Kati Texas: On "Studio Space," Marceau Verdiere's unique work is imbued with layers of saturated pigment.

Learn more about his inspiration.

Emily Silver walks the landscape collecting mud and earth to incorporate into her paintings.

"Studio Space" explores Northern California's vibrant art community.

♪♪♪ Marceau Verdiere: Hi, I'm Marceau Verdiere.

Rhynell Mouton: I'm Rhynell Mouton.

We're here to talk with Marceau about his wonderful abstract paintings.

Join us as we explore the artist's journey.

Marceau: I play with the idea that we are what we've encountered in life.

What we've encountered, what is--what remains of that.

My paintings are, in essence, imagining the patina of a soul.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Rhynell: Marceau, thank you for having us.

Marceau: Thank you very much for coming and visiting my home.

I much appreciate it.

Rhynell: What would you say your best thing about abstract art is or art in general, why--the way the painting or the photography, what is your favorite part about that process?

Marceau: The favorite part is simply to make it.

I am a person that gets really easily distracted by life.

I--when I'm in the studio, when I make a photo, it's one of the very rare times that I am focused on what I'm doing, and I like this and it makes time disappear.

So I may start in the studio at 7 p.m. and I think I'll be there for a couple hours and it's like, "Okay, maybe time to go to bed."

I look at my watch and it's 3 a.m. and I love that.

I love that time disappears when I create.

So that's my favorite part about it, just the act of making it, you know?

Rhynell: I notice you have, like, different themes.

Do you stick to a certain theme or is it just more so kind of how you're feeling or-- Marceau: My work is primarily about memories, and memories as traces.

I imagine what a soul might look like if we could see all the traces that memories are and how they build up and how they change.

And I'm interested primarily in small moments in life, the moments that we generally don't pay attention to, moments of doubt.

Moments of silence.

But there are defining moments.

Rhynell: Are you sometimes surprised at what the viewer can pull out of your abstract paintings?

Marceau: I'm always surprised, yeah.

And I'm surprised mostly when the viewer allows--the viewers allow themselves to be completely genuine in the reaction.

It's always interesting to see what people read.

I've had reactions from people, I have had people crying at my painting, I had people burn my paintings because they saw devilish things in it after they acquired them.

I mean, so it's fun, you know?

You can--yes, the reactions can be quite varied.

Rhynell: And does it change, depending on what country you're in?

You know, people are different all over the world and you know that.

You've been around the world multiple times.

Do you see different reactions from different people all around the world, depending on the country?

Marceau: It's almost like the rest of the world versus Humboldt.

In Humboldt there is an--Humboldt is such a beautiful place and because it is so kind and so caring and so-- and supportive of the arts that the reaction will inevitably be positive generally and that's very comforting and it's very pleasant.

You go elsewhere where people don't know you and, especially when you go-- a show in bigger cities, Vienna, Barcelona, or some--the reaction can be a lot more rough, raw, honest.

But also it's quite helpful, you know, and the dialogues that you enter into can be quite stimulating.

It's a privileged moment when you're working in your studio, you're all alone with your time.

Time disappears.

In a society like this, like the one we live in, where everything goes so, so fast, I feel incredibly privileged to have figured out that, you know, I can do this.

Rhynell: When you're creating these images or these artistic paintings, are you going in there with the image in mind or are you kind of creating as you go?

Marceau: I do work always in series, so I may have a series on doubt, I may have a series on silence or, right now, I'm working on a series on anticipation.

So with that in mind, I have a certain vision of what the color palette, what the sort of composition will be to create a coherent ensemble.

So when I start a new painting, it fits within that ensemble of painting that I'm working on, except for the first one.

The first one sets the pace, often for what is coming.

Rhynell: This has all been so amazing.

Mind if we see how it all works?

Marceau: Let's go.

Rhynell: So, Marceau, can you take me through your creative process and why you use the things that you use?

Marceau: When I start with a painting, I always start with a black layer.

That is just a habit that I've taken and it's a chance for me to sort of have a first step in the painting, so I don't have painter's block like some writers have in front of a white page.

So, and for this I just use plain house paint.

I already have an interaction with the painting.

I have a sense of the palette and the colors I'll be using, and the direction I'm going to have something that is consistent with the series I'm working on.

Rhynell: So, now that the surface is dry, what comes next?

Marceau: The next step is to build up texture.

And for that I use an oil-based industrial paint.

It's thick, it's tough, and it will interact well with the oil paint.

