- [Announcer] Funding for "The Art Show" is made possible by the Rockwern Charitable Foundation, the L&L Nippert Charitable Foundation, Montgomery County, the Virginia W. Kettering Foundation, the Wohlgemuth Herschede Foundation.

Additional funding provided by... And viewers like you, thank you.

(no audio) (joyful music) - In this edition of "The Art Show," painting sports scenes and more.

(joyful music) Detroit and Dayton fusion, (joyful music continues) and beautifully beaded bugs.

(joyful music continues) It's all ahead on this edition of "The Art Show."

(joyful music) (joyful music continues) (joyful music continues) (no audio) Hi, I'm Rodney Veal and welcome to "The Art Show," where each week we provide access to local and regional artists and arts organizations.

2025 Sports Artist of the Year, Gary Blevins, specializes in depictions of exhilarating sports scenes.

Football tackles, baseball bat swings, and other dramatic athletic moments are captured by Gary's brush.

But he also applies his incredible attention to detail to wildlife scenes, stunning landscapes, and more.

Step inside Gary's Springfield gallery to learn more about his creative journey and kaleidoscope of work.

(no audio) (calming music) - My name is Gary Blevins and I am an artist.

I cover most of the range from sports art to landscapes, to portraiture, a little bit of everything.

The world around me is my subject matter.

Pattie, my girlfriend, will tell you that as we travel, I'm always looking out the window telling her to, "Get a picture of that, get a picture of that."

My art is an attempt to be realistic.

I capture what I'm trying to capture.

I have this vision of what I want to do, and most of the time I can do that with my style.

I went to the Dayton Art Institute for two years as a full-time student.

After that period, I went to Ohio State.

I came out of school, started my own art supply store right here in Springfield, and I only lasted about a year and a half because I didn't realize you had to have customers to have an art supply store.

I always told myself that I would do one painting a year, no matter what it was.

I did people's cats and dogs and houses.

And I did that for a number of years because I started a family.

Can't eat paint and canvas, so I got jobs.

But the whole thing turned around in 2002 when I got affiliated with Ohio State.

I was working for a printing company and a gentleman came in from a marketing group out of Cincinnati, and he was having cards printed that were of Ohio State players.

He said they were looking for someone that could do a painting of the stadium since they added 19 rows to the top.

And I told him that I could, and he looked at me and, yeah, yeah, right, buddy.

I went home and I did a watercolor of the stadium, and when he came back to pick up his order, I presented him with that watercolor and he said, "We can use that."

And at that point, I decided maybe you can do something with this art stuff.

Well, as far as detail in my paintings, to me, it's one of the most important things.

Creating that detail, using a small brush, even though it's going to take a lot of time, taking the time to do it and make that painting something that people want to dive into and really look at it close.

Wildlife is always a challenge for me because first of all, the environment has to be right.

There's a lot of questions that you have to ask yourself to put them in the right location.

And then trying to figure out how do you do fur?

I have a tiger jumping out of water and I'm thinking, "How in the world do you paint water?"

So you have to figure those things out.

(joyful music) I enjoy doing the portrait work, doing famous people, people that are right here from Springfield and local people, and doing a lot of historical type paintings.

I recently did one of the Wright Brothers with Harry Toulmin, who was the attorney that did all the patents for him.

The subject matter of art that I really enjoy, I really enjoy sports.

That's probably number one.

When we talk about sports art, it is totally different.

I think artists have to know the sport and understand the sport.

There's a lot of detail to sports art.

When you talk about logos and uniforms and all the things that go with it, all those things help tell the story and I think it's necessary to put all those things on there.

A lot of people probably don't recognize, color is important to those teams, and you have to have those colors right and they'll let you know if you don't.

So I was named the United States Sports Artist of the Year for 2025.

The award that I received comes out of Daphne, Alabama at the United States Sports University, and they have an art museum and the art archives at that museum.

I currently have 14 paintings hanging in the museum now.

I've had my work in several places, really across the country.

I've had painting shown at the Brandywine Museum in Chadds Ford, a painting of the Wyeths.

I've had paintings displayed at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

I've had paintings displayed at Arlington, Vermont, at the Norman Rockwell Studio where he did his most famous work, which I'm most proud of that one.

And I've also been displayed and I have permanent paintings hanging at the Terry Redlin Museum in Watertown, South Dakota.

Springfield's special to me.

I was born and raised here.

My artistic space is Gary Blevins Art Gallery at 145 West High Street in Springfield, Ohio.

We've been here for three years now.

I just wanted a place where people could come and look and enjoy the artwork, maybe learn a little bit, read some of the stories that are next to the paintings, and just enjoy the art.

We have games that they can do, like "Where's Waldo" in one of my paintings.

I have a hat, blankets, I got a canoe and different items that they have to find in that painting.

Because what I was finding was when kids come in to look at paintings, they have a tendency just to kind of glance and walk by.

