Art Zone is about to start.
Come and get it!
(bell rings)
(cat meows)
(llamas stampeding)
(chicken cawing)
(dogs barking and howling)
(water splashing)
(insects buzzing)
(♪) ('LEG THEME' BY CHRIS & TAD) (♪)
[NANCY GUPPY] Hi everyone
and welcome to our first show of the fall season.
I'm Nancy Guppy
and I am standing in the midst
of "Sentient," a new exhibit at Traver Gallery.
More on that in just a moment.
We've got a great lineup of art for you, including
Low_Liner with a track from their latest record,
Seattle Art Museum spotlights Anthony White,
♪♪
and a new musical
from singer-songwriter Jen Ayers.
♪♪
And we'll begin right here at Travor Gallery
with Curtis Steiner, the artist behind "Sentient."
Now, Curtis is a creative dynamo
who excels at pretty much anything he puts his mind to.
Case in point, his deep dive into watercolor painting
that led to this exquisite show.
♪♪
[CURTIS STEINER] For 20 years, I owned a store.
It was called Curtis Steiner,
and before that it was called Souvenir.
I sold fine art.
Very interested in craft in the gallery.
Also jewelry, eccentric antiques.
When you go to somebody's house and you see
they have 100 things and there's one thing
you think that is the most cool little object.
What is that thing?
It's mysterious. It's neat. It's beautiful.
I love to have my store full of those things.
I feel like the pandemic was a horrible thing,
but it really was a gift in that it allowed me
and actually almost forced me to change
and to become an artist.
About a year and a half ago, I decided that
I was going to focus full time on just painting.
And so I very methodically spent each day
for many hours working on a series
of paintings, developing a series
that I really felt had all of the aspects
that were me and satisfied my need for precision
and for being challenged.
And then also,
something that I felt was a unique presentation of that.
So I started doing all these very colorful watercolors
and gouache paintings that are very precise,
amorphic, gradated, beautiful color expressions.
It's all about color and light and form and connection
and how things are magnetic and they kind of
want to pull together sometimes.
When things are out of focus,
you see in the background these beautiful forms
and shapes in a photograph. And I love that.
And that's the sort of thing I like to fixate on.
When I realized I had a show,
I started looking at frames
and considering how I wanted to present them.
And then one day I was looking at my work
and I had used
some antique velvet that I had had hoards of that
I bought years ago from a dealer.
I saw it next to my painting.
That is such a perfect marriage.
I mean that absolutely
the nap and the velvetiness marries
beautifully with the surface of particularly the gouache,
or when the watercolor gets really dense
and where it's not broken
and just just a perfect little surface.
And I really felt like I became this window,
like part and parcel of the piece.
The brain started to become like a portal into
the painting.
It took about two months
to get all the framing done in the mats done.
I'm not sure there's anything I don't like
about being a full time artist.
I love it.
I have a beautiful life.
I have a beautiful garden
that is right outside my studio door.
And the garden has
all sorts of strange plants that most people don't have.
And I'm very interested in leaves and foliage and form
and sculptural things, and not so much driven
by flowers...though I don't mind a flower or two,
but I really want it to be this lush, protective world
where you feel like you are in the womb of the forest.
The whole world just disappears.
It's only your world that you've created.
I've always been somebody that's very at ease,
being alone in silence, meditating, looking at things.
And for 20 years, I didn't get that opportunity
as much as I get now.
Right now I'm doing these relatively small watercolors.
But if somebody had a space that I was able to work with,
so site specific space that was large
and I could create something, I'd have a reason to do it
if I was hired by somebody who became a collector.
And so that's something
that's really exciting to me and what might lead
from this experience to the next experience
and the creative opportunities that it might give me.
♪♪
[NANCY GUPPY] "Sentient" runs now through October 1st.
Hours and location are at travergallery.com...
And keep up with Curtis on Instagram.
♪♪
Our band
this week is Low_Liner featuring Arlan Lackie,
Lucile Lackie, Eric Woodruff and Jessie Harmonson.
performing "Wrong Heaven" off their 2022 release:
"Swept Up All the Pieces."
-Roll cameras.
Speed. Speed.
-Song one, take three
-Standby band.
