, we sign them on the back.

Before I start, I do my Bible reading, I do my praying, I do my meditating.

So it's like, I prepare myself in my mind and in my spirit to engage with the materials.

And when I engage, it's like you get into a zone.

It's just me and God.

And so it's like a dialogue, it's very much like prayer.

It's painting in prayer mixed together.

It starts with a drawing and the drawing itself is composed of what we call sacred geometry.

So the composition is very specific.

Then the painting methods that we use are based on classical painting.

We paint with pigments, with dry pigments.

So we mix those dry pigments with the yolk of an egg.

What you can achieve with egg tempera is layer upon layer of transparent veils of color.

And it creates this rich, deep experience which you can't get any other way.

- I'm really lucky to know Christine, I asked her to write an icon for me.

There is a character in the Bible that many people know he wrote the majority of the New Testament, his name is St. Paul.

And whenever you see St. Paul depicted in art, he looks like an old man with a pen.

And he looks like he's writing on a scroll.

- And the drawings take hours and hours and hours.

I mean probably maybe eight hours of drawing, at least.

So I came up with a drawing and showed it to him and he said, "Well, no."

(laughs) - And so I asked Christine to depict St. Paul, not as kind of a wavy old man in his study, writing a letter, but as a strong young man, building tents, surrounded by people, engaging those people and becoming in relationship with those people in order to spread the gospel.

An icon enables you to picture God in a way that God reveals himself to the writer of the icon.

But also if you're commissioning an icon like I am with Christine, enables you to get someone who in prayer can share the vision that you have to depict a character in the Bible or a Saint or a scene in the life of Jesus to come alive.

- The Eastern Orthodox people believe that the only people who can write an icon are men who are Orthodox.

I'm not Orthodox, I'm not Russian and I'm a woman, and I really did a lot of soul searching on that.

And I felt like God has called me to do this.

So I just thought, well, God, you're the one I answer to.

And I just have to take it on the chin because it's such a beautiful art form.

- There's a really important intersection between faith and art.

And you could see that just with the music that was developed in medieval times.

So much of the great historic classical music that we have, it comes from the Christian tradition.

And then when you just think about the Sistine Chapel and all the phenomenal artists of the time that were commissioned by the church so that our faith can come alive through art and to a degree, the liturgy, the mass, the whole Eucharist is in a lot of ways a type of, it's more than just, but a type of performance art.

- It's just a wonderful thing when people can access art almost subliminally, like they go to church to pray and worship, but these beautiful figures of the saints, we talk about the communion of saints that we're not alone.

There are others who came before us and who have the same experience.

We say, icons are the invisible made visible.

- To learn more, visit christinehalesicons.com.

Meet Chesapeake, Virginia photographer, Megan Wynne.

She uses her camera to explore the maternal experience and the powerful relationship between mother and child.

- I always made art about relationships.

When I became a mother, I was really affected by the intimacy and the vulnerability unlike any other relationship I'd ever had.

My work is about telling the story of the experience of being a mother.

I was adopted at birth, so it was also very strange to physically have my own child, how dependent they were on me.

I never grew up seeing anyone breastfeed and I did it, it was just so intense.

I started to document it.

That was my very first experience of making work on motherhood.

I'm inspired by visual ideas and ways in which I can imagine my kids can engage.

And that requires a lot of thinking and planning because I often have one shot that I can do it.

I don't wanna do something that's not fun for my kids 'cause then they won't wanna make art with me.

My plan was to become a professional tap dancer, but you can't major in tap dancing in college.

So I went into fine art school.

I started out in painting, but I did photography when I was a sculpture major.

And then I got an MFA in new genres.

This piece is from my MFA thesis exhibition.

I was interested in 16th and 17th century anatomical engravings.

I thought of them and how they were done as kind of metaphors for human frailty.

And here's an example of something I was inspired by.

It's essentially a cadaver holding open their skin so that you can see their insides.