So I just put a little bit here, and then-- Rhynell: Oh wow, yeah.

Marceau: Do you wanna try?

Rhynell: Yeah, do you think I could give it a go?

Marceau: Go for it.

But put on a pair of gloves.

Rhynell: All right, so, just let me get in the oil.

I can feel the Picasso coming out in me already.

Marceau: You're doing great.

We'll co-sign this one.

Rhynell: Okay, and then, do you like to keep it a little starry night or a little bit more, you know, thicker with-- Marceau: That's up to you and each painting will change, you know?

This is where you can start composing a little bit how the painting will come out.

It's actually sort of inspired from the Grisaille technique that they use in more ancient paintings where you build up different tones of grays and then by using translucent glazes over transparent paintings, you know, you'll be able to play with the light a little bit.

Rhynell: Ah, okay.

Marceau: And then you can smear a part, partially.

Start building up.

Rhynell: Yeah, I can see the shaping already, yeah.

Marceau: Something that goes on.

Rhynell: And so now that you have the textures and, you know, the extra layers, what comes next?

Marceau: So I start to scrape and because my paintings are about memories or traces that accumulate on one's soul, you know, the idea is you put on a layer, you scrape it off, you put on a layer, you scrape it off.

And now, when we start playing, again, we're just doing traces and build up a surface that becomes, hopefully, more and more interesting.

Rhynell: It's interesting already.

Marceau: How about you?

Rhynell: Yeah-- let's give it a try.

Marceau: Have fun with pressure and how you wanna play.

Rhynell: I can definitely see, like, the textures and just-- how the white kind of is still coming through the blue, even though it was like the one, you know, second layer that you put on, but it's still kind of coming through.

It comes out really nice here.

Marceau: But now, we take it off again.

So, now we start scraping again.

You never take everything away.

It's like a memory, you know, it stays with you.

It slowly fades, but there's always something that remains.

That's--while it's still wet, why don't we change it up a little bit and bring a little warm white on it.

This one is opaque.

A bit there, and this will allow me to sort of play and see what it does.

So since it has this little yellowish sort of tone, interacting with blue, will become a sort of a greenish thing, but it's going to be a very subtle, almost jade-like green.

And again, I'll put a little bit of medium.

This is--and I have some different kind of things and, you know, let's play with it and see.

Rhynell: Yeah, I can see just applying different pressures just--it's creating something totally different.

Marceau: And the act of painting has to be playful.

Otherwise, it's a--it's interesting.

It makes it a lot more pleasant.

Rhynell: Yeah, I feel like just, with painting, just anything works.

Like, you can literally just come out and just, you know, just throw things on and you can create something out of that.

Like, you can just--you can be as experimental as you want.

All right.

Now, let me guess.

Are we taking something off?

Marceau: Let's play a little bit and smear it around a little bit and see, you know, some areas.

And create.

Just we start having--but now you're right.

Scraping off.

Rhynell: Okay.

Marceau: So, you--and you can play around with which areas you wanna scrape off a little bit and same for the pressure.

Marceau: And as you see, the tough industrial paint, that stays, you know, that's a hard one to get.

Rhynell: Yeah.

Marceau: Yeah, and now I would wait until this dries so it could take two, three days, and then I start rebuilding the new layers in different colors to then create contrasting effects and certain depth and things, but on this one we started with blue, we may move on to a reddish or an orange sort of thing, things that contrast really well with the painting.

Rhynell: Yeah, okay, wow.

That's amazing.

Marceau: Good job.

Rhynell: That's--thank you.

Yeah, that is--yeah, that is something.

That is very, very cool because you just took something and you, basically, just added, you know, three or four colors but made it so much more hands on by just adding the scraping and the rolling and the drying with the heater and, yeah, that's amazing.

Marceau: That's exactly how life works, you know?

Every experience that you encounter is applied to yourself somehow in a different way, and as it fades away, as it's scraped away by the rest of life, you know, what remains is, or at least traces, that accumulate.

♪♪♪ Rhynell: Is there another artistic medium that you've always wanted to try but never had the opportunity to try yet?

Marceau: Ah, yes.

I want to work with metal one day and weld and grind and so forth.

I have project ideas for it but haven't yet had the opportunity.

I've played around with sculpture.

I did a month's long stay in France to work on ceramics which I really, really, really liked but it's not intuitive to me and, you know, so, yeah, I do explore different things but I come back to painting.

It's my thing.

Rhynell: Well, Marceau, this has been amazing.