(♪) ('WRONG HEAVEN' BY LO_LINER) (♪)
♪♪
(applause and cheering)
-We're out of here!
[NANCY GUPPY] Catch Low_Liner
Saturday, October 1st in Tacoma at ShopShow Tacoma
and Wednesday, October 12th at The Rabbit Box
in Pike Place Market.
And you can download a copy of "Swept Up all the Pieces"
on Bandcamp.
(mechanical tool motor)
♪♪ ​
(mechanical tool motor)
♪♪ ​
(clanking)
(mechanical tool motor)
[NANCY GUPPY] Jen Ayres is a mega talented singer songwriter
who has written and is about to debut
"SHe Said," a deeply personal, full-length musical
about love, family and gender identity
based on Jen's own life.
(♪) piano playing (♪) ​
[JEN AYRES] I'm Jenny Ayres
and I'm a singer and a songwriter.
I'm a pianist.
And I'm I'm an actor.
And now I'm even some hybrid
of playwright.
(♪) piano playing (♪) ​
I grew up in Wisconsin in the '70s,
and my mom and dad bought a upright piano.
And one morning,
my mom woke up to me playing the melody to
"Hello, Dolly!"
on the piano,
and signed me up for lessons.
And I was classically trained on the piano,
but I also love to sing.
♪♪
I sang all the time in high school --
I sang so much that my friends and in the car would,
you know, they'd humor
me for a little bit, then tell me to stop.
♪♪
I moved here in the early '90s.
I moved here with girlfriends.
We got a rental house on Queen Anne.
One of
the reasons I moved here was because of the music scene.
My boyfriend moved here a year later
and we started a band and I've been playing
music here ever since.
♪♪
I met Graham in 1988 at college orientation.
He was sitting behind me and I turned around
and he was looking at me and we smiled.
And I turned back around and, you know,
it was sort of that spark at first sight.
♪♪
We worked together
probably since that moment. We lived together
for a few years and then got married.
(♪) Remember how we rule the world (♪)
(♪) You and I ran free (♪)
(♪) Just you and me. (♪)
(♪) You and me. (♪♪)
He's very fun and loyal and smart.
He's one of the most creative people I know and supportive.
As creative people and as adventurers,
because we really are adventurers, who had big dreams
and wanted to do lots of different things...
We could be honest with one another
about what we wanted to do in life,
as crazy as something might be,
and that we could share that with each other
and count on each other to either,
you know,
embrace that idea together or give each other the
space to do it.
♪♪
I think as musicians and
artists, we weren't living a traditional like 9 to 5 life.
And so, you know, guys wearing makeup is not a big deal.
You know,
guys and eyeliner are all over the place
in rock clubs across the country.
I think it was a gig in Ohio that we had on Halloween,
and Graham said, I want to dress in drag.
And so,
you know,
got him fishnets
and we found this little black
dress and he put on our little cat ears
and got some high heeled shoes.
It was great.
And Graham looked great. And
I didn't really think
anything at all about that...
was just expression.
And as artists, that's what we do.
Graham might say to me,
"You know, I, I feel like I have a female brain."
And "I relate to women so well."
"Sometimes I feel like a woman inside."
And this was years ago.
I would say to Graham, "Well, that's why I love you."
And then we'd move on.
♪♪
It wasn't until
we went out this one night for Halloween
and Graham was dressed as the beautiful Cleopatra.
And we were at the end of the night
and we were having fun
and we're looking into the mirror together.
And my partner said into the mirror,
"I think I'm looking at my real self for the first time."
After I told her she was pretty.
(laughter)
But yeah.
And, and it, you know,
still was a moment of: Ohhhh.
And then the next day it was a
it was a question of, oh, well, now what?
(♪) High heels in hiding (♪)
(♪) Eye shadow dancing in dark places (♪)
[DARYLE CONNERS] I first met Jen at the Triple Door
when I was shooting a show that she was
in called "House of the Unholy."
Yeah, we became friends
and we quickly started talking about working together.
Very early
on, when Jen and I were collaborating,
we were actually writing a different story.
It was a story to do with
the matriarchy in her family, and it was based on an album
she had made that I thought was very theatrical.
But at the same time,
this gigantic thing was happening in her life,
and her marriage, and her family...
