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WOMAN: I decided I was going to be an artist, my mom says, when I was 5.

[ chuckles ] MAN: The first song I ever wrote was literally called "Rebel Truce."

"There was a few kids, yeah, who wanted to be a little different."

WOMAN: It's from my imagination, and that gives me freedom, which gives the piece freedom.

MAN: It's my private world.

It's a really important part of how I create.

WOMAN: I think we have 17 hens, two dogs, two cats, and four horses.

[ woman chuckles ] [ howls, then barks ] This is Bill.

He's a character.

Horses were the first big connection I had to animals.

I definitely feel at peace when I'm around them.

I feel like everything's okay if they're out there.

And they're just like a safe spot for me.

We are just barely inside Union County.

Baker County line is just on the other side of this hill in the Wallowa Mountains.

My great-grandparents homesteaded here about the turn of the century.

And then their children ranched and homesteaded, and so my whole family, it's just kind of in our hearts, this place.

My name is Amy Lay, and I am a contemporary wildlife artist.

I think people have a natural attraction to wild things.

It's what humans have always been painting and drawing, has been animals, since cave paintings.

[ ♪♪♪ ] I decided I was going to be an artist, my mom says, when I was 5.

[ chuckles ] And I remember saying that, "I'm going to be an artist."

I think isolation can be a wonderful thing for creativity, and growing up out here, I didn't have a lot of other little girl friends, and instead, I found joy and companionship with animals.

I found myself drawing them, so I drew and drew and drew.

And one of my goals was: I want to be able to draw any animal.

My animals don't look perfect.

Instead of trying to find a photograph, it's from my imagination.

And that gives me freedom, which gives the piece freedom.

The movement is everything for me.

[ ♪♪♪ ] And it applies to any animal.

If you just watch the way it moves, you'll see the way its joints go together and its muscles are, and then you can draw it.

Okay.

One of the things that are most important to me is that drawing shows in my paintings.

I'll use a pencil and draw and draw and draw and draw.

This is paint thinner, and it just kind of seals in that first initial drawing, and then I go on to the next phases, which is kind of the oil wash.

I got an art degree from Eastern Oregon University, Eastern Oregon State College back then.

[ ♪♪♪ ] And by the time I got to college, I was told so often that one percent can make it.

Only one percent?

And it just discouraged so many people.

And I was very lucky, because my parents never discouraged me from that.

And not just my parents.

The whole town I grew up in supported me.

But I also think I was just defiant.

And it's like if someone told me I couldn't, it was like jet fuel.

It made me mad.

And I was like, "I'm never-- I'm never, ever, ever going to quit."

And stubbornness, I guess.

This is just putting on an undertone.

It kind of tones down the white of the canvas, and it helps it just have an overall softer feel.

I was taught watercolor, and I found out pretty quickly that my galleries wanted me to switch to oil.

But I decided I wasn't going to learn oil technique, and I just kept my watercolor technique.

It's been a good thing, because it makes my work look different than most people in my genre.

[ ♪♪♪ ] In 2000, I started applying to different shows and galleries, and I was very fortunate.

So I show in nine galleries throughout the United States.

And then I do a few large shows, national shows.

We support a couple of museums and quite a few private commissions.

So it keeps me very, very, very busy.

[ laughs ] [ ♪♪♪ ] I love fall in eastern Oregon.

There's a magical snap in the air, and the color, everything just changes to these golden oranges and yellow ochre and burnt sienna.

And I guess, for me, it all becomes paint colors.

This is alizarin crimson, which is my favorite red of all time.

And then these other reds I'm going to add to it will make it pop.

These are going to be like leaves in the fall.

And it's kind of the finishing touch on a lot of my work.

And it's very easy to overdo it at this stage, too.

That's kind of the scary part.

Okay.

I think that one's done.

[ ♪♪♪ ] I just think it's so important in this world, just something original that we make that is a one-of-a-kind thing, no matter what it is, is very human and important.

