EVERYDAY NORTHWEST May 2023

(upbeat jazz music) - Hello again, and a very warm welcome along to another colorful new edition of "Everyday Northwest".

I'm your host, Staci Nelson, and our first excursion leads us south to Dayton, Washington, where we're about to discover the fine art creativity of painter Steve Henderson along with his wife, Carolyn, herself an accomplished author and Steve's business partner.

(gentle piano music) - I guess I'm fascinated that paint on a canvas hanging on a wall, something just very concrete, just the combination of shapes, color, texture can cause somebody to feel words and expressions that are hard to express and that is what I call magical, is that it's taken them into a place that is beyond the everyday, beyond maybe their moment at that time.

It's transporting them into a place they want to be.

(gentle piano music) Art to me is anything that causes an emotional reaction of some sort.

It seems like if music, you know, you play the music and if it doesn't, you know, resonate in your soul.

I mean, is is that art or isn't it?

You know, to you?

You look at a painting, does that resonate?

Does it cause something to change within me?

When I was a junior high in school, my mom went to a parent-teacher conference, as usual, and the art teacher, who was also the home ec teacher, she just saw a promise and she took my mother aside and just said, "If there's any opportunity I would get Steve in some kind of a class or introduce him to some artist, but he needs to be working with somebody to get his talent cultivated."

And so she looked up a local painter that everybody told her about, if you want to know about art, go visit so-and-so.

And she took me to his studio and it was upstairs in his house, completely packed with paintings.

And so that really encouraged me at that age, just as a junior high in school.

We went through the Central Washington University in Ellensburg and I attended the school there for four years.

And wanting to be an artist, I didn't really know any other option at that time but to go the academic route.

- Steve's a cool guy.

I've been married to him for 40 years and I remember when we first met.

I was just attracted to his spirit; it's a a gentle, confident spirit and I think that's what comes out in his paintings.

One of the highest compliments anyone can ever give him, and they have given it to him, is "I feel like I'm in that painting."

"You took me to that painting."

"I'm standing there", even if it's a man and the the painting's of a woman, I'm standing there I am in that place.

There's a lot of things he says in his paintings, but the main thing he's trying to get across is truth.

Just, he's trying to find it and he's trying to get people themselves to look for it.

- The painting "Free Spirit" is of our grandson and he is the free spirit, of course, that motivated that particular painting.

And what I was trying to capture in that painting is that breeze that was blowing through the fields out there that day.

He has his hat on and he's kind of holding tight onto it.

So, that one there is a very much of a combination between brushwork, palate knife work, and my thumb.

- It's sunset and the light is doing that thing that it does at sunset.

The water isn't blue, it's golden, and it's coral, and it's red, and it's orange, and there's a breeze blowing, and you are walking in the surf barefoot, and it's a little cool, and all you're doing is just walking.

You're not going anywhere.

You're already there.

So you're just walking through the breeze and thinking, and listening to the surf, and just letting your mind slow down, and letting it flow like the water does.

- "Serenity", one of my personal favorites, for the the composition, the way that particular painting is set up, drawing the viewer to stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon, right along with this lady who is wrapped in the blanket sitting there contemplating the setting sun over the Grand Canyon.

And that one there is primarily brushwork, very little palate knife.

There's a lot of detail in that one, but they're the muted colors, trying to keep the values very close in that painting.

- "Twilight Romance" always makes me smile and I think what makes me smile most about it is people's reactions to it.

People who come in and they'll just go, (gasping and sighing) and everybody thinks a different story about it.

And some people will say, "Well, are they leaving?

Is this their last dance together?"

And other people are, "Is this their first dance together?

And who's the fiddler?

Do they even know that he's there?

Or is he actually even there?"

It's just a really fun image because it just lets you tell the story.

It is your story the same way it is your relationship with that special person, this is your story about how that relationship goes.

- The painting "Gone Sailing" is a very small one, so I'm trying to capture as much as possible in a small format, but suggesting detail instead of actually creating it.

So if you zoom in on it, look a little closer, there's actually not a lot of detail, but it's suggested.

We're out on the Bayfront, out by Port Townsend, Washington.

So we're capturing being outside under the blue sky, on the blue ocean, and the swirling paint tries to capture a bit of that feeling of these guys just being totally lost to getting that boat out there and enjoying their day.

- Ending the day on a good note.

That's how I like to end my day.

Basically, taking off my hat, kicking off my shoes and just saying, you know, I don't have to worry about what happened today, and I don't have to worry about what happened tomorrow, but I'm home and that music on that Victrola is my music, and I am just going to rest.