And of course, as friends
we were talking about it and she started playing me,
the songs that she was writing about it.
(♪) What we've got is love so strong (♪)
(♪) I thank God every day (♪)
(♪) That you've come along (♪)
We both knew that we had to make the show about this
and not about the past,
but about what
she was living at the time.
And to be doing such a personal story
that's so compelling,
but that also was like
a very experimental writing process,
because we didn't know
what would happen in the second act
when we were writing the first act,
because it hadn't happened yet in real life.
So there have been some twists and turns
we never could have imagined at the outset.
[JEN AYRES] Sorting this all out on the piano was therapy.
We just had so many thoughts running through my mind,
so many emotions,
and I would just sit at the piano and and write
and record.
And over time, all of that took shape
and became songs, became a story.
And this was the first time where I wasn't sure
that we would make it as a married couple.
I knew we'd always be
best friends and we would be parents to our son.
But it was probably the
first time that I just I did have that thought of, whoa,
what if.
What if.
What if we don't make it?
-Mm hmm.
(conversation)
The working title for a long time of this project was "This Picture."
But for somebody who knows nothing about the project,
those two words weren't necessarily saying a lot.
And so the idea is now that we have,
"SHe Said," and the S and the H
delineated as She/He
and the story's being told, it's being told by a woman.
(♪) Who am I to you? (♪)
(♪)What makes you think you can talk the way you do?(♪)
(♪) And who are you, anyway? (♪)
(♪) I wanna hide (♪)
(♪) my face. (♪)
(♪) Now voices shining all around (♪)
(♪) Sometimes I just wanna fall to the ground (♪)
(♪) And shield my eyes (♪)
(♪) From this disguise (♪)
(♪) And blow away. (♪♪)
(♪) High heels in hiding (♪)
[JEN AYERS] Telling the story was a way to sort of
sort it out for myself, but also
it seemed an important story to tell.
(♪) Remember how we wrote like lions (♪)
(♪) The world was not to see (♪)
(♪)ust you and me.(♪(♪)
I want people to understand and know that
I love my transgender partner and family, you know?
Families come in all shapes and sizes and...
here we are.
[JEFF FIELDER] It started as exclusively a show, like a one woman show.
And then Jen was like, well, maybe it should be an album.
And then that brings us to now.
(♪) So you find yourself waking in the night. (♪)
(♪) Your dreams are telling me you're not all right. (♪)
They needed to work as a whole piece,
but also I think it needed to work as individual songs.
You know,
it was obviously about this particular situation
that they're living in.
But I think that you could individually take these songs
and make them about whatever
is happening in your relationship, too.
It really does have a universal sentiment.
It's intense for them to be so open about this stuff.
I think it's a gift to all of us.
[JEN AYRES] And I had questions of if I'm married
to a woman, am I now a lesbian?
-Princess Leia.
-There were questions of looking at my partner in a new way or in a
in a fuller way, in a more honest way.
I realized a lot about love.
What I realize is I love this person
that is my partner and that will never change.
And that Graham's exploration of self
doesn't define who I am.
And I think the opportunities I was able to take
to just really
explore myself
outside of our marriage just made me stronger
and gave me a larger ability
to love my partner back.
♪♪
Graham's just Graham to me.
And Graham feels good inside.
And it's really easy to love your partner
when they're feeling good and liking themselves,
and living their dream, and doing what they love.
And that's how I am
experiencing life with my partner right now.
I have a happy partner and that makes me a happy partner.
(camera shutter clicking)
♪♪
[NANCY GUPPY] "SHe Said"
runs October 6th through 9 at Broadway Performance Hall.
Ticket Information is at jenayresmusic.com.
And pick up the "SHe Said" soundtrack on vinyl
CD or digitally on Bandcamp.
And that's a wrap.
Special thanks to Traver Gallery for hosting us.
I also want to thank the man behind the camera, Pete Cassam.
Thank you, Pete.
And most of all, thanks to you for tuning in.
Have a great week and we'll see you soon.
Pete, do you think that the gallery would notice
if I took one of the paintings?
-Ugh, yeah. -Really?
-I'm surprised you're not in jail.
Well, you and me both lots of close calls,
but this is the one I really want.
Oh, god. It's sooo beautiful!
♪♪