(upbeat music) - [Narrator] On this episode of Postcards.

- I just wanna be performing music for the rest of my life, I wanna be on stage making people happy, making people sad, making people excited.

- I definitely have a day job that's in a different realm and that's what I do to pay the bills, but this is what I do to pay my soul.

- I think some artists wanna become famous and be another Picasso.

And as long as I can sit here in my little studio and do my weird stuff, I'm happy.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Postcards is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the Citizens of Minnesota.

Additional support provided by Margaret A Cargill Philanthropies, Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen on behalf of Shalom Hill Farms, a retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Wyndham, Minnesota.

On the web at shalomhillfarm.org.

Alexandria, Minnesota, a year-round destination with hundreds of lakes, trails and attractions for memorable vacations and events.

More information at explorealex.com.

A better future starts now.

West Central Initiative empowers communities with resources, funding, and support for a thriving region.

More at wcif.org.

(upbeat piano music) - I started taking piano lessons at age five.

I was taught by my mom pretty early on, she had to pass me off to another teacher.

So at age seven, I started taking piano lessons at MacPhail Center for Music with Timothy De Prey.

(upbeat piano music) My initial condition was, I'll take lessons with you, but I don't ever want to perform.

And he was very much like, "Okay, but we're probably gonna have you perform."

So he put me in a couple of recitals and I realized maybe this performance thing is not as bad as I expected.

The first recital I can remember performing in, I played, "Puff the Magic Dragon" and added a couple of improvisations of which I was very proud.

And after that recital, I looked at mom and I was like, "I wanna do this again."

(gentle music) I've been a tea drinker as long as I can remember.

My family is very connected to the United Kingdom and there is such a tea culture over there.

My favorite kind of tea, let's see, I'll grab the packet.

It's so good.

Wait, is that the one that you grabbed, Congest Away?

Yeah, it's so good.

My favorite kind of tea has fennel, peppermint, ginger, and licorice, and it is called Congest Away.

(upbeat piano music) I have synesthesia, which means that I experience things with more than one sense at a time.

So most notably, when I'm listening to music or playing music, I also visualize colors and shapes and textures almost as if I'm seeing the music itself.

So music is a form of communication to begin with, but it's even more than that for me because I'm not just communicating in terms of like, in terms of what you can hear, I'm also feeling and seeing and tasting and smelling everything that I'm putting out there and everything that I'm listening to as well.

(upbeat piano music) Tim put me in Crescendo, which is a sort of graduated leveling program at MacPhail, where as you learn more and more complicated songs, you rise through the ranks, perform at galas and recitals and stuff.

So I graduated from Crescendo a couple years ago and one of the people who attended the recital was Seymour Bernstein, who is a well-known pianist from whom I've had some masterclasses and stuff before.

After that recital and after the feedback I received and after the thrill of doing a solo performance, I was like, I kind of wanna do this full time, maybe pursue music education, maybe pursue music professionally.

So I started devoting more and more of my time to piano and to theater and just getting myself on stage and doing music as much as I possibly could.

♪ I'm singing in the rain ♪ ♪ Just singing in the rain ♪ ♪ What a glorious feeling I'm happy I guess ♪ My favorite part of performance is going on stage and performing and seeing other people smile or cry or laugh or whatever else they might feel during a performance.

And knowing that I made them feel something, that I touched their hearts.

(upbeat band music) (audience cheers and applauds) I love playing modern jazz and rag.

It's so vibrant, there's so much going on.

There's a lot of harmonic dissonance, which just, I eat that up.

I also really love playing pop songs because then I can play and I can sing, which is, two forms of music in one, which is just, it's twice the fun.

And this is Lament of Orpheus by Darren Korb from the video game, "Hades."

- [Interviewer] My favorite video game, by the way.

- Let's go!

(upbeat piano music) ♪ Hear, oh gods, my desperate plea ♪ ♪ To see my love beside me ♪ I am a spectrum child as we like to put it.

And I often struggle with overstimulation and mood swings and antisocial tendencies, sometimes not being great with people.

Music has been really therapeutic for that.

So when I feel overstimulated or when I experience a mood swing, I can go to the piano, I can start humming, I can elicit emotional responses from myself to help work through whatever I'm dealing with, it's like a self-regulatory system for me.

♪ Don't, don't look back ♪ ♪ Close enough that light we can see ♪ ♪ My doubt betrays the better of me ♪ ♪ Glance to the stern is all it would be ♪ ♪ That anguished shade shall haunt me ♪ ♪ Ever on ♪ ♪ Calm seas ♪ ♪ Winds alee ♪ ♪ But now the squall's upon us ♪ ♪ We're floundering ♪ ♪ Drowning ♪ ♪ Don't look back ♪ ♪ Don't look back ♪ ♪ Don't look back ♪ I have quite a large family and we are all quite rowdy.