Thank you for inviting us to your lovely home.

Marceau: Oh, the pleasure was certainly mine.

Rhynell: And thank you for joining us on "Studio Space."

Kati: Today on "Studio Space," we have come to the beautiful town of Ferndale, California, to talk with Emily Silver, a watercolor painter who does landscapes from a very unique perspective.

Hi, I'm Kati Texas.

C'mon, let's check it out.

Emily Silver: There are so many ways to see a simple walk on the earth and ways to experience it that, you know, for any one of the walks that I've ever taken, I could do a hundred paintings and each one would be different.

♪♪♪ Kati: Hi, Emily.

Thank you so much for having us in your beautiful studio.

Emily: I'm really glad that you guys came up.

This is wonderful, thank you.

Kati: Whenever I traverse a landscape physically, like, you know, walking or even biking, but not in a car, I feel like I have a better sense of the place's personality.

Like, I've met--I've met the landscape more so than watching it just fly by.

Do these places have personality for you?

Emily: I'm a walker and I like to walk distance.

I like to walk on a trail.

I prefer to walk in the desert and, through walking, I feel like I familiarize myself with-- walking presents a challenge.

You're breathing the air, you're suffering the weather, whatever it is.

You're dealing with whatever comes up on the trail, maybe it's a rattlesnake, maybe it's a puddle, maybe it's ice, maybe it's deep mud, wind.

I mean, walking puts you out there.

And you--it's a way of experiencing land.

It's one way.

Kati: So in these paintings, how does the walk come in?

Like, what do you mean, you-- Emily: I often map the walk in my paintings, so that I'll use a little, usually white, little dotted line to represent myself and my movement through that place.

I think of my individual paintings as just a map or response to a place.

It's a map in the sense that I'm inviting the viewer to understand the whole situation of where I am in my walk.

It's also a documentation of the walk so that you're saying, "Well, this is the place and here's where I walked."

It's a simple communication of place.

It's a two-part quality: it's the landscape and it's me, so that my orientation, my emotions, my sense of place, all of those come into play on how I feel about the landscape or what its tone is.

But also, I'm documenting places I've been and where I've walked, and these are meaningful places to me.

And when you're walking, you are actually a living horizon between earth and atmosphere so you are connecting.

Your feet are on the earth, your head is in the sky.

So you're a connecting agent.

There's something happening under your feet and then there's something happening to, you know, the rest of your body that's in the air.

And then there's you.

I mean, whoever you are and whoever you're responding.

And then there's the time, the moment.

You're responding in a certain way.

You're walking in a certain mood.

You had a bad--you didn't sleep last night, you had a bad day, you had a good day, you came off a big breakfast, you know, whatever.

All of that plays a role into how you perceive.

So, a lot of it is really just perceiving earth and air, earth and sky, earth and atmosphere, through the medium, kind of, of the road, of the path, or of the route.

Kati: I can't wait to see how this goes together.

Can you show us how--show us some of your work?

Emily: Sure, let's go over there.

Kati: This is a very big piece of paper.

Emily: It's 72 by 45.

Kati: And it's just a blend of paper and fiber?

Emily: It's all cotton.

This is made by Arches which has a paper mill in France that was opened in 1492.

And for my very first part, I always start real loose on all my work, and I just sort of decide on the color.

My color approach today is gonna be kind of grayish with a warm tint, so I'm mixing up viridian green.

This is watercolor.

And I'm using burnt scarlet to mix with it to gray, to warm up that green and get kind of a gray that's pretty warm.

I happen to like the way these two pigments work together.

So you'll see a lot of burnt scarlet in my paintings.

Kati: What does the water do for you?

Why are you wetting the surface?

Emily: Well, it spreads the paint and it also helps--just like a sponge, a wet surface absorbs stuff better.

If you have a wet surface, it's gonna draw the color down into the paper and then you can work in layers over it without really picking up very much.

This is gonna be a painting about an area west of Las Vegas called Blue Diamond and there's a big old mine there.

The mine is going to be in the lower right corner, and it's white where they've cut into the earth, so I'm gonna try to leave that area white and I'm gonna just start in, putting in some color.

I didn't mix enough, but this'll give you an idea.

And you can see that it's flowing.

It's flowing out real good and then I can add more water and move it around.

The more water that you add, the more cool things happen with watercolor.

So, and a lot of people are kind of afraid of water, but it's the greatest.

Kati: A little feathering on the edges there.

Emily: Yeah, and the pigments are different weights, so they're gonna do different things.

