Support for Oregon Art Beat is provided by... and the contributing members of OPB and viewers like you.

♪ Nice to meet you Where you been?

♪ When I sing, I think I feel my most authentic.

I think I feel my most exposed.

MAN: I discovered that there were artists when I was 13.

I just pulled down a book and opened it up, and it was like a mutual recognition.

MAN: The story I want to share is all this beauty behind human things.

Anything that involves human, I want to share that in this wall.

[ ♪♪♪ ] MAN: This week, we have five artists painting five different murals.

Viaduct Arts Project is the first phase of making a mural district here in Central Eastside.

We have a ton of big blank walls in this area which are just perfect canvases for artists.

We had over 200 submissions come in from all over the state.

I think we were really successful in finding artists that were already doing incredible work and then just trying to help provide them a platform to show their work on a larger scale.

[ ♪♪♪ ] MAN: I think at first I was a little intimidated.

It's my first large-scale mural.

But once we broke it up into some more, like, edible chunks, I'm not as worried about it today.

And we're making good progress.

The title of the piece is "Paradise: The Land of Ricos Suenos."

The main protagonist of the piece is a luchadore, like a wrestler, basically, like, shushing you, right?

And there's this idea of, you know, this paradise and the American dream.

[ train whistle blows ] It's kind of theater.

Like, not a lot of people really get to achieve it.

The luchadore is like inviting you to ignore all the problems.

And at the end of the day, it's a beautiful picture.

So, like, just be entertained.

It all draws from, like, my experience, being born an American with -- you know, of Mexican descent of this tradition.

And, like, you're always kind of stuck in the middle of both of these things.

So there's a lot of conversations happening on the wall, in my head, and hopefully with the viewer.

[ ♪♪♪ ] WOMAN: I am a graphic design major, and I usually work small scale, so it's been a really good challenge for me to have work that is so visible and people can't really ignore it.

Today I have my mom and dad with me.

They made the drive from Denver to Portland.

And they've been awesome.

They've done, honestly, more than I have today already.

I learned how to use a lift.

I'm not a huge fan of heights, so it's been a challenge, for sure, but when I'm up there, if I, like, play the right music and just focus on painting, it's okay.

I wanted to do something colorful and playful.

I was thinking about childhood.

Some of the colors were inspired by the colors of the Tanzanian flag because my dad is from Tanzania, and it's becoming even more of a part of my identity the older I get.

A lot of my work is about balancing or being in the middle, because that's something that I identify with, being half Black and half white.

And I also think that growing up Black in America is definitely a balancing act.

And I think in both worlds, representation is important.

And also getting to paint Black bodies on a giant wall is awesome.

I think Portland needs more of that.

[ ♪♪♪ ] My name is Oliver Casillas.

and I live in Talent.

I'm doing a mural painting.

It's mainly about this portion of land that keeps the United States and Mexico together.

It's called the Sonora Desert.

There are just five colors showing in the sunset is when everything starts in the desert, when all the animals start going out to do all of their things.

[ warning tones beeping ] Yesterday was the first day that I met that wall.

And it was amazing and kind of intimidating, but it was cool.

The story I want to share is all this beauty behind human things, behind human skin, races, behind anything that involves human.

I want to share that on this wall.

Right now, in this moment with this mural, I'm in the feeling of excitement.

I love it, yeah.

[ ♪♪♪ ] WOMAN: I lived in the Los Angeles County in the San Fernando Valley, and there's a lot of Chicano art happening in that city.

So a lot of the things I saw growing up were mural works by artists who also have my background.

I'm very interested in farmworkers' rights and issues regarding the community I'm from.

I wanted to take this opportunity to pay an homage to farmworkers.

We see three women tending to produce, and I chose to depict women because I wanted to give them some sort of agency and some sort of place to shine a bit.

It's my first mural in Portland, Oregon.

I already gravitate towards work like this to begin with, and, like, art has its role in politics, and I hope that this helps in some way.

[ ♪♪♪ ] WOMAN: The process is definitely new for me.

Using heavy equipment to make art is something that's kind of new.

The concept for the design is a bike ride, a lot like a lot of the social rides that happen here in Portland.

And the procession is being led by a little skeleton on a ghost bike, which, if you're not familiar, ghost bikes are bikes that have been painted white that are put up as memorials at the sites of crashes that end in a fatality of a cyclist.

This mural is significant to me because of the mix of art and cycling and community and activism.

The general idea is that it's something that's going to be pleasing and fun, but if you take a moment and examine it, then people are going to kind of understand that when we're riding, we're always kind of riding with the memory of people that we needed to make the streets safer for, and that hopefully they are now safer for everyone who follows.

[ ♪♪♪ ] I think the power of street art and murals happens when, you know, someone's just walking down the street and they're hit with this piece of art that they weren't expecting.

The future that I see here is that every single wall on every single warehouse is covered in art.

