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is made possible by The State Arts
and Cultural Heritage Fund, and the citizens of Minnesota.
(female narrator) On this edition of Minnesota Original--
Jon Reischl portrays the act of remembering
in his vintage-hued paintings.
Illustrator and collage artist Colin Johnson
painstakingly assembles elements for his mixed-media work.
Pianist, conductor, and educator,
Phil Mattson is recognized
as one of the top vocal jazz arrangers in the country.
I love to hear him playing Body and Soul.
These artists and more, now on Minnesota Original.
electronic music plays
drums and synthesizer play in bright rhythm
(Jon Reischl) Objectively I'm trying to portray the process of thought
and all of the stuff that goes on in your head
when you think about things.
Like for example, if I were to say your mother's name,
you might picture your mother's face, but you're also
going to include all this other information about her--
what her hair looked like at any given time;
her favorite clothes, the way that she smells--
not even all visual information--
the way her voice sounded.
That's just the stuff that's specific to her.
There's also going to be all this other analogous data
that just comes with that simple suggestion.
What I'm really trying to do visually is at least address
all of that activity that's going on in our mind.
I share my studio with 3 other artists
in an old mattress factory in St. Paul.
I went to college at the College of Visual Arts in St. Paul
where I was an illustration major.
Once I graduated from college, I didn't really want
to go down that path of being a full-time illustrator,
but I still wanted to paint and still wanted to create images.
One of the artists that I was really taken by
was Robert Rauschenberg, who's very famous
for his assemblage works--he'd use a lot of layered imagery,
but combined it all in a very weird, confusing way,
and I was very taken with that.
A mixed-media painter would be someone
who uses different mediums all together.
I use acrylic and ink and elements of collage
and photography, all together in the same space.
I begin typically by assembling some images,
generally start with photography--
stuff that I've shot or stuff that I've collected.
On the computer I'll combine it, working with, you know,
opacity and layers and multiplying layers and overlays,
two ways that I think
are interesting structurally and compositionally.
I typically don't really think about what the images
are going to have in common with one another,
but I am usually looking for a few different general types
that I'll want to combine together.
I think Tom Waits once said something to the effect of
how all you needed to write a song is the name of a girl,
the make and model of a car, and a town.
And similarly I'll typically start with some sort of figure,
something industrial and maybe something in between there also.
And when I have something that I'm happy with,
I'll have that output onto a larger piece of paper.
Usually a 24 by 30 inches is what I can get away with,
print it on a laser printer, then use a gel medium
to coat that paper with.
Since the image is actually printed with a laser printer,
it uses toner, which transfers nicely
from the paper to the gel.
The gel, it doesn't seep into the fibers of the paper.
The toner, unlike ink, which actually stains the paper,
the toner rests on top of it, and so the gel is able to pull
as much of it as possible from the paper.
The idea is to get this as thin as possible,
as much of that supporting paper off of it as possible.
We do this by soaking the image in water for 15 to 20 minutes,
get it really saturated, then we'll pull it out
and flip it over and just,
with our hands just start rolling the paper off.
I'm using the brush to pick up
some of the thinner layers of paper
that my fingertips can't quite get.
So after I've removed all of the excess paper,
I'm left with the image
imprinted onto this sheet of gel.
And after both sides are dry, then I will be able to mount it
to the wood or canvas; in this case we're going to use wood.
Basically, it's a glue like polymer.
It's used a lot in bookbinding, it's a real nice solid adhesive.
It doesn't bubble up.
After I press this for a certain period of time, and it cures,
I will be able to paint on it.
One of things I like about the process is
that it is degradative in that you lose a lot of definition
as the process goes on and then ultimately,
you are taking what you have left over and creating
something kind of new, but still related to its source,
which I think mimics the thought process.
I want people to feel comfortable
interacting with my pieces.
I've gone out of my way
to invite people touching them in the past.
I had done pieces that had an actual moving spindle
that they had to touch, and that was actually
one of the challenges showing that work,
was getting people to break through that wall.
Actually I would have to walk by
and spin it in front of people before they'd be like,
Oh, and they would do it themselves.
