Hawai`i Island artists Manu Josiah and Leilehua Yuen were selected as the featured artists to present their unique hand-crafted lighting at the Volcano Art Center annual gala Love the Arts fundraiser. The 2012 event theme is "Carnivale di Venezia - under a Hawaiian Moon."

“The theme, ‘Carnevale di Venezia: Under a Hawaiian Moon,’ has aspects both of a ‘gimmie,’ and of a real challenge,” Leilehua says. “Moonlight, shadows, the susurrant sea. . . That’s definitely the ‘gimmie.’ Carnevale di Venezia – a bit more of a challenge. I haven’t studied Italian art since my Dad made me copy out sketch after sketch of Da Vinci!”

But the common theme in the Venetian schools of art is light. And that’s really our medium. Everything else is just a way of controlling where the light falls and how it is perceived. The Venetian painters were passionately interested in the relationship between light and color. Our pieces explore how light and shadow interact with the colors in the environment around them.

“The Venetian painters strove for that luscious velvety texture in their paintings. A Madonna’s velvet gown looks as though you could reach out and stroke it. In my torch work on stainless steel, I strive to make the steel look velvet-soft. I love that dynamic tension between working with what is intrinsically a cold, inorganic material to create a warm organic feel to the art.

And, in their own way, the Venetians are an island people. So as we explored the concept to come up with the works for this show, we found more and more connections. As an island people, they really had limited resources which had to be managed very carefully. They imported a lot of stuff, so their art was critically important to their economy. Hawai`i faces some similar challenges. There are lessons to be learned.

One of the things we do in our art is use a lot of recycled materials. Manu harvests invasive species such as waiāwi and running bamboo to make a variety of components for our projects, and also makes musical instruments from them. He also harvests junked palette wood, interesting pieces from broken furniture, and various found objects to incorporate into our pieces. When we replaced the fly-roof on our lanai, he harvested the copper gutters, which will be used to make some of the pieces for this show.

It’s a fun adventure doing the research to get a sense of what we want to create for this show. But,” Leilehua says, “Everything keeps coming back to the light. It’s all about the light.”