MPR's Marianne Combs speaks with musician Georgia Ann Hunter, painter Patricia Canelake, and poet Louis Jenkins, as they gathered with other artists at the Lake Superior Center in Duluth to share their work and talk about how the lake has influenced their art.

Segment includes reading by Jenkins and musical perfomance by Hunter.

Transcript:

(00:00:10) I'm Dirty Dan Hunter and I'm a Gaelic harpist, which is a small Irish Harp. There's times that I'm walking down on like Park point and look back at the hills behind Duluth and it just it's like straight out of Scotland everything. It's amazing. I've been to Scotland to couple times and there's just so much of a crossover even with some of the fishing the way people make a living there and the way they did here we've gotten away from that a little bit more. So how would you say that Lake Superior has influenced your work as a musician? Well it pro. I think actually it just permeates everything I do. I feel like when I first moved here I had been in Colorado for about 12 years and I gotten a ticket for watering my lawn. I can remember driving down the street thinking it was one of their seven years. Outs thinking if it doesn't rain soon I could literally go crazy. I mean it just and I think that feeling of how much water is an element that life depends on and hear the lake is just there. I mean even when I don't see it, it's still just there. It's an energy force that I just feel and it sort of my life operates almost out of that and I can remember coming down some of the streets are some of the overlooks when I first moved up here and I would just go Rounding the corner and I thought you know, I'm going to lose that at some point, but I actually think that's still is there for me a great deal? Hi. My name is Patricia cane like and I'm a painter I paint with oils and I can see little strip of like spear for my house. But I always go down there daily and paint directly from the lake and It has inspired me, especially in the season the warmer seasons in the winter. I work on other themes but in the summer, I was go back to painting the lake ever get bored of painting the same picture. It's never the same the weather's different the way an artist sets up the site the way you where you sit and how you view things as I was going to change the lighting your sense of color. The lake is very volatile changeable. And that makes painting kind of interesting to it helps me with concentration and staying put and you know intense mode. So my other paintings are much different during the winter. I paint cars and trucks and animals and human beings. So but just the the sense of being outside and sitting still and and dealing with the intensity of observation. I think that helps in all Endeavors, I'd say my opinions are Use express have expressive use of color. In fact, I have a series of paintings that are influenced by an orange lichen on the rocks. And so they look very red or orange you read and then some of the paintings are more with blues and greens and purples, but I always tend to see more color than the average person would say in the paintings are very colorful.
(00:03:26) I'm Luis Jenkins and I'm currently a security guard at the Tweed Museum of Art.
(00:03:33) What else do you do for a living?
(00:03:35) I'm a poet. I've lived in Duluth for about 25 years now and Lake Superior is presence that's very difficult to ignore. And if you are a writer painter musician, whatever I don't think that it could help it influence you it's There it is wonderful terrible and all of those things that Lake Superior is the lake can be very different things at different times to you in a metaphorical sense in an emotional sense. This is called the ice fisherman from here. He appears as a black spot one of the Shadows that today have found it necessary to assume solid form and along with the black jet of Shoreline just to the left is the only break in the undifferentiated gray of ice and overcast sky here is a man going jiggity jig jig in a black hole. Depth and the current are of only incidental interest to him. He's after something big something down there that is pure need something that had it the wherewithal would swallow him whole Right now nothing is happening the fisherman stands and straightens back to the wind. He stays out on the ice all day.