I'm just gonna do whatever is fun for me and whatever's going to cause me to relax and I'm not gonna feel guilty about it.

- The paintings, each of them, I believe encompass not just a visual story but an internal story.

We have a story to tell, so we paint a picture.

We put that picture out there.

The viewer comes to that story, but they're looking at it from their experience and their background.

And so, in a way, they're taking our story and combining it with their story and creating a story of their own.

- Steve has two websites: one is for his original paintings and one is for his prints, and the one for his original paintings is SteveHendersonFineArt.com.

The one for his prints is SteveHendersonCollections.com.

- Everybody talks about leaving a legacy on this planet, through our life, and I think the only legacy that really lasts is that memory within somebody else's heart and mind of, well, that person cared.

That person helped me when I needed help.

That person gave me an encouraging word.

My entire existence and who I am as a person, as an individual walking here around on this planet, I find that it truly does come down to relationships and like for us, for our case, it's family.

(hopeful classical music) (upbeat music) - The next leg of today's journey across our Pacific Northwest offers a unique and most delightful musical interlude.

Sandpoint, Idaho is the home of Tonedevil Guitars, where we discover two very talented musical brothers, creating, crafting, and playing their fascinating and aesthetically beautiful harp guitars.

(fire crackling) (strings twanging) - A lot of times people will see me playing the instrument and be like, "Oh wow, did you invent that thing?"

Or, you know, "What is that?"

That's a question I get a lot of the times, but the inventor of the harp guitar, it's a little bit ambiguous, a lot of the time it is attributed to this Norwegian immigrant named Chris Knutsen, and he first came to Minnesota, I believe, and then he ended up over in the Seattle-Tacoma area where he set up his guitar-making facility.

And this was back in the late 1800s, early 1900s, and so he had this sort of invention of a steel-string, six-string guitar with what started out as an extra arm and the arm sort of gave it a little bit more resonance, a little bit more frequency response, and then, of course, soon he started stringing extra strings on that arm and having tuners, extra tuners, and sort of thus was born his version of what he then patented as the harp guitar.

(guitar strumming and picking) - Around 2000, my brother had seen a harp guitar and was interested in one and I was interested in having a decent mandolin at that time, too.

My dad had just renovated a house and had some furniture-grade mahogany, such as this wood right back here, and I was able to kind of build some rudimentary instruments at that time, about 2000-2001 is when I built some of my first instruments.

That eventually led on to me experimenting a little bit more with a harp guitar design that maybe somebody would consider buying.

- Tonedevil Guitars sort of started really early on.

My brother had this idea about, you know, kind of creating a company really out of the need for us to have instruments for ourselves.

This is probably back in 2002.

Years later, we sort of took a trip and went to some bigger trade shows and saw that some of the dealers that were out there, they wanted kind of something different than just the standard, you know, six string hanging in the window and the harp guitar has that sort of wow factor.

So we thought, hey, we can do this.

Let's go back to Idaho where we have some access to woods and a bigger facility and stuff.

And, and so we, we did.

That's what we did back in 2010, 2011, somewhere in there.

And yeah, it began sort of this quest for creating this product and being able to produce it affordably and we could make a really great sounding instrument for people.

- We saw how much market there was for the harp guitar.

A very small market, it's a very niche market, but there's definitely enough of a niche market and it's well known enough of an instrument and has a very elaborate history right alongside the guitar and the banjo and the ukulele, you know, it's an American icon and it's also a worldwide renowned icon.

German, Italian, all over Europe, France, you know, the harp guitar is just well-known in history.

- The Tonedevil name is "tone" which has to do with sound, of course, right?

How, you know, the different timber of a sound, the different qualities it can have.

And then a devil can be a mischievous being or a spirit.

In Chinese, it's actually synonymous with angel.

It's just, you know, a spirit.

And so it's a spiritual sound, if you will, or a clever type of mischievous sound which I think is actually pretty descriptive of the harp guitar because it kind of has a unique way of tricking people into thinking there's more sound than than what you're seeing or there's more going on than what you're hearing.

I call my brother Tone also, his name's Anthony, but we call him Tone.

It's a little play on words there too.

- The process of building a harp guitar for us, we start with some high quality AAA grade tone woods, mahogany, black walnut, rosewood, and we pick them out.

We have a bunch of templates pre-made that we've designed on the computer and we take each piece and lay out our designs and templates and start trimming them down in a process.