Well, this makes them stop, really look at the detail and look at all the elements that's going into that painting, and I find that exciting.

I never would've dreamed that I would've had an art gallery with just my art.

When I was in school, I felt like other students appreciated my art, but they were art students.

That's a different thing.

So I never thought I would have a community support me.

I never feel like I've finished a painting.

I can look at every painting and go back and say, "I should have done this and I should have done that."

I have to put that detail in there and make that thing go all the way, and I'll still leave something out.

It's a struggle, but it's something I strive for.

(no audio) - If you'd like to learn more about this or any other story on today's show, visit us online at cetconnect.org or thinktv.org.

(no audio) Dayton and Detroit are two cities built on invention, industry, music, and more.

And when it comes to creativity, neither has been afraid to make some noise.

The creative connection was on full display at The Contemporary Dayton, bringing the work of three dynamic Detroit artists right here to the region.

Let's step inside the contemporary to discover what fuels the work of Jason Revok, Paul Verdell, and Jamea Richmond-Edwards.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - My earliest experiences of art in Detroit is my upbringing.

So my mother's a dancer.

She would go dancing on the weekend and I would observe her getting her hair, makeup ready.

We wouldn't call it art, we would just call it culture in Detroit.

We would have dance competitions, we would make up dance routines.

Detroit was known as the hair capital, so my understanding of art was always informed by my community.

- Yeah, I think the hand is everything.

I think as far as like with my works you, you know, I want them to have hand in it, so I want them to look like they were created by a human still, and that's something that's incredibly important to me to have it look gestural.

- Like dedicated my entire life pretty much to like spray painting all surfaces you're not supposed to paint on.

- To me, it doesn't get any more American than Detroit.

Detroit is a testament of the resilience of this country and really how we come together.

And Detroit is a very DIY type of city.

And so I feel that our coming together here in Dayton is like very timely as well because it expands the conversation beyond Detroit into the Great Lakes, which there's been a significant relationship.

- I think it means quite a lot.

I've lived in Toledo, Ohio, and I went to Bowling Green State University for my undergrad.

So Ohio is definitely close to me, even though I live in Detroit now.

But I think having the works here and having come down to Dayton and just kind of like seeing the community here and seeing the want for art and how people are incredibly interested in art, that's very important and I very much really enjoy that.

- I relied on going out and exploring these environments that I had spent a lot of time in and sampling the environment, finding interesting little things that were like malleable that I could take back to the studio and shape.

So that almost exclusively consisted of wood.

So I would go out to the city, I would go into neighborhoods, I would go into like commercial districts, I'd go into industrial districts and anywhere there was kind of neglected architectural remnants, things that were once homes, things that were once schools, things that were churches, places where people did business, anything that kind of had ghosts of life lived, I collected those things.

And my only way of intervening on those materials was by cutting a straight line with a saw.

When my daughter was born and my wife's like, "We're going back home," I felt it was unethical for me to take these materials back to Los Angeles and continue to make this work.

- I think what drew me to Detroit was the community.

There was a huge artist community that I had been hearing about in Detroit, and I had several friends who had already made the move from Ohio, and it also became kind of a place for me to stay grounded and make the work that I wanted to make without having to be too constrained.

- [Jamea] So my film, "Leviathan," is a short experimental film that examines my family's relationship to the great migration.

At the time when I created this work, I just recently relocated back to my hometown of Detroit after being away for 22 years.

So in the film, you will see me examining Detroit from a new lens, wanting to learn more, and through this new lens, I'm able to dream and find new alternatives and new possibility within my lineage, within my genealogy.

(upbeat music) - Well, it's funny because "Tabernacle" actually came from the fact that I was like driving around Detroit and I kept seeing churches that had that word in it, tabernacle, and it flies off the tongue.

It's like an interesting word to me to say, and I looked up the definition of it and it really means portable sanctuary.

And to me, that felt like, oh, a studio practice.

- [Jason] I kind of found myself wanting to make things that didn't really make sense within the context of what I had dedicated myself to.

I wanted to somehow make work that not just like visually, but like in the process of actually making the painting was a way of reconnecting with that original initial feeling of excitement and emotional, energetic action of making a mark.

- [Jamea] I am identified as a futurist, and the most important aspect of my work is being able to imagine and dream possible realities.

For me, when viewers are looking at my work, I hope that they take away the capacity to dream and imagine and to live in those worlds that they create.

- [Jason] And I like that idea of the most simple gesture being so meaningful and so threatening and having so many kind of like stigmas, both positive and negative, attached to it.

There's a long history of call and response within art making practice.

Graffiti is no different than that, or music is no different than that.

My work is filled with references to other artists, and graffiti very much is a practice that has its own kind of boundaries and established kind of standards.

- Jason and Jamea, I've known since I had moved to Detroit, and they're incredible artists, and I actually, you know, look up to them like a lot.