It's just one of those things that we're so well-trained
to keep distance, which is great when you're dealing
with stuff that's hundreds of years old that's necessary,
but I think it's building up an unnecessary wall.
Working with this process and thinking so much
about how I think, I don't think
it's changed the way that I think, but it's changed
the way that I think about how I think, if that makes sense.
We don't spend a lot of time sitting around
and thinking about the way that we think.
It's just unnatural and confusing,
but when I do try to do that now, it looks like
these images that I'm creating and I think that is to me more
because I've now established that in my mind,
as oh, this is what this looks like, so when I need
to call up an image of me thinking, I have one.
(Faye Passow) My work often has a narrative quality.
There's a little bit of a folk element to it
maybe in the way it looks.
I use humor a lot.
So the way things are drawn kind of reflect that too.
I have a lot of disasters in my work, but they're not drawn
in such a way that they really look like a disaster.
People are kind of klutzy
and the disasters are kind of nice and rounded.
Lithography looks the most
like a charcoal drawing.
You know, I love that sort of moody look
and you can get a gradation of tone
that is really difficult to get any other way.
drums, bass, & guitar play rock
I'm gonna roll the holy living daylights out of this.
Well, this particular print is
really about egos, you know,
it's about the vaulted nature of modern architecture.
It is really physically a lot of work.
You know, I do it because of the way it looks
and because that's what I want to get.
Then one of your rewards is that you have multiples,
that you go through all that process
and you don't just get one.
Sometimes I get tired, but I keep doing it
because I can't stop! laughs
(Bettye Olson) I think every artist has a language
they develop that's their own.
As you paint, you do grow stronger
and I saw my language developing with brushstroke and color.
(woman) Bettye and her work have provided a bridge
between that generation active in the 1930s and '40s
and what happened later on
in the women's art movement in the 1970s.
Bettye's had a remarkably long career.
She's a little bit chagrined when people point this out,
but when you're 90, I think you have to expect this.
Bettye's significance lies
in two different streams that come together.
One is that she is very much influenced
and part of the abstract expressionist movement
of the mid part of the 20th century.
(Bettye) This is basically an abstraction,
because even my abstractions have themes--
the theme of this one is water.
(Patricia) There was something about how the brush mark was made
that was thought to be
expressionistic and have meaning.
And if you look at Bettye's work, you can see
that she has basically mastered that stylistic device.
The second thing is that she has been very true
to her deeply-felt relation to nature, and you see this
both in intimate works like her flower paintings,
and you see it in her more grand subjects--
mountains, the ocean, the sea.
(Bettye) I've always been attracted to nature,
and I'm a typical Minnesotan, I love to be outdoors.
I find a lot of energy in nature,
and I find that that gives me energy
and I put that energy into the brushstroke
and try to express it in the painting.
(Patricia) Basically she has come forward
with a very unique personal expression
that puts her in the foremost ranks
of painters in this region.
I curated a show of Bettye's work in 2006,
called Persistence of Vision, because she had been working
by that time for 60 years, and I felt that she had
a remarkable persistence of this deeply-felt vision
that she brought from her work from when she started
in the late '40s right up to the present time.
(Bettye) She did a very interesting format for the show.
She picked one painting from before '96
and matched it with one that I'd done in the last 10 years.
(Patricia) I was trying to make this argument that
while she was continually growing as an artist,
that what she had at the basic level
is a very strong vision
that she showed through her art.
You know, I can use all these kind of descriptive words
of dynamic and expressive and direct movement,
but this is one of those visual things that has to be seen
and appreciated, and at some point, words just fall away.
(Bettye) I'm active with my sketching
and I do maintain my studio,
and I'm there many times a week.
My artwork goes on.
Creating art is my balance in life,
and it's so a part of me, I cannot see life without it.
(Patricia) It's very clear the joy she gets in making things,
and also the joy that's coming through in the work itself.
I always say, nobody hired me, no one fired me,
no one retired me, but creative people just keep going.
Picking up a paintbrush does not take a lot of physical energy,
so you can keep painting, and I see no need to stop.
bass, drums, synthesizer and strings play in bright rhythm
(Colin Johnson) I remember going into museums when I was a kid
and I would see like, minimalism,
and it never did anything for me
because I didn't see it as being hugely different
than the wall next to it.