You start wide and then you slowly get incrementally narrower and narrower.

The top and the back get bookmatched; they're usually a slab of wood that is sliced on the band saw and then opened up so that it is a mirror image from one side to the other.

They get all clamped up and formed, and then the head block and the neck are then fabricated.

The neck is made on the CNC machine out of some blocks of mahogany or what we're now using is sapele.

The harp head is another interesting aspect of the harp guitar.

It's like a neck, but it's just above the harp arm.

And that is a precision piece that we build, the sides then get joined to that, and then the top gets glued on and then we pull it out of the mould.

So, basically, at that point is when the harp guitar is sort of born.

It gets pulled out of the mould, it's in the shape and look of a harp guitar, and then I trim the rim on the back, and then get that lining glued in, and get the back glued on after it's been braced, of course.

And then, from there, we binding route it, get ready for the very decorative edge binding, and after that the fingerboard gets glued on.

So, Dave manufactures fingerboards on the CNC machine, so they're real precision, and then we glue the fingerboard on.

I do some finished sanding to it, which takes me basically a whole day.

And then, from there, it goes in the spray booth and then that gets sprayed for a couple of days.

Dave can put on two or three coats a day and there's definitely between five and eight coats of varnish that go on it depending upon what type of varnish we're using.

It comes out and it gets the final brace glued onto it, which is mostly known as the bridge.

It actually is the last brace that goes on there; it's a scalloped piece of hardwood and that's the piece that holds the strings and the saddle and where the strings slope over top of.

That's when the instrument is basically complete and now we just need to put the tuners on it and string it up.

And then Dave strums the first chords on the harp guitar.

- The demographic for the harp guitar is definitely a unique, specific type of a player.

They are going to be somebody that is usually a finger picker.

They're gonna use their right hand, their three or two or whatever fingers with their thumb, to play what you can almost call it like boutlerney, like almost like banjo rolls on the guitar.

Classical players have been doing it for centuries now.

And so they have this finger style approach to the guitar that is a little bit, you know, specific to them.

And so those are the two.

You got like sort of the classical, which I would consider like the Olympic gymnasts of the guitar world.

And then you have the more sort of folksters that listen to maybe like Tommy Emmanuel or Chad Atkins.

Chad Atkins was a pretty big finger picker back when he was around.

And those, they're more along like the popular folk genre, but there's maybe a little bit of blues influence there, but usually people are influenced by one of the two schools there who are calling me up and they know they want a harp guitar.

They've been thinking about it, it's in their head, they saw it somewhere, and they call me up and they want me to build one for 'em.

- For us to be able to build an instrument for somebody based on what their aspirations are, musically, is a profound thing and always has been a passion of ours, but our passion has always developed from our own musical desires.

You know, we're musicians, first and foremost.

- Check us out: ToneDevilHarpGuitars.com is our website.

We're also trying to build our YouTube subscriber list, so check us out, I think it's youtube.com/ToneDevilGuitars.

Definitely subscribe to our channel there.

And yeah, you can send me an email, contact me off the website, look at some of our products and I'd be happy to answer questions for anybody if they want.

(jaunty guitar music) (battery zapping) (upbeat music) - If you gain tasteful enjoyment from a wide variety of premium wines made right here in the inland Northwest, coupled with culinaria: the fine art of food, while listening to live music, and even peruse, choose, and purchase local works of art, we reveal our third destination in beautiful Coeur d'Alene, North Idaho, home of the fine art of wine.

(smooth jazz music) - I love the idea of producing a product that would bring people together, that would provide something for our community, a product that would make people happy, and that would maybe create a legacy here in Coeur d'Alene.

I own and operate Coeur d'Alene Cellars Winery and I started this project 21 years ago.

I was born and raised here in Coeur d'Alene.

When I was in college, I spent a year in Burgundy, France, and learned a little bit more about French lifestyle, cooking, pairing wine, burgundy wines.

And so I brought it back with me and when I graduated from college I started working at Waterbrook Winery in Walla Walla.

At that time, there were only seven wineries.

I thought Coeur d'Alene was ready for it.

It was growing, it had a sophisticated population, it had restaurants popping up that were offering really nice menus, and I could just tell that the clientele in Coeur d'Alene was ready for a winery that was potentially making fine wines.

(smooth jazz music) It's really special to create an experience for our customers.

It's not just wine that we're sharing.

We're sharing an entire experience.

So our wine specialists, and anybody who works here, they're people-people.

They love pouring wine, they love talking to customers, they love sharing their own wine experiences.