[ ♪♪♪ ] So I'm going to fill this with ink, but I'm really interested in accidents.

I just found this the other day.

It's a broken piece of concrete that was hard up against the post of a fence, and then this broke out and has a very interesting shape.

And I'll take an ink impression of it.

It's almost like an object was silent, and now it has a voice.

It reminds me of lungs.

This is a head of a sledgehammer.

Here's a snake that I found that was all dried up under a board.

And I inked it and printed it over and over until it fell to pieces.

I'm Jef Gunn, and I'm an artist.

We remodeled an old church into our new temple, and we completely tore out the old furnace, and this was underneath the furnace.

Kind of crooked.

This piece of iron... made those impressions right there.

On the left side moving up, come morning.

On the right side moving down, come evening.

I was always interested in art.

I didn't know it was art.

I was always drawing, always drawing.

My earliest memories were drawing.

I discovered that there were artists when I was 13.

We had a new stepdad, and the stepdad had books and bookshelves full of books.

He bought everything that Time Life published.

And there was a book on Rembrandt.

I didn't know what it was, I just pulled down a book and opened it up, and it was like a mutual recognition.

And then I took out the book on Goya and I copied Goya.

And Velazquez, I copied most of the drawings.

I knew at that moment that I was an artist.

I mean, I just knew that I was one of those guys.

They do that, I do that.

It was as simple as that.

I like Jef Gunn's work.

That's why we represent him.

And the encaustics have a completely different feel than the oil paintings.

They have a very Zen kind of quality to them.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Encaustics is really labor intensive.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Sometimes I start with tar as my base or some other strange surface.

And then I put pigments in water and smear them on or pigments in wax and paint with them.

I'm pouring hot, molten wax medium, apply the wax, scrape that off, apply more wax, scrape that off.

KOCHS: Painting an encaustic is painting with translucent colors, not opaque colors, and so you basically are able to see the painting that you made five minutes ago underneath the painting that you're making right now.

GUNN: I'm going to fuse it in.

Okay, so that's fused in.

I'm going to let that cool just a bit.

I'm going to use a furniture scraper... to smooth out all the high spots.

[ ♪♪♪ ] I just came upon this spontaneously on a painting some time ago, and if I keep this up in this spot, it's going to get real relaxed and fall apart and let that beautiful orange come through.

And it'll crack in its own pattern, which is great.

There's a lot of unanticipated consequences.

I'm pulling up pigment from below.

More often than not, there's a surprise to be dealt with, either a total kerfuffle, like this isn't going to work, or I change my plans or I burn a hole in it.

So it's not difficult to imagine 30 hours on a painting like that.

That's really just the beginning, but it lays the bones of this piece that I have in mind.

I actually might extend this form a little bit.

My thinking on this is a rock just off the ocean.

There's a certain loneliness in the quality that I'm after.

Sometimes you have ideas for the painting but the painting has other ideas and it fights back.

It says, "No, no, we're not going to do that."

And then you have to have a talk with it and ask it nicely to do what you want.

Sometimes you have to curse at it, sometimes you have to just tell it to go sit in a corner for 10 years.

I made a devotion to landscape some many years ago, like in the '90s.

I decided I'm just going to focus on land, sky, water.

[ ♪♪♪ ] I went to Barcelona because I wanted to live in a country that spoke Spanish.

Barcelona is like electric.

I was influenced by a lot of things there, but especially by the Romanesque art up at the National Museum of Catalan Art and their wildly crazy, fluid abstract.

And then, on the other extreme, was Antoni Tapies.

It had an immediacy that just shocked me.

I really loved the spontaneity and the in-your-face of the graffiti in Barcelona.

Graffiti everywhere has that effect, but there was some graffiti that was really artful.

Someone had written all these ancient phrases.

[ ♪♪♪ ] There's an awareness that the moment is passing and that what we captured was this moment.

There's something about that time moves all the time and paintings don't move.

There's a strange mystery in that, and there's a sadness in it, like a nostalgia kind of sadness.

But there's a joy in it.

It's the play between those two.

♪ When you are By my side ♪ ♪ Nice to meet you Where you been?

♪ ♪ I can show you Incredible things ♪ ♪ Magic, madness Heaven, sin ♪ ♪ Saw you there and I thought ♪ ♪ Oh, my God Look at that face ♪ ♪ You look like My next mistake ♪ When I sing, I think I feel my most authentic, I think I feel my most exposed.

It's like when you finally say something you've been meaning to say, and it was uncomfortable, but you're like, "Oh, thank God that's off my chest."

♪ So it's gonna be forever ♪ ♪ Or it's gonna go Down in flames ♪ ♪ You can tell me When it's over... ♪ Before you went, "On a clear day," the one before, it's...

I pick songs exclusively because they seem to resonate with me or there's typically something about the lyric.

I feel most connected to my voice when I am a little moved by something.

Mon coeur... And the rhythm...