They are very much mentors, you know, they've been doing this for a lot longer than I have, and it's incredible, and it's also like very flattering to be a part of a show with them.

(upbeat music) - If you crave more art goodness in your life, the podcast "Rodney Veal's Inspired By" is available now.

You can find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Learn more and find show notes at thinktv.org or cetconnect.org.

- Mikelle Hickman-Romine of Columbus is an artist whose palette is made up of tiny glass beads.

She painstakingly recreates some of Mother Nature's most overlooked creatures.

Let's visit Mikelle in her home studio, which overlooks her backyard, a place where she finds much of her inspiration.

(calming music) - I'm a beadweaver, so that means I sew little tiny seed beads together with a needle and thread, one bead at a time to make beaded glass fabric, and then I make jewelry out of those pieces of fabric.

When I was a little girl, I played with all my dressy great-grandmother's like mid-century costume jewelry and loved it, fell in love for life.

And as I got older, and I love jewelry, I'm very working class, as was my great-grandmother, so I learned how to make it.

And so I was making earrings, making jewelry, a little bit of this, little bit of that, and started reading some craft magazines.

One of them is called the "Lapidary Journal," was very popular then, and they did a feature on a woman who uses the technique that I'm using now to make hats, handbags, and these huge beaded sphere necklaces, and they were crazy.

And I was like, "This is very interesting."

So she had a tutorial in the back of the magazine for how to make a flat weave, and so I picked it up and tried it, and immediately I was like, "Oh, yes, yes."

(laughs) So I got really fascinated with this technique, and then eventually learned to make some components that are reverse engineered from some antique components and started developing my own line of jewelry.

And then as time goes on, I start pushing it to see how far it can go, making flowers, making floral jewelry, making some stuff like that, dimensional.

And then eventually it becomes the problem of how do you make jewelry that doesn't spend most of its life in a box or a drawer?

And that means that it would have to be a successful object as well as a successful piece of jewelry.

And how do you harmonize those things?

There's a component of meaning to it that's necessary.

There's a narrative and a story that's important.

And so I started considering, I'm a native Ohio girl, I wanted to do something that was about my home, and so I started looking at the native moths and butterflies in Ohio and how I could depict them and their habitat and make these very cool wearable, life-size, giant silk moths and stuff.

One of the things that's very interesting about trying to get these done, like I get these little eye patterns down or whatever, and then trying to figure out how to do this without getting too, too literal because too literal, it looks geometric, it doesn't look natural.

So when to back off and become more painterly, more impressionistic about how to get a good rendering, but also try to hit that uncanny valley thing so that while you were wearing it, somebody might have that moment of, "Do you have a bug on you?"

(calming music) What I'm usually doing is reference photographs of these moths and butterflies, and I will usually choose one, particularly for the specific markings, because there are wide variations in markings in nature, and I'm like, "Oh, I'm going to do this one's markings."

And then another one, it's usually for the position.

So it's like, "Oh, his wings are spread just so, but it's just enough that you can see his underwing."

And then I make a drawing that is measured to scale, and then I am roughly drawing the markings and stuff, and then I start making a pattern.

And the first one is usually awful, but it gives me a place to start.

So I will go over and over again until I have it refined to something that I was like, okay, this marking is right, the ones that have protective eye marking shapes or whatever, they have to kind of look like they're looking at you.

(laughs) So trying to get that right, and sometimes I'll have to do little tiny studies of just that section until it's pretty correct.

And then once I get an upper wing pattern, I replicate it real quick, so I have both wings, and then I usually have to do the lower wing pattern.

That black witch moth of mine, I think I made 19 different iterations before I figured out how to get it done.

(calming music) This one, the finishes are what makes it very blingy, right?

But the color, if you let the finish speak for itself and it's very hyper real, but once you are just looking at this kind of like orange, blush, mauve, beige color scheme, that is actually what the moth looks like.

(calming music continues) And then also when you hold these things up to the light and the light comes through them, that changes a lot.

This is one of the pleasures of working with glass, is that it is a living material that takes a lot of different aspects of the light and uses them.

I get to have a lot of conversations with people about the wonder of the place we are, that you don't have to travel the whole world to see wonders.

Like they're right underneath our feet.

And then it becomes a conversation about leave the leaves, plant some native plants, like figure out how to cultivate, even in our human spaces, a place where we get to share our world with these things that belong here and are awesome.

(calming music continues) (no audio) - And that wraps it up for this edition of "The Art Show."

Until next time, I'm Rodney Veal.

Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) - [Announcer] Funding for "The Art Show" is made possible by the Rockwern Charitable Foundation, the L&L Nippert Charitable Foundation, Montgomery County, the Virginia W. Kettering Foundation, the Wohlgemuth Herschede Foundation.

Additional funding provided by... And viewers like you, thank you.

Closed captioning in part has been made possible through a grant from the Bahmann Foundation.

Thank you.