My work is maximalism; I mean it's like the exact opposite.
I always love coming back to pieces by other artists
that contain so much detail that every time you look at it,
it sort of recaptures your imagination
and you see something that you perhaps hadn't seen before.
And I hope that my work does that too.
I think in general I'm just drawn to detail.
I've sent pieces off to gallery shows and got them back again
and just kept working on 'em, so you know, that might be,
that might be a sickness, I don't know.
I was an illustration major, and after graduation,
I became a freelance illustrator.
I worked with a pretty good cross section
of all the major magazines, Better Homes and Gardens,
US News and World Report, and Newsweek, you know,
pretty much all the major magazines,
'cause I've been doing this close to 20 years now.
A lot of it at this point in time,
in terms of the illustration work,
is pretty much straight painting,
as opposed to my personal work,
which is heavily collage-based.
I've only done one collage piece for a magazine client,
and that was for Smithsonian last year.
Typically, the magazine clients
don't have that kind of time to give you.
Like an 8 x 10 piece would take me like a month to do.
But The Smithsonian wasn't very big;
it was about 4 x 5 inches,
and they gave me plenty of time
and I think the overall result turned out great.
As far as my personal work goes,
you know, I can do anything I want to do.
This is a big sort of 40-by-60-inch piece
that I started a while back.
It basically starts where I'm just painting in
like big blocks of color
to give a lot of color to the piece, but then to also start
building the collage into the background color.
I think actually the most fun is the fact that I have to
like go on a scavenger hunt to find all this stuff.
These are like old Valentine's Day cards.
These are both old pieces of packaging.
This is like an old tobacco card.
As many different sorts of things as I can possibly get
into the piece without kinda repeating anything.
And actually, now that I'm sorta filling in some of these gaps,
the pieces will tend to become smaller and smaller as I go along.
To sit down with an X-Acto knife
and cut it out each individual little piece,
that takes a pretty long time to do
in order to build up a wealth of material.
It can take me days sometimes
just to fill one of these things enough
so that I have enough material in order to start gluing.
There is sort of like a filling process with this type of work
where you have to get to a certain point
and bring the elements close enough together
where there can then be like relationships
that you can play with--
more of like a conversation going on in terms of the way
that the different elements are communicating with one another.
Actually the work, even though I refer to it as collage
for lack of a better term,
it's actually pretty much 50% collage and 50% painting.
Even though it started as straight-up collage pieces,
I've actually branched out and started doing the collage
as actual characters that are moving through a landscape
and interacting with characters that I've actually hand-painted.
The straight-up painted characters
are characters that have
a lot of nature-related stuff going on,
where the collage characters are
supposed to be indicative of humankind
sort of spilling all this stuff all over the nature.
So there is a definite man-nature duality
to the newer work that I'm excited about.
I like all the parts of the process of doing the collage.
Sometimes I get impatient because it takes so long,
but I have to remind myself that it's,
it's a marathon and not a sprint,
and I have to just come in every day to the studio
and take one day at a time and do as much as I can.
I really don't know
how to define what I do.
I've heard it defined in a lot of different ways--
pop surrealism; or at one point I think
all the artists who were doing work in a sort of similar vein
to what I'm doing, were referred to as lowbrow,
which nobody seemed to like.
I tend to leave that to other people, because I have
like 80,000 little pieces to glue, so I don't have the time
to try and figure what, you know, what the work is.
(men and women) Bossa nova eyes
In love with a Latin rhythm
Soft Brazilian
(Phil Mattson) The essence of vocal jazz is not so much
improvisation as instrumental jazz is.
It's mostly about singing arrangements
that treat the song
in interesting harmonic and rhythmic ways.
There's sometimes where you just like nice harmony.
playing jazz chords
But if you did that all the time,
then boring, or something, you know.
So it's kinda this mixing up of texture that is a key
to writing an interesting arrangement.
(woman) My life a wreck you're making
(Phil) Right now I teach singing and arranging
and I accompany several singers in town
and I write arrangements,
and I'm directing 3 vocal jazz groups.