I've seen other places in the country and in the world now, and I still just like it here the best.

[ chuckles ] My great-grandparents had a cider press.

And that old cider press still just cranks it out.

I love Oregon.

I'm so happy to be in Oregon.

And I feel very fortunate that my children get to be here.

It's pretty good stuff.

I'm hoping that we can keep it going.

It's hard to do after so many generations.

It is thick, yeah.

I'm honored that this kid from eastern Oregon got a chance to be an artist, and I just want to make sure I do good on that for this place.

[ all laughing ] [ train bell ringing ] [ ♪♪♪ ] [ train bell rings ] [ train bell rings ] [ train bell rings ] [ train bell rings ] [ train bell rings ] [ train bell ringing ] [ band playing rock music ] ♪ It's deep ♪ ♪ Deeper... ♪ I'm just excited to be playing again.

And the players that I've been playing with, we're all working together to create a collaborative group.

I'm Jeremy Wilson.

I'm a singer/songwriter from Portland, Oregon.

Lead singer, rock 'n' roller.

[ playing rock music ] My career really started back in the late '80s with my band the Dharma Bums.

♪ I don't want to lie to you ♪ ♪ Tell you things That make you blue ♪ ♪ I don't want to... ♪ Three singers in one band was kind of the magic soup that became the Dharma Bums.

♪ Yeah, yeah ♪ I think the first song I ever wrote was literally called "Rebel Truce."

You know, "There was a few kids, yeah, who wanted to be a little different."

You know, from second one, it was about identifying as being different.

I have my own way of starting to process and create a song.

I usually start by strumming and then writing and then drawing a little bit.

You know, to bring up the stew.

♪ We with heavy hearts... ♪ It's my private world, and it's a really important part of how I create.

I was born on 8/8/1968 in Detroit, Michigan.

So I spent the first five years of my life in inner city Detroit.

Some of my earliest memories are actually bouncing around the house to the show Soul Train.

And then of course the other music that was around was the folk music and the protest music of the time.

And there was a real sense of, like, let's go west.

And in August of 1976, I celebrated my 8th birthday the month that we moved, in Scotts Mills, Oregon.

My progressive, hippie, wonderful, well educated mother, she discovers that there's a ballet studio in Silverton, Oregon, and I became the only boy to take lessons at this ballet studio and started six or eight years of ballet training.

I absolutely loved it.

And then eventually was accepted to the Royal Academy of Dancing in London.

But that wasn't meant to be.

This is the middle '70s in a very rural area where literally in the whole state of Oregon there were maybe two other boy ballet dancers.

This was a pretty intense way to start off my relationship with the other boys in Scotts Mills and Silverton area.

It wasn't just people calling me names, which was an every moment experience.

The abuse that began in second grade from pretty much the full spectrum age range of the male population of the area was pretty severe.

That's the real story, is that my dancing had been, like, beaten out of me.

Even by the time I started making music professionally and was in my mid-20s and on major labels, I was still looking for ways to process what happened.

♪ I had a dream That I was floating... ♪ It made me at a very, very young age go inward and create a magical world, which became my songs and my stories and even my bands.

[ ♪♪♪ ] After the success of the Dharma Bums' first album, Haywire, we wanted to honor this place that we were from.

We wanted to honor the Silverton area.

And so we actually chose the Waldo Hills Community Club as a place to record the album.

[ strumming chords ] And we camped there for one whole month while we recorded the record Bliss.

We literally had to schedule the recording session between two square dances.

The night after the first square dance, we hang microphones from the ceiling, we put the bass rig down in the woodcutting room, and we record basically a live record in this what-- let's call it a grange hall.

The album Bliss was just received in Europe as like, "This is different music, this is American music."

And we had an absolute glorious European tour in 1991.

After our third album, Welcome, a grueling tour, it just-- it crushed us.

It was a heartbreaking experience, you know, five years into the band.

It's probably, what, 1993, when the band broke up.