So it just seemed like a metaphor for frailty and exposing oneself.

(soft music plays) This is another piece that I have up in my studio.

It's from a series called "Foundation".

With this series, I thought about the idea of a mother being present or having a trace of herself there, kind of a haunting feeling.

They speak to the invisibility of caregiving.

All kids are good artists, that's why my husband's an elementary art teacher.

He just loves the work he sees every day.

It's so inspiring and feeds his practice.

And he used to teach college, he used to teach at VCU and it's like he can't compare it with the joy he gets from seeing the work of first graders.

I will drive past through hell We take our kids really seriously, we don't take ourselves too seriously.

It's kind of asserting the validity of the creative impulse in the children.

We encourage them, we try to create an environment where they feel free to express themselves.

And sometimes I'm shocked with how comfortable they are.

Let go This project I worked on with my kids, I revisited a concept I've already worked with in the past.

And that piece is called "Mask and Motherhood".

- Open your mouth.

- I actively choose to give up control and see what will happen and how far they would take it, 'cause you don't really know.

- This doesn't look like you're sick at all.

It now looks like you're happy, happy, happy.

- I wanted to experiment in giving up control, a metaphor for being a parent, being a mother.

I wanted to revisit the idea with three children and they're different ages now.

(upbeat music) Fear no more Fear no more Fear no more My son was delighted, but you could see him climbing on my head.

It was more violent than the last time.

(laughs) For some reason, that dance, it's like a circus.

That dance is thrilling to me, it's exciting.

Just free experimentation, which I think is beautiful.

The more I think about my work and it's evolved, I think about the fear of failure.

I've started realizing more the kind of everyday struggle of motherhood, combined with the joy and humor of it.

Like with a lot of my work, it's an exercise of letting go, allowing myself to feel the anxiety and doing it anyway.

I feel like one of my pieces are successful, they have that element to them of me really allowing myself not to know what's gonna happen and not being afraid.

The experience of any relationship is not all perfectly serene, nor should it be.

And that's kind of how motherhood is in general.

It's an exercise in being in control and then selectively letting go of control.

You can't completely be in control all the time.

How do I let them be themselves and grow as a person and yet also protect them and keep them safe?

That's a struggle I have every day as a mother.

So I investigated in my work.

(upbeat music) - To see more of Wynne's work, visit meganwynne.net.

The play "Detroit Red" shines a spotlight on civil rights figure, Malcolm X.

The performance focuses on his time as a young man living in Boston, Massachusetts.

Here from the talented team, Behind the Show.

- [Narrator] The lasting image of Malcolm X is of an undaunted civil rights activist.

- You're going to have a racial explosion and a racial explosion is more dangerous than anatomic explosion.

It's gonna explode because black people are dissatisfied.

- [Narrator] Here in 1963, two years before his assassination, he was the fully formed firebrand.

But he wasn't as the new play, "Detroit Red" reminds us born that way.

- I'm late three months on the bills and if Ella hears you, she's gonna jam me up for the money I don't have.

- How does one reach their full potential into manhood, into adulthood?

So I was always fascinated by this part of him.

- Will Power is the playwright of "Detroit Red", a drama now having its world premier at ArtsEmerson.

- Oh, he was from Michigan and they eventually called him Detroit red.

But that's because Lansing red didn't sound as good, you know what I mean?

So he was from East Lansing which at that point was pretty like rural.

- [Narrator] Malcolm X or Malcolm Little as he was known then, referred to himself as a hick when he came to Boston in 1940 to live with his half sister Ella.

He was 16 and would spend 12 years in the city, nearly a third of his short life.

- 'Cause when he first got to Boston, rather than getting a job immediately, his sister, Ella which was his older sister but was kind of a matriarchal figure for him.

She was like, go explore the city.

Don't get a job yet, go explore.

And so he got on the bus, got on a train and before he even knew anyone, he just went all around the city and got exposed to these places.