We sing songs from The Great American Songbook.
They're called standards-- they're the songs
of George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin.
They're good songs, and they're arranged in such a way
to maximize harmonic interest and rhythmic delivery.
While I play for you
Sometimes it's hot then again it's blue
I describe Phil Mattson as innovator, pure innovator.
Phil Mattson is the greatest jazz vocal arranger
on the planet and in the circle of music,
everybody knows Phil Mattson.
One, 2, 3, 4.
Dum dum dum doo-doo
(Phil) You've got to separate more.
Phil plays the passage as he would like it sung
Let's do it again, and let's take the tempo just a little slower.
I think it would be more bossa nova-ish if we took it...
When I was 5 years old, I played a chord on the piano
that was a dominant 7th chord
and the hair on my head and back stood up.
It was just the sound of those notes,
and even though I resisted it from time to time,
ultimately, I ended up being a musician.
The Phil Mattson Singers began in my basement in 1983
and we entered a contest
called The Great American Choral Festival,
and we were fortunate enough to win that and won $10,000.
We were nominated twice for Grammy Awards.
I've arranged for most famously Manhattan Transfer,
but also very well-known, the Real Group from Sweden,
Chanticleer, The Four Freshmen, Dale Warland Singers.
I've done approximately 150 arrangements.
One, 2, 3, 4.
That's the way things seem to go
In Old Brazil
(Phil) In the early '70s, late '60s,
I was hired to direct a vocal jazz choir.
There weren't many arrangements published at that time.
When I started arranging,
I had a lot of really inspirational ideas
that turned out to be new for vocal arranging at the time.
Each group has its own sound,
but I think what they're interested in
is something unique that I might bring to their repertoire.
(men and women) Looking through my bossa
Nova eyes
Well we'll figure it out, we'll figure it out. all laugh
It's hard to know what to do, right?
Phil's arrangements are not easy.
Phil is very sophisticated.
He's just so knowledgeable about music, about chords,
about how the voices flow, they go from one note to another,
and the way they come up and down
and come up and down between each other.
Somehow it's gotta come make sense this way, but when you
hear the chords, it's somehow gotta make sense that way
when you hear the voices going in and out.
Somehow Phil Mattson figured it out.
extremely rapidly Doo-be do-be doo-be do-ba doo-be
Doo-be do-be doo-be do-ba doo-be doo-be doo-ba
Doo-be do-be doo-be do-ba doo-be doo-be doo-ba
Doo-ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba
Doo-be do-be doo-be do-be doo-be doo-be doo-ba
saxophone solo
(Phil) Richie was instrumental in getting the Manhattan Transfer,
probably the most popular vocal jazz group,
to commission an arrangement of Body and Soul.
And I introduced Phil to the Manhattan Transfer,
because I knew it was a match made in heaven.
Sounds good to me
Should sound good to you
I love to hear him playing Body and Soul
Very pleasing to the ear
(Phil) Body and Soul and is a very difficult arrangement to sing.
Very difficult; the chords are changing all the time.
The voice singing is kind of in clusters,
where everybody's going up and down,
so nobody's sitting on the same notes very often.
Dum dum dum-dum
Dit-dum dum dum
Dit-dum dum-dum-dum
(Richie) Bossa Nova Eyes is a composition
I wrote about 10 years ago, and Phil Mattson
has done a fabulous vocal arrangement on it.
Instead of starting right off with the song,
which is this...
it starts with a solo bass singer
just singing a groove like this...
Then the ladies come in
with something like the melody on doo.
Da da da da-da da da
(Phil) The first time the group sang it,
they were really excited.
To sing a brand new arrangement is fun,
and there's something about this arrangement turned out well.
Bossa nova eyes
Just move as the spirit moves you
Feelings tell you
(Phil) More than almost anything
I've loved harmony in music.
That's what thrilled me
Melodies yes, rhythms yes, but harmony's the most
and harmonies are very much a part of jazz.
With you I am looking through my bossa nova
Eyes da da
(man) Minnesota Original is made possible by
The State Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund,
and the citizens of Minnesota.
orchestral fanfare