[soft orchestral music]
*
- East Tennessee is a really special part of Appalachia.
*
We're a little bit off the beat and track,
but it's much more interesting and diverse
and connected than people give us credit for.
*
At the Knoxville Museum of Art,
our primary focus is on artists that are connected
to this really spectacularly beautiful part of the world.
*
- Some of the earliest professional artists
in East Tennessee, rather than trying to focus
on subject matter from far and wide,
they were looking in their own backyard for inspiration.
They would turn to East Tennessee's lush landscape.
They looked at its burgeoning urban landscape.
Even contemporary artists based many
of their compositions on local subjects.
*
- The museum is one of the great destinations
for the arts and culture in Knoxville.
But if you look back eight years ago,
the Great Hall was kind of a hopeless space.
It was so big and ungainly, a great place for events,
but there was no art there.
- I knew to have a successful impact on the space,
it could not be something light and of whimsy.
It had to have more solid mass to it.
- To me it was just a daunting task.
When I walked into the Great Hall, I said, "Richard,
"are you sure you want to take this on?
I mean, this is a lot."
And he was like, "Ah, it's gonna be incredible."
*
- Richard is a great artist
who happens to live in Knoxville
and works mostly in glass.
Every human being is inherently fascinated
with glass.
It just looks like magic.
It's heavy, and if you touch it, it will burn you.
- Good. Good.
Ready to blow. Blow.
- There's so much drama to the making of glass...
- Blow. - And the kind of choreography
of all the different players that it takes to make a piece.
- Up.
Good, good.
Steady
You're good, just stay with me, everything's good.
Good. Good.
- Today we're making a head.
It's a sleeping head, so it's a head on its side.
The finished piece will be with a bird on top.
- Whenever you're ready.
It's part of the "Suspended in Dreams" series
that I've done.
Good, good, good.
- Richard has such tenacity.
Once he gets into the hot shop to make the things,
he's probably already made it in his head several times.
He has a clear vision of what he wants to do.
- And he makes his own glass.
That's very rare.
Richard is the only American artist
that I know that does that.
He's a real chemist.
He makes his own colors, all of his own blues,
all of his own greens, every color
that you see in his work.
The knowledge is endless.
I'm like, "Can we put our heads together?
And can I suck it all in?"
But I don't think it's possible.
[soft orchestral music]
*
- I think when you're young,
you're always worried about finding your voice.
But as an artist at my age, it is like you breathe in,
you breathe out.
*
There are narratives with my work,
but I don't feel that you have to know the narrative
to understand it.
*
I don't think that it takes much explanation.
*
Functioning as an artist,
you're sort of always in a dream state.
Although you're very focused and realistic,
there's also this dreamlike quality
that you have to have to do these things.
*
[torch roaring]
- I think the Richard's interest
in working with different materials, fire, chemicals,
it's deeply rooted in having grown up in the atomic city
of Oak Ridge.
- Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was built from scratch
during World War II, part of the Manhattan Project.
It was a very secretive location
because of the governmental research they were doing.
My father was a scientist; my mother was an educator.
Growing up in Oak Ridge, everyone was supposed
to become a professional,
whether it's a doctor or an engineer.
Somehow I missed the memo and decided once
I got into college that I wanted to be an artist.
*
- Hey, Richard. - Hey.
Tommie and I met in 1980.
- Coming to make sure you're working.
- Yeah.
- I grew up in Mobile, Alabama.
And the difference between Oak Ridge and Mobile
are like night and day.
I can't imagine them having drive-through daiquiri machines
in Oak Ridge [laughing].
- I wanna try to get the "Sky" part laid out.
She is so different than what I am.
I mean, she's very vivacious, intelligent.
- I think it's a trumpet flower.
He's very stoic compared to me,
plays his cards pretty close to his chest.
But look at this color. - That's fabulous.
- I mean, look, it's almost pink underneath.
- Yeah, this yellow is really nice.
- I know.
Beauty can be found in so many things.
For me, it happens to be found in the garden.
And my work is very botanical-based.
It really is an extension of my joy
of the natural world.
*
- Richard was thinking about the space
and what would the subject of this installation be?
- Steve and Ann Bailey were benefactors
and patrons that gave me carte blanche to do what I wanted.
[bright orchestral music]
- Richard began using line drawing.
That's usually where his initial ideas first take hold.