- Smart boy, you read don't you?

- Yes, sir.

Working on a few things now, never fall from my books.

- How much differently did you think about him when you actually came to Boston and started working on the piece?

- I got, being in Boston gave me just a closer view of who he was during that time.

Not just who he was and what he did, but also the places.

- [Narrator] We met Power at Darrell's Restaurant in Roxbury, in the same neighborhood Malcolm X once roamed.

It's here where Power himself walked the streets over the last two years, talking to long time Bostonians to get a feel for who Malcolm X was in his youth.

- I talked to a couple of old guys that knew him in the '40s during his time.

I mean, that was crazy.

And that's real interesting because people who know, when you know someone, but you know them before they're like an icon or celebrity, is not the same things.

These guys like, "Yeah, I knew Malcolm.

"He was around talking me."

It's not the same like, oh, reverence or something like that which is real gold for me as a writer.

- [Interviewer] But does it get to a point where you think that you can think like him, that you can see like him?

- [Power] Yeah, for me at least as a writer, you tap into his energy, that's emanating off the page in the books, the speeches, the interviews, what you hear.

- That's like asking the fox to protect you from the wolf.

- [Power] And then I try to tap into his rhythm patterns and speech.

- Shorty, can you get me a gun?

- What for?

- Can you get me one?

- [Narrator] In Boston, Malcolm X replaced menial jobs with work in crime rings, peddling cocaine and robbing homes, a spree that ultimately landed him in the Massachusetts prison system.

- If we as audiences see Malcolm X or JFK or Martin Luther King or Susan B. Anthony, and they're like these perfect figures, then we adults and young people are gonna be like, well, that's great, but I can never be that because I have doubts, I have failures.

- What the play is showing is that he doesn't always want to do what he's doing.

He's constantly working for something greater and bigger.

- [Narrator] Actor Eric Berryman plays Malcolm X.

We met him in front of the home, Detroit red shared with his sister Ella.

- So this is my first time walking around here.

- [Narrator] Like Power, Berryman has gone deep down the Malcolm X rabbit hole, studying film, photographs and writings, determining who he was before he leveraged prison resources to reinvent himself as one of the country's most galvanizing voices.

- Is it any more daunting for you to be playing a real life person?

- No, it's more exciting to me 'cause that's all one, can I think hope to do when you're playing someone who really lived is try to attain a part of their essence.

And when father was murdered, we ate dandelion roots and corn mush and anything we could find.

- [Narrator] He has taken one solid note though, from a Boston woman who knew Malcolm X in his youth and took exception to the poor posture, Berryman thought a young, less confident Malcolm might have.

- And she said, Malcolm never slouched.

(laughs) And I, she said, yeah, she says, "Malcolm was always, always had a pride and never slouched "and he was always upright."

So I slouch a little less now.

- [Narrator] Which is the key to understanding the physical and emotional bearing of a man made for monumentality.

- For more information, head to artsemerson.org.

Nicole Eldridge is a self-taught abstract artist in Reno, Nevada.

She uses alcohol ink to render colorful creations that are dynamic and emotive.

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

You would never guess that based on all my artwork 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 like finished piece that you have.

And it's that, that time that I do love it, that's all that really matters.

(upbeat 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 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 from 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.

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 rogue color and try to test myself.

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 wanna 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.

(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 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.

(upbeat music) So my work, it's 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 a content place and focused.

And you can see that across the board in all of my art.

It's very emotional and very liquid and fluid and you can see all the movement in there.

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 my work is done.

(upbeat music) - Check out more of her work at artbycolee.com.

And that wraps it up for this edition of WEDU Arts Plus.

For more arts and culture, visit wedu.org/artsplus.

Until next time, I'm Dalia Colon, thanks for watching.

(bright upbeat music) Funding for WEDU Arts Plus is provided by the Community Foundation, Tampa Bay.

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