Five siblings, lot of pets.

While we may fight, while we may have arguments sometimes, we're also, I mean, we're family, we're as tight as can be.

(upbeat music) I have been homeschooled my entire life and so have most of my siblings.

So not only are we living together and interacting with each other when we're at home, we're also learning together and being together when we're doing school and stuff.

So we're constantly interacting with each other.

Our mindset started out like, we might as well, we might as well just get through this, we might as well be friends just to make this easier.

And now it's like, I can't live without you guys.

It's the, okay.

As a musician and as a performer, I just wanna be performing music for the rest of my life.

I wanna be on stage making people happy, making people sad, making people excited.

I just wanna communicate beauty to people.

(upbeat piano music) - The Little Show on The Crow was an idea that Bethany and I had in terms of trying to figure out how to get summer programming really kind of off the ground for the theater.

The last number of seasons that we've had during the summer have been pretty low attendance.

And we know that a really big part of that is that people wanna be outside.

And so the idea of being able to do a summer concert series really just kind of seemed like a no brainer.

We love bringing in entertainment for people and providing a lot of opportunities, so taking it outside just seemed like the right idea.

(upbeat music) ♪ I am not tall enough to do anything ♪ - Work on that.

- Work on that Little Show On The Crow is a summer concert series that's taking place here at Neer Park.

We meet on Wednesdays at 6:30, we gather the community together.

We've been attempting to try to get a market associated with it as well, providing opportunities for local vendors to be a part of it as well.

But ultimately, it's a time for us to gather once a week as a community to enjoy free live music and then also kind of educate people about what Little Theater is about and what we're sort of working towards in terms of our responsibility in the community and how people can sort of be a part of it.

(upbeat music) New London's Little Theater Auditorium is a nonprofit organization and location in downtown New London that emphasizes the importance of the arts and art education in our community.

(upbeat music) My interest in the arts really roots in my youth.

I grew up wanting to be on stage and performing and wanting to make visual art.

I went to an arts high school and then continued to study art and became an art teacher.

I actually just came out of a 16 year career as an art educator in the public and private sector, so it's pretty deep into who I am as a person.

This is a really great opportunity for me to sort of make a difference in the community on a whole different level outside of, a school system or my own personal classes.

But that's pretty much who I am.

I definitely have a day job that's in a different realm and that's what I do to pay the bills, but this is what I do to pay my soul.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are so excited to welcome you here to Neer Park for our fantastic 4th of July edition of Little Show on the Crow.

Everybody give yourselves a round of applause.

Today, my duties for the Little Show on the Crow are sort of all encompassing.

We get together a little bit earlier in the day and do all of the setup and then I sort of fill in wherever necessary.

I'm actually the MC of the whole event, so I'll do the introduction and I'll introduce our performers.

I'll also tell people about what kind of things they can enjoy while they're here.

And then I'm also the face painter today.

We were looking for something a little special to add to the event.

We're hoping that we'll have a lot of families and kids here and why not add another fun element to it?

Neer Park and the Crow River is a really special place to host this type of an event because it's such a beautiful landscape.

We've got this really lovely rolling hill that serves as a really great amphitheater.

And the space is actually really commonly used by the Little Crow Ski Show on Fridays.

They do a fantastic show all summer long, so people are used to coming here.

So it really just kind of seemed like an ideal space to welcome people back and experience it in a totally different way.

(upbeat music) Some of the vendors joining us tonight are going to be Back 40 Pizza, the Aaron's family farm, they're really fantastic and definitely a crowd favorite.

We have a new food truck in town called Gypsy Bowls that's gonna be joining us for the first time this evening.

And we also have a really fantastic baker.

The name of their company is Killer Frosting, she makes really fantastic confections.

And then we have Maggie's Minis.

Little Show On the Crow is definitely an event for all ages, it is family friendly and we encourage you to bring the whole gang.

(upbeat music) Starting this programming has definitely been a journey of confidence building and confirmation.

I would say we have spent the last number of years kind of working up towards this kind of programming and learning about how to do it and how to make it really attractive for people who are looking for something to do, but they don't quite know what.

And so with the beginning of it and with its proven growth, we're feeling like that's something that's really, coming to fruition and really helping build our confidence when it comes to designing programming in the future.

And then in addition to that, for me it's really confirming the fact that I truly live in a village of people who really just wanna support each other and really wanna be a part of something really cool.

And it's kind of how my family ended up in this area is that we were looking for a smaller community that we could have a bigger impact in.

And that's happening and it feels really good.

And if anything, New London is incredibly open-minded and excited to try things that are new.

It's a welcoming community and it's a community that really enjoys a lot of fun.

(upbeat music) - My art career started probably when I was a little kid and was drawing all over my parents' walls so that I just naturally, as soon as I could hold a pencil, I liked drawing.