We have a winemaker who has a degree from UC Davis, but we also have our general manager who has worked in wineries all over the world.

So for them to be able to share their experiences with customers, too, is really special.

When we started this winery 21 years ago, we were trying to figure out what to do.

Of course, you have to have a label for your wine, so we actually combed wine shops, grocery stores, we looked online, what are other wineries doing?

We were really gravitating toward the art-based labels and we conveniently had one of our initial investors happens to be my mom.

As a watercolor artist, she'd been doing watercolors here in Coeur d'Alene for 30 years.

So she already had a name in the community for her art and she had some artwork that seemed perfect for it.

She also did some custom painting at that point in time for our first two wines to see if they would work well.

They did, and we decided to take our name, Coeur D'Alene Cellars, and create the tagline "the fine art of wine".

So fine art, of course, representing the artwork behind the labels.

The process for winemaking is actually, it's interesting, it's kind of lengthy, but I'll try to keep it short.

It starts in the vineyard.

We partner with vineyards in the Columbia Valley, so in Washington as far south as the border of Oregon and Washington.

McKinley Springs Vineyard has been a huge partner for us.

We also get fruit as far north as the Chelan area, so we source some fruit from the Clos Chevalle Vineyard.

And then there's a whole bunch of them in between that we partner with and year to year it changes a little bit, but for the most part we always do Syrah and Viognier, Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay.

We bring that fruit over here from Washington and we process them right away.

Rosé comes in as a red grape, we process it right there and maybe leave it on the skins for two hours and then press it out right away; that gives it the pink hue.

White grapes, we bring those in full cluster, sort through those, and we press those right away.

Once fermentation happens, we put those wines down into barrel.

We get barrels from the US, we get barrels from France, Eastern Europe.

Then we get ready for bottling, like we have just recently done.

When we're bottling, we're bottling in the springtime or early summer whites that we had processed the previous fall, reds that we had processed a year and a half earlier.

Once it's in bottle, typically we'll let those bottles sit for a little while so they don't go through bottle shock At that point, we just drink 'em or sell 'em, hopefully.

Bottling is a very special, exciting time here at the winery.

8:00 AM we start immediately and we do one bottle every second for the entire day.

It's crazy and it's super fun.

That starts with loading the cases up onto the truck.

The glass gets loaded into a big wheel that turns around, that actually pumps a little bit of nitrogen into each bottle which sterilizes the bottle and gets it ready for fill.

It then goes into the filling process, where the hose is hooked up to our tanks and is pumping the wine.

There are two or three people who manually put every single cap on every bottle of wine.

Then it goes through a capper that seals that cap onto the top.

It moves into labeling and it's laser-driven, so the bottles flow through pretty quickly and the labels get tossed onto that bottle.

One bottle every second; we do, on average, 10,000 to 15,000 bottles in a day.

The future for Coeur d'Alene Cellars looks great.

We have some really special partnerships locally with some of the nicest restaurants in town.

We also have a really special partnership with the Coeur d'Alene Resort.

We customize wines for them every single year and sell those throughout all the resort properties.

It's a super important partnership for us because not only is it our wine locally, but many of the people that are coming to the resort are from out of town, so it's a representation of Coeur d'Alene and North Idaho.

We're located in Coeur d'Alene at 3890 North Schreiber Way in Coeur d'Alene.

It's right between Hayden and downtown Coeur d'Alene and it's just a little bit off of I-90, so it's super easy to get to.

We also offer all of our wines and artwork on our website at cdacellars.com.

I really feel like we're giving back to the community, as well, sort of one glass at a time, making the world a better place.

So it really is rewarding that way and it builds lifelong friendships and it makes it meaningful.

(smooth jazz music) (upbeat music) - We sincerely hope you enjoyed traveling with us on today's multifaceted show, and, as always, we very much look forward to your company next time right here on "Everyday Northwest".

- [Narrator] Learn more about the sights, sounds, beats, and treats of life in the Pacific Northwest through "Art Chowder" magazine.

Subscriptions and more information are available at www.artchowder.com.

Funding for "Everyday Northwest" provided, in part, by BECU: people helping people.

www.becu.org, the Liberty Building in the heart of downtown Spokane, retail convenience for your next office address www.spokanelibertybuilding.com, also Historic Flight Foundation at Felts Field in Spokane.

Experience history in motion.

www.HistoricFlight.org and Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture: The MAC, www.NorthwestMuseum.org.

(upbeat jazz music)