(bright music) (relaxing jazz music) >> These notes that ring out sound like they're, like they're melting or like they're falling down a waterfall.

(gentle steel guitar music) >> Alex Ann: I fell in love with art probably about 10 years ago, and for the last two years, I've been kind of pursuing it full time and just dedicating my life to it.

But I guess I've lived it my whole entire life.

And yeah, so it's just a journey of continuing that love.

>> Narrator: Jeanette Pasin-Sloan's style, realistic, doesn't even quite do it, I would say almost hyperrealistic, making the familiar extremely unfamiliar, but at the same time doing it in such a way that it looks completely convincing and it's just plain uncanny.

>> Dale: Doing as much as you can, as quickly as you can is important to me.

Life is short, and the earlier we get started helping our community, the better off our community will be.

(upbeat music) >> I have a very strong connection to other students.

Everyone makes an effort to help each other.

I'll remember the feeling of being here, the feeling that I was a part of a family.

(upbeat music continues) >> Announcer: Ivy Tech offers more than 70 programs with locations in Michigan City, LaPorte and Valparaiso.

New classes start every few weeks.

Ivy Tech, higher education at the speed of life.

To get started, visit ivytech.edu.

>> Announcer: Family, home, work, self.

Of all the things you take care of, make sure you are near the top of the list.

North Shore Health Centers offers many services to keep you balanced and healthy.

So take a moment, self-assess, and put yourself first from medical to dental, vision, chiropractic, and mental health.

North Shore will help get you centered.

You help keep your world running, so make sure to take care of yourself.

North Shore Health Centers, building a healthy community, one patient at a time.

>> Narrator: "Eye on the Arts" is made possible in part by South Shore Arts, the John W. Anderson Foundation and the Indiana Arts Commission.

Making the arts happen.

Additional support for Lakeshore Public Media and local programming is made possible by viewers like you.

Thank you.

(light playful jazz music) (light playful jazz music continues) (light playful jazz music continues) (light playful jazz music continues) (light playful jazz music continues) (light playful jazz music continues) (light playful jazz music continues) >> Say when.

>> Person: Go ahead.

(light steel guitar music) >> Narrator: Whether you know what it's called or not, you probably recognize the unique sound of the pedal steel guitar.

It's been a part of American music since the instrument's mass production began in the 1950s.

For Nelson Wynn, owner of Broadway Music in Merrillville and member of the Original Hazzard County Band, the instrument comes with a personal and storied history.

>> My father was a Sunday school teacher in church and always loved guitar.

He played guitar and sang in church.

And when I was about four years old, he would get me up and I would sing harmony with him on some songs in front of the church congregation.

Later on, he left the church and started a country band about 1965 and that band was called Roy Wynn and The Country Clubs.

A lot of folks don't know it, but the area of, we'll call it the Calumet region, back in the heyday, there was a bar on every corner and there was a band in every bar.

There was a lot of bands playing music five, six, seven nights a week.

And I started playing in my father's band when I was about 14 and a half or 15 years old.

I was playing four nights a week, going to school during the daytime.

(light steel guitar music) When I first started playing music, I played the six string guitar, and my father had a steel guitar player in the band that was just a wonderful musician.

And as things happen, guys leave bands and they go different directions.

And at one point, he chose to leave the band.

There was a guy that had a music store in Downtown Hammond called Stan Bosega, Bosega Brothers Music.

And me being, I don't know, 15 and a half or 16 years old, he called me up and he said, "Hey, I got a pedal steel guitar down here in my store that a guy ordered and he can't pay for it.

I wanna know if you'd be interrested in a steel guitar."

It was a beautiful instrument, but it was $1,100 and I was 15.

I guess I was very fortunate because Stan looked at me and simply said, "Take it home.

If you can learn to play it, pay for it."

So I took it home and I bought the guitar.

Took me some years, but I paid him off.

(dreamy steel guitar music) Pedal steel guitar can be played in so many different styles.

You can play it as a solo instrument and you can play it as a background instrument.

It can be a single string instrument and it can be a chordal style instrument.

It can do all those things and it does all those things very well.

(playful steel guitar music) >> Narrator: With its many ways to manipulate notes, the instrument offers a sonic palette unique unto itself.

Nelson showed us some of the practical applications of his craft and how they contribute to the emotional impact of a song.

(light steel guitar music) >> Those notes right there just don't work together until they get resolved.

And Vince Gill wrote a song called "Look at Us," recorded that song and John Huey was the pedal steel player on that song and he played these lines.

(light steel guitar music) That's just incredible.

It's beautiful how that all comes together, yet much of the time, it's actually out of tune or dissonant.

It's the nature of what the instrument can do and how you approach it.

One of the phrases that I like to play a lot, I would play these notes here and then step on that first pedal and strike the fourth string and then raise the fourth string.

Now you're just waiting for that to go somewhere, right?

(light steel guitar music) And then let it all go.

And now it changes and all of a sudden it's beautiful.