I then personally signed a publishing deal with Sony and I signed to Elektra Records, and I formed a group called Pilot.

The first single comes out, and Time-Warner Bros buys Ted Turner Entertainment and fires 30,000 people.

And the month the record's supposed to come out after two years, the record gets put in a vault, and we did our last tour and very amicably we broke up.

I was just exhausted and I was crushed.

And I just wanted to come home.

[ ♪♪♪ ] My idea was to build a studio, and within a couple years, I had that studio built.

♪ I walk Re-create the man... ♪ And I started bringing in projects.

♪ I wake every mornin' 'Fore the break of day ♪ ♪ Drive on as the dark Begins to fade... ♪ I decided that I did not want to pursue record labels and stuff.

What I wanted to do was be independent.

And lo and behold, what happens to me?

I end up passing out, waking up in an ambulance.

Turns out I have a congenital heart condition called Wolff-Parkinson.

And when the community heard that I was uninsured, I had just come out of a heart surgery, I was potentially going to lose my business, out of nowhere, all these people came to my rescue.

They threw a show at the Doug Fir... and when I got to the show, I stood in this one spot, and then for the next four hours, a line of people stood there, and every one of them came and gave me a hug and told me I was valued.

Those hugs absolutely changed the course of my life.

Omicron is so much more contagious, and we are seeing a spike in need and...

I realized that in no way was my experience unique, and that was the formation of the Jeremy Wilson Foundation, that desire to try and be a safety net for musicians.

The JWF Musician Health and Services Program offers help in two major ways.

One, in navigational services from a social worker to help musicians navigate the whole health world, right?

Huge part of our program.

And then the second part is financial grants to help with living assistance and/or healthcare bills and stuff during a medical emergency or crisis or recovery.

In this last year and a half, we've helped like several hundred people.

I can't stress enough how honored I feel when I get to talk to or work with somebody that's going through something.

It's profound.

It's greater than any rock 'n' roll success could ever be.

Hey, man.

MAN: Hi, Jeremy.

[ laughs ] How are you?

Good.

I'm having the time of my life already, so this is really fun.

That's awesome, man.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Then when you're done with your move, spins you in, right?

And then spins you...

I was invited to choreograph a dance for BodyVox, and I put my own music to it, and they told this story through dance.

There was like a body memory from my own body.

These things I trained so hard to do are still in me.

It flipped the story.

It turned the story back into joy from the pain that was always associated with my ballet training and stuff, and I really found myself able to say, "Yes, I was a dancer.

I am a dancer."

[ music playing over speakers ] ♪ A softer calling ♪ [ music ends ] [ audience applauding ] I think finally taking care of myself on a health level is really opening up the door to the future and really helping me feel grounded now.

Success in music at this point is that it's about the enjoyment of making the music, about the freedom and the creativity.

Hey, I just want to say thank you for coming out tonight.

I kind of stacked the deck tonight with all the people that I really, really love and who I know without a doubt love me.

And I feel like I'm in a place where I can really clearly put certain things aside and actually go meditate in my studio and make records.

♪ To find a moment ♪ ♪ Invent a new day ♪ ♪ And own my own story ♪ ♪ Fear no change ♪ ♪ Fear ♪ ♪ Fear no change ♪ ♪ Fear ♪ ♪ Fear no change ♪ Sound all right, guys?

To see more stories about Oregon artists, visit our website... And for a look at what we're working on now, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

[ Amy chuckles ] [ howls, then barks ] ♪ Hey, Jerry Oh, why'd you go down?

♪ ♪ You got love in your heart In a thousand new parts ♪ ♪ So worried On a future don't come ♪ ♪ You're hungry and numb But you ain't so young ♪ ♪ But the verdict It ain't wrote ♪ ♪ You got more years to work And explore the earth ♪ ♪ There ain't nothin' That can't be done ♪ ♪ You got rhythms and rhymes ♪ ♪ Moon, stars, and sun ♪ Support for Oregon Art Beat is provided by... and OPB members and viewers like you.