The green is probably gonna sink, and the red is gonna flow.

Kati: Yeah, the colors are separating out.

Even though you're doing one stroke, you're getting sort of like a variation between the green and the brown.

Emily: I'm gonna--I'm gonna fade this out toward the top because I really wanna kind of get the focal point down in this area.

So this part will be a little bit--will have an underlying glaze that's a little more interesting.

Some cool things happen when you put this red in and if you've ever been to Las Vegas you know that red is pretty--a pretty strong color down there, so I wanna kind of get that.

Now, I know that there's a mountain range right over here, so I'm gonna kind of work that area with some color.

And now, at this stage, I don't really mind whatever happens with the paint is good and unexpected, and so I just kind of finish out.

I can add water in, after it starts to dry and get some really nice explosions.

Kati: And since you're doing this organic natural thing, using the natural chaos of the water, of the fluid, as it flows, helps make that texture.

Emily: Yeah, and I sort of take pot luck on this stage because I know that I can go over it later.

I can even scrub it later, but they actually add a lot so I'm not afraid of scrubbing or erasing or painting over.

Sometimes, you know, I botch it up but, oops, now that got a little too green.

I need to get some red.

And, you know, those processes actually, they seem sort of like last-ditch processes when you're in 'em.

Kati: Right, you know, so I'm standing on a hill and I'm looking out at the valley, but this is a very different perspective on the land.

Emily: This is a mapped view, or a survey view.

So it's like a satellite view.

So that kind of area really interests me.

I always think of my paintings as like a window 'cause I really love that view.

Now I'm pretty happy with the way this looks and I'm running out of color so we'll see.

We'll add a little--let's get a little more color and just kind of go in here with something.

Yeah, and then maybe the same with a little water.

I like texture.

This texture is gonna unify my painting because I'm gonna work in actual--I'll be working in actual--in a grid.

I'll be working square by square.

So with this underlying kind of unity, the painting will have a little more unity.

It'll look more unified.

Emily: And I refer a lot to maps.

I was raised with--my parents were both geologists and so maps were like a thing in our life.

Kati: This land texture is in your blood.

Emily: It is, yeah.

Yeah, it is.

I'm not scientific like they were but look what's happening here.

This is cool.

So, that could be developed into something and I'm getting a nice red area over there.

As it dries, things happen, and I really like that this is-- this is the beginning or the underpainting that's gonna lead to, you know, something a little more exotic and complicated.

But this'll give--this is like the seed of the painting.

Kati: So it sounds like the walking, the exploration of the environment, is an important experience to you, as well as the creation of the art.

Emily: It's the most meaningful thing that I have in my life, you know?

So that's where my bliss, passion, and ecstasy are, you know?

That interface between sort of a micro activity of painting and this sort of macro activity of walking and being in a place, and identifying the qualities of the place that are affecting me, that turns out to me to feel really elemental.

And when I think about painting and I've painted, you know, for a long time, I just feel like the paintings that I do in relationship to land are the most-- have the most power for me.

They're the most satisfying.

It's sort of like I kind of close the circle of the relationship with place by walking, painting, mapping.

Emily: Orienteering, all of that, just works together like this to feel like I'm really engaged with a place.

All our emotions and all our feelings are kind of fugitive and moments are fugitive.

So a painting sort of stands in for a moment or sort of freezes a moment.

Kati: Your paintings and the desert both make me feel small but in a, like, good way, in a connected way, in a, like, "I am also made of dirt" sort of way.

Emily: Yes, you are.

Kati: So I definitely appreciate that.

Emily: Mm-hm, good.

Kati: When did you land on this particular style?

When did you start doing these watercolor portraits of landscapes?

Emily: They evolved.

I used to do a lot of paintings that were more like lines or horizon lines, and they were a little more painterly in a way.

They were more focused on the colors and the glazes that I was using in the cool resist that I was practicing.

But the idea is that we collect, you know, we're a very intelligent people and we collect complex ideas of place.

♪♪♪ Emily: I like to walk the same walk over and over and over because it is never the same.

I never see the same thing twice.

And I think if my paintings could be like that, that would be wonderful.

Kati: Well, that is wonderful.

This has all been really fascinating.

Thank you so much for sharing all of this with us.

Emily: Well, thank you very much for having me.

Kati: And thank you for joining us on "Studio Space."

Rhynell: For more information about these artists, visit studiospace.tv.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Rhynell: My résumé is gonna say, "Film/artist."

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