There is a standard entitled "Every Time We Say Goodbye," which, the title in itself is just so -- I don't know who can't relate to that.

It's dramatic, but I think that's how those feelings actually feel in the moment.

♪ You fill my eager heart With such desire ♪ ♪ Every kiss you give Sets my soul on fire ♪ ♪ I feel your warmth So tender... ♪ MAN: The thing I like about his voice is the passion and the storytelling.

He's an incredibly technical singer, but he's also an incredibly soulful singer at the same time, and combining those two elements, it's... Yeah, you have the world on a string when you can do that.

♪ Goodbye ♪ Wow.

[ audience applauds ] HERROD: Thank you, thank you.

I first realized that I thought I could sing probably in the house.

I can't think of a morning that I didn't wake up without my dad playing music and singing along as he walked through the house, so...

I'd say my dad is where I think I got my love of music from.

When I was younger, we went to church pretty devoutly.

And, you know, they were like, "Oh, you sound -- you have a great voice, you should sing on the team maybe."

And they asked me eventually to play piano for the youth worship team, but they never let me sing for anything other than that, and they directly told my mother that, you know, "It's because he's gay."

When I think of who I am and who I was told I needed to be growing up, it was always, you know, you need to be this machismo thing, you need to be more masculine, boys don't cry this much, you're so emotional, yadda-yadda.

I think now, with loving what I do and learning to love myself more and pursuing what I want to pursue, I think has really helped me to develop a more assured understanding of who I am and what I need.

♪ Tell me I'm wonderful As I am ♪ ♪ He says that I'm lovable As I am ♪ ♪ And when he holds me I'm the luckiest man ♪ ♪ As I am ♪ The song that I was writing is about a new person in my life whose predominant language is French.

INTERVIEWER: Does this kind of situation, a new love in your life, does it bring music out of you sometimes?

Oh!

[ laughs] I think -- I think new relationships are almost all that I write about, but I have to intentionally not do that sometimes.

I'm like, "Write about something not love-related.

Just see what that's like."

♪ You'll be happy When he comes ♪ ♪ So gentle shines ♪ ♪ You must wrestle darkness... ♪ After Cornish, I moved to Portland, where I ended up going to Portland State University and doing my master's in jazz studies.

[ singing scales ] And continued working in the last two years as an adjunct professor for the vocal jazz program.

So that when we go up, we're already -- We're kind of already in the shape of the up.

Yeah.

Currently my life is pretty interesting to have a number of things I think I've wanted actually sort of happen.

I'm like, "Oh, my God!

You can actually have things you like."

♪ He would have Brought me the sun ♪ ♪ Making me smile... ♪ I met Jimmie Herrod less than a year ago.

Jimmie came down to the loft and it was like, "Wow.

This is -- what an incredible presence, what an incredible voice."

♪ When I was mean to him ♪ ♪ He never said Go away now... ♪ It soars, it's transcendent, it's smooth, it's just... it's otherworldly.

And so shortly thereafter, he made his debut with us in Los Angeles and then San Francisco, and he's been singing with us ever since.

I think this one was yours, but I'm not sure.

HERROD: I'm going to be doing more touring with them in the fall, and I -- I really love it.

[ tuning ] [ indistinct conversation ] Oh, my gosh, I love your dress!

Oh, you're sweet.

Thank you.

How are you?

Are you doing an interview?

Mm-hmm.

Oh, that's fun.

[ chuckling ] Please welcome the fantastic Jimmie Herrod.

[ audience applauding, cheering ] ♪ Though I am Just a man ♪ ♪ When you are By my side ♪ ♪ With your hand... ♪ I would say at present my dream is to love what I do and to love someone and be loved in return, and they're kind of both important.

I think I've lived enough of my life being malleable for other people, and that involves how I sing, what I want to sing, what I want to wear, what I want to do.

♪ I'll fight... ♪ I just don't really want to humor that anymore.

So I will sing songs about a man and I will wear what I want to wear and I will love the person who I want to love, so that's that.

♪ This land ♪ ♪ Is mine ♪ [ audience cheering ] [ ♪♪♪ ] ♪ Bitty boppy Betty Bitty boppy Betty ♪ ♪ Bitty boppy Betty Booboo ♪ ♪ On weekends She's your honey ♪ ♪ Then comes Monday ♪ ♪ And that'll be sir to you ♪ ♪ Bitty boppy Betty Better known as Billy ♪ ♪ He's the up-and-coming Local DA ♪ ♪ A fearless crime fighter Political insider ♪ ♪ Sure to be mayor one day ♪ ♪ But after work on Fridays Off comes his necktie ♪ ♪ And on comes the diamonds And pearls ♪ ♪ You better get ready 'Cause now Billy's Betty ♪ ♪ Everybody's favorite girl ♪ Support for Oregon Art Beat is provided by... and the contributing members of OPB and viewers like you.