So I had a grandmother that constantly sent me to little art classes in the summers and it just kind of continued from there.

And then after I got out of high school, I ended up at Ringling School of Art.

They had graphic design, fine art and interior design and I just thought I didn't wanna be a starving artist, so I went into graphic design.

And so then that kind of was my career for the first 15 years doing logo design, any kind of advertising type layouts.

I did architectural renderings and then I kinda slowly merged into doing faux painting and more probably towards interior design type stuff, but it still involved murals.

So yeah, it's just evolved for throughout the years.

But probably my biggest love is still fine art and painting and now I'm evolving into that, I guess you could say.

(upbeat music) How I ended up in Madison is my husband's family farm, it's been the family's since 1880, is right outside of Madison, so we were looking for a place to spend summers that wasn't hot like Florida.

And we just ended up, we decided here after a few family reunions, we thought this is really a nice, quiet town.

After dealing with tour season, it's kind of nice to come where it's nice and quiet.

I did this design for the Madison Arts Council.

They were putting out a brochure and were looking for a design for that and for T-shirts, and so I came up with this form.

In Florida, a lot of my clients are like in really nice, big $5 million homes and they want really big paintings and they want something that matches their colors and usually very contemporary.

So needless to say, no little old cars and things like I like to paint or appear, people like the tractors and the scenery and the nostalgic stuff.

So and I enjoy painting that probably.

I like both of them, it's kind of a challenge to paint a big, contemporary painting that's nothing.

I'll do like a little thumbnail, I try to have some dimension to them instead of just great big shapes with, runny paint running down it and so, but, so I don't know, 'cause I like so many genres of types of painting, I just, I jump around after I get bored with something and I'm like, oh, let's try gluing bark on canvas, why not?

All right, so I actually thought of this because getting into all the weird other things that I could glue onto canvases, I had a tree that gives me bark on a regular basis, so I decided to kind of make it a little more colorful so I didn't stain it a little bit with the color wash and thought it would be cool on canvases.

So probably every day, I'm doing something creative.

I come down here even on Sundays when there's no one here and work on stuff sometimes 'cause it's fun.

I had someone the other day say, oh, well why don't you enjoy your house more and stay at your house more?

And I'm like, well, because I would just sit there and watch TV, I'd rather be down here making some kind of art or working on an idea for something, so it's my spot here.

Yeah, this is a Siberian cave bear skull.

So my husband likes weird stuff too.

So we have the paw, like the paw the skull was like $20,000 or something like that, so I was like, well I have this skull, it's just a painting of it.

So it's not the original, but I took a photo of it at the, I think it was Nature's Gallery in Colorado that had them, I think if I would've just gone into fine art only, I wouldn't know all these other weird products that I can use in my fine art.

And I find myself using my faux products all the time on canvases that I'm thinking, well, why aren't they giving this to artists?

Because this stuff is great.

Faux painting, it's been around for hundreds of years actually over in Italy, people that couldn't afford marble would do carvings out of plaster, and then the faux painter would come in and paint it and make it look like marble.

So it really just, faux means fake, which is funny because my license tag used to be faux biz, so people were like, "Oh, you have a fake business?"

I'm like, "Well, yeah, kind of, I guess."

The painting that I am working on right now is for myself, it's from a photo I took when I went to Alaska quite a few years ago and I did a smaller version of it and I've wanted to do a larger version.

It was a kind of a neat time.

We went into an area that the ships weren't able to get into for a while.

And so it was kind of neat that we were able to catch shots of the glaciers and the ice falling off and have a little time in it, but it's, it'll be fun.

Things that inspire me, obviously, like, beautiful scenery, like the Grand Canyons, our national parks.

I try to go through those whenever I'm near any of them, I'll, well, I'll go outta my way to go to them actually.

Other artists' art inspires me.

I mean, I've got tons and tons of screenshots that I take of other artists art to, it gives me ideas, but it gives you feelings, there's some paintings that I look at and I'm just like, that is so cool, if I could go buy that painting and had the money, I would go buy that painting from that artist.

And I mean, I would love to just drive all over the country and visit all these other artists' studios.

I think some artists wanna become famous and be another Picasso and, and I'm just kind of like, I just like doing my art and I don't care if I'm ever famous, as long as I can sit here in my little studio and do my weird stuff, I'm happy.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Postcards is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Additional support provided by Margaret A Cargill Philanthropies, Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen on behalf of Shalom Hill Farms, a retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Wyndham, Minnesota, on the web at shalomhillfarm.org.

Alexandria, Minnesota, a year-round destination with hundreds of lakes, trails and attractions for memorable vacations and events.

More information at explorealex.com.

A better future starts now.

West Central Initiative empowers communities with resources, funding, and support for a thriving region.

More at wcif.org.

(upbeat music)