(light steel guitar music) Just a really nice change.

And then, we can make these notes that ring out, sound like they're melting or like they're falling down a waterfall.

(dreamy steel guitar music) But it's letting those strings ring while you play other strings that aren't necessarily in tune with them.

(dreamy steel guitar music) I mentioned that the music store owner gave me a guitar and said, "Pay for it if you can learn to play it."

I had the opportunity a couple of years ago to pay that forward.

I heard about a kid 13 years old in Danville, Illinois, Tobin Hess.

And Tobin was playing just a very poor idea of a pedal steel guitar, but learning to play nonetheless.

And a friend of his told me about him and I happened to have an extra pedal steel guitar sitting in a case.

So I called him up and I said, "Tobin, I want you to do me a favor.

I want you to talk to your mom and dad and I want to see if they would agree to let me loan you a guitar."

And so of course, he did.

And I got a phone call a couple of days later and his dad said, "How can we meet you?"

They drove up from Danville and met me here in the store and I gave them my Emmons pedal steel guitar, which is probably a $5,000 guitar.

And I said, "Take it home.

Play it as long as you want to.

Learn to play it and if you ever get the opportunity and you have the funds and you wanna buy a guitar, I'd like to help you if I can."

About a year later, he called me up, he says, "I think I'm ready."

And so, I had a used guitar at the time, I sold him that used guitar and got my Emmons back and I think he played that guitar that I sold him about a year.

And the company that built that guitar saw him playing that guitar and said, "Hey, we want to build you a new guitar and give it to you."

So they built him a $10,000 guitar and gave it to him because he is such a phenomenal pedal steel guitar player.

This kid has gone way beyond what my capabilities would ever be.

He's a pretty ingenious pedal steel player.

(light steel guitar music) (light music) >> Alex Ann: I fell in love with art probably about 10 years ago, and for the last two years I've been kind of pursuing it full time and just dedicating my life to it.

But I guess I've loved it my whole entire life.

And yeah, so it's just a journey of continuing that love.

(light music) I just got into spray paint last summer.

I primarily use oil paints for my portraits, but now that I'm diving into murals, I'm falling in love with the vibrant colors that you can get from a can.

All the different tips you can use, all, you know, different styles kind of seems endless.

One thing I wanna always keep in the back of my mind is to never be held down to one style.

And I always wanna like try to strive for something different and new.

I have a feeling that these gradients that I'm using will just kind of evolve as I get older.

So my process is kind of, I'm learning as I go and I'm learning that for me, it's easier to, to draw with a pencil, make my lines first.

I kind of plan it out with the shapes in my mockup.

I find shapes and then I break it down into the lines that I'm using, and then kind of just take it piece by piece.

Right now I'm using a lot of tape on my murals and I'm hoping to, with enough practice, be able to put the tape down.

But I do love a good crisp line, so I always make sure I'm able to prime the wall first.

Especially working with brick, it saves a lot of spray paint.

So once the brick is primed white, I then go on top of it with pencil and then I kind of add my lines and continue.

Yeah, so we're on Franklin Street, Michigan City.

This is the Uptown Arts District.

The title of this piece is "The Gradient at the End of the Tunnel," and I'm just going with the phrase, the light at the end of the tunnel.

And so this is a three piece mural, and as you're looking up, my gradients slowly start to kinda fade it into the background and get smaller.

So it's kind of like an illusion when you're stepping back.

I found out about this mural through Facebook this past winter.

My friends are super awesome, and they would share really cool opportunities, like this one.

And so I applied, I went through the process and then got the best email ever when it came through.

So that was awesome.

(light music) (bright music) It's kind of like the unknown that keeps me going and a beautiful unknown because I don't really know exactly what the end result will be.

I have this on idea, and to me that's just like pure excitement, and it's like that curiosity that I feel like will never end for the rest of my life.

So for murals, if I'm presenting a mockup for the client, I will take a picture of the potential wall and I'll throw it into Procreate and I will go on top of it with my design digitally.

And that way when I print it out, I'll have a nice reference and I'll hang that reference on the wall so I can step back and see it.

So that's a bit of my process.

Every day I get excited to start something new.

It's literally never boring.

Every process, every step... well, there are some boring parts, but you have to go through those.

But just being able to have complete freedom as a full-time creative is my biggest dream.

For me, it's a feeling of purpose.

Every day when I wake up, I know what I wanna do, and, and this is it.

And to be able to share that with other people, it just, it's like human connection.

And yeah, I love everything about public art.

The different people I meet with each piece just kind of fills you up inside, you know?

(gentle inspiring music) >> Now Jeanette Pasin-Sloan's style is that she is an artist that is working with realistic, still life subjects.

Realistic, doesn't even quite do it.

I would say almost hyperrealistic.

Now, Jeanette Pasin-Sloan got her MFA from University of Chicago, in other words, a trained artist.

And she was at home and married with a family, and I think she'd kind of gotten out of art.

Family life can do that to you.