- As I started out, I wanted to have a sense of place,
and then I realized that I was talking
about a cycle of life.
*
- He had his team basically trace
his puddle-like line drawings and superimpose
those onto sheets of metal that were then cut out
keeping the drawing's expressive quality alive
in the final sculpture.
- There is a combination
of these sort of steel drawings filled in with glass
as well as freeform blown or hot-worked glass.
*
- The piece was seven tons,
one of the largest sculptural projects I think
that's ever been done in glass.
So we had all these physical issues
of weight and fragility that we had to solve.
- And these fragments were assembled and brought
to the museum, but it involved trucks that were trying
to make it under bridges,
having to be craned over the museum's walls and then wheeled
into our space.
- I worked on the project for five years
and today the "Cycle of Life: Within the Power of Dreams
and the Wonder of Infinity"
is a permanent installation at the Knoxville Museum of Art.
- It was an incredibly ambitious
and kind of implausibly ambitious idea to take on,
and he pulled it off.
[gentle piano music]
- "Cycle of Life" unfolds from the first section
this primordial forest glass tree trunks based on
The Tulip Poplar tree from East Tennessee.
- Number two is "Emergence,"
so it's a young couple as they emerge from the forest
or emerge into life.
- Next, you see birds ascend up into the heavens
in a section that's called "Flight."
- Flight is sort of the growth from adolescence
to the next step of life.
The fourth element is "Desire,"
so it's a couple getting ready to embrace.
Number five is the "Tree of Life."
It's very symbolic in very many cultures
about just sort of the progression of life.
*
- The final section is "Contemplation,"
and it's a monumental human head in two planes
that have been disjointed
and I think signaling the end of life
when that human shell breaks down
and the spirit is released.
*
- The most difficult thing about the project
is that there is a 22-foot gap in between one wall
and the second wall, so it's like stuttering.
I had to figure out how to link youth and maturity together,
and so that ended up being the solution of "Sky."
- "Sky" is suspended from the museum's ceiling.
And it's as if the spirit moves back
into this elemental state
that then leads around to the beginning again at the forest.
*
- The Knoxville Museum of Art
was one of the first places
that I came to when I was still learning
about Knoxville, before I had even been offered
the job of music director.
And I really felt completely drawn in
to this metaphysical world that Richard Jolley created.
[bright orchestral music]
There's this tradition of music being inspired by art,
I mean, the most well-known being
Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition,"
and I sat there thinking, this is begging to be turned
into a piece of music.
*
We came up with this idea of,
what if the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra
and the museum collaborate to commission
a new piece of music
for our audiences and our city.
Michael Schachter was the composer
I knew that we could trust with it.
You walk into the door,
you can't help but be aware of "Cycle of Life," but...
- Aram had me come down to Knoxville
to see the piece of art.
- It's literally larger than life in a way.
- It's just the way you have to look up at it,
that it sort of fills the space and commands attention
in a way that was really striking
and it was very inspiring for my earliest ideas
what the piece would be.
You know one thing that struck me
is that the "Contemplation" figure, it's in two planes.
There's a split right down the center hemisphere
of the head. - Oh, interesting.
- Yeah, I was thinking about the different parts
of my own brain in writing this
and that I felt a lot of internal tug-of-war,
much as this figure might have.
[violin music]
*
- Aram and I started talking about the piece
as a concerto, as something having the single soloist
and the orchestra.
*
I feel like Richard has the concept
of "Cycle of Life" apportioned out
over seven different movements.
So I decided I wanted to use that seven-movement structure
as a way of thinking about my own work.
*
The third movement is called "Flight."
This is the sort of point of adolescence.
It explodes in a kind of flurry
of freedom and robustness.
*
- There's music that I associate
with these sculptures now.
I just think it's incredible
the different parts of my soul it's sort of awakens
when I look at it.
*
- The sixth movement is called "Contemplation,"
and I did set this as a solo cadenza.
It's darker; it's one of the most dissonant movements
of the concerto, and it also is the one
that's most self-reflective as well
that in this moment of the contemplation,
the soloist is thinking back about their life.
*
- It truly is inspiring.
There is sort of the combining of the plastic
and performing arts to have a little bit more
of a holistic view of art.
*
- You know, I got goose bumps.
It really sounded like the art looks.
*
Now I can just get to look forward
to when this piece premiers
with the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra
and add one more layer of energy to the "Cycle of Life."
*