And so Jeanette in her home with children and thinking about art and saying, "I gotta get back into art."

So then she starts working on what's available to her, for example, a highchair or an air conditioner, and starts working with those subjects and gets remarkable results, results that gain attention right off the bat.

She's able to work with Chrome in a way that she can render it completely convincingly, but at the same time, not just use silver paint.

When you really look at it carefully, it's reflections of specific colors.

So breaking down chrome reflective surfaces so that they look completely real, making the familiar extremely unfamiliar, but at the same time doing it in such a way that it looks completely convincing and it's just plain uncanny.

And so many of Jeanette Pasin-Sloan's subjects would be the chrome objects on a patterned cloth, where you'd see the pattern and the painting as well as the pattern reflected into the silver object.

I mean, any vantage point that you take is gonna have all kinds of odd distortions in it.

And each of those distorted passages becomes a world.

The silver objects are stacked in this precarious sort of way.

I mean, everything might fall the pieces at any point in the reflections of the silver, for example, she's got her white set up and you can sometimes see a little vestige of her, like a self portrait within the painting.

And you realize that the "Balancing Act 2" is her life being an artist and being a mother and being a companion and being a human being with obligations.

Life is a balancing act.

(upbeat rhythmic music) I like the level of detail that she brings to things and the level of attention.

The other thing that I really like about Jeanette Pasin-Sloan's work, although she's a still life artist, they always seem like they're about more than that.

So for example, she did a beautiful color with a graph is titled "Roswell," and it's kind of a pun, because it's a silver saucer and it's on a Native American pattern blanket, Roswell, New Mexico, Roswell Flying Saucer, but then also Roswell in terms of Jeanette Pasin-Sloan with the reflective object on patterned fabric.

So you look at it for a second, you say, "Oh, that's the Jeanette Pasin-Sloan's work."

Everybody that comes in and looks at it says, "Boy, is that a striking painting?"

Now what is it?

That just cups on a cloth.

But it's a lot more than, it's also about color and pattern and reflection and foiling your expectations.

I mean, you're maybe used to a camera frame rectangle like this.

Well, now she makes a configuration long strip.

What do you think of that?

You just kind of let the picture work on you a little bit and it becomes much more complex than just an arrangement of objects on a fabric.

She's developed a body of interest for herself.

The characteristics of chrome and still life, the compositional opportunities, I'm sure those are all very exciting for her to the point where she wants to keep on coming back to it again and again.

But then also I think for her she thinks about the nature of perception itself.

I think that's kind of a subtext of her art.

So when she does a still life composition on a polka dot background, I think she's interested not only in the fabric, which she probably really likes very much, and the objects themselves, but also the way the outside reflects the surroundings to the point where you get drawn into the vessel, even though you're being drawn into the outside of the thing.

She would give you the raw material and it's digestible because you know what this thing is.

But once you start to parse this stuff out you realize that this is a very complex picture.

There's a lot to it.

It's breaking down the familiar in a way that yields many rewards, I guess you could say.

(light music) >> Doing as much as you can as quickly as you can is important to me.

Life is short and the earlier we get started helping our community, the the better off our community will be.

>> Almost every single professor I've had, I'm on a first name basis.

By building that relationship with faculty, I was able to get involved with research.

It's one thing to read about an idea in a book versus physically doing it and seeing the results.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Ivy Tech offers more than 70 programs with locations in Michigan City, LaPorte and Valparaiso.

New classes start every few weeks.

Ivy Tech, higher education at the speed of life.

To get started, visit ivytech.edu.

>> Announcer: Family, home, work, self.

Of all the things you take care of, make sure you are near the top of the list.

North Shore Health Centers offers many services to keep you balanced and healthy.

So take a moment, self-assess, and put yourself first from medical to dental, vision, chiropractic, and mental health.

North Shore will help get you centered.

You help keep your world running, so make sure to take care of yourself.

>> Narrator: "Eye on the Arts" is made possible in part by South Shore Arts, the John W. Anderson Foundation and the Indiana Arts Commission.

Making the arts happen.

Additional support for Lakeshore Public Media and local programming is made possible by viewers like you.

Thank you.

>> Announcer: Did you know that you can find all of your favorite Lakeshore PBS shows online?

By visiting video.LakeshorePBS.org, you can stream a large selection of shows including "Eye on the Arts," "In Studio," and "Friends & Neighbors."

Lakeshore PBS has taken great care to bring you the best in local content.

Not sure how to find local content?

Click on shows and sort by Only Lakeshore PBS shows.

Not only will you find local content on Lakeshore PBS, but you can also stream live TV right to your computer.

Click on Live TV and get instant access to Lakeshore PBS Live wherever you are.

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Visit video.LakeshorePBS.org to stream your favorite local shows.

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With our newly expanded signal, we're with you from the southern corner of Michigan and into Chicago, and of course across northwest Indiana.

From the Dunes at Lake Michigan to the windmills of Walcott, Lakeshore Public Media 89.1 FM is along for the ride wherever you call home.

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