The following is an original production of AZPM News.

(Tom) This week on Arizona Illustrated, artists from across state 48 spend a day plein air painting.

(Becky) The challenges of this painting, as with any plein air painting, would be what you see to start with is not always what you end up with.

(Tom) An industrial warehouse becomes a haven for the local arts community.

(Sage) It helped me sort of sit down away from home to a place where like, this is just for me to make art.

(Tom) This local designer is mixing fashion and advocacy.

(Karen) In my work, it's more about timeless, how long can it last?

(Tom) And this Arizona Illustrated story on photographer William Lesch was recently awarded a prestigious Edward R. Murrow Award.

See why.

(James) Not really taking a photograph.

He's making an image.

Hello and welcome to Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

And we're coming to you from studio A in our brand new home, the Baker Center for Public Media.

But for now, here's a story about the third annual Paint Arizona Day, which encourages plein air painters from Tubac all the way to the Grand Canyon to go out and document state 48 on the same day.

[ WIND BLOWING ] (Peter) Boy, it's an incredibly clear day.

It's really,... really quite stunning out here.

You're getting to know a place because you think you're seeing it, but then you draw it, and then you realize that you've got some things wrong about it, and you have to go back and fix things.

And then you get to know it a little better when you fix the things.

And then the next thing you know, you're seeing a little more.

And then it's a race against time because the sun is moving.

And so the way that the light's showing up in the scene keeps changing.

So it really is a lot about getting to know the scene.

[ WIND BLOWING ] (Denyse) Partially because of Tucson, I think.

Yeah, the outdoors here is just so amazing.

I just got here and I just thought the light was different, the scenery's different.

Everything's, you know, it's just so intense.

And that's really what got me into plein air painting.

I think everybody starts out as a bad plein air painter.

Even if you were a decent studio painter, you get out here, it's very humbling.

You know, the light changes, there's bugs, there's dogs.

But you'll get better at it.

(Becky) For those of us who love to paint and love to be outdoors, it's the best hobby you could ask for.

When I come out here, I'm looking at the light, lightest lights, darkest darks.

This is actually a form of meditation.

I get to observe everything in front of me.

I'm still listening to the wildlife.

I can hear the ducks.

I can watch other people paint.

(Denyse) Today is the third annual Paint Arizona Day.

I'm hoping eventually it's going to be a state holiday.

Last year we had, I think, around 300 painters painting all over the state.

(Becky) I think it's ambitiously great, first of all, to get everybody out painting, to do it all on the same day, and to paint every corner of the state.

(Peter) It's really quite nice to be here, knowing there's other painters out from the Grand Canyon all the way down, I think they're as far south as Tubac this year.

When I've painted it before, there's often been haze in the valley, and I couldn't see the mountains at all, or they were very obscured and looked very distant.

Today it's so crisp and clear.

I can see a little bit of a mountain range that must be 60 miles away.

There are colors out here that the cameras won't pick up, and qualities of light.

There's also a bit of time pressure, which can make the painting a little more spontaneous, because you have to commit and get right to what you're doing, because you're just not going to have but a few hours to do the painting.

(Denyse) We weren't sure when we got here at 8 this morning.

It was pretty overcasty, and normally we like light and shadows to really makes a painting pop.

But I said, "I looked like the sun was going to come out."

I saw blue skies, and I hung out with it, and I think I'm getting a decent painting.

So I'm happy.

(Becky) The challenges of this painting, as with any plein air painting, would be what you see to start with is not always what you end up with for painting.

And so when I started this morning, the water was glassy, beautiful, undisturbed reflections.

The trees were all lit up with sunshine, and so now you can see it's overcast, a little rainy, and it entirely changes the scene.

I'm so blessed to be able to do this, to be able to paint like this on location, and just think about painting and watch the wildlife, and it's nothing more than that at the moment.

(Denyse) It is very meditative.

I think with all the weird things going on in the world today, it's really nice to come out for a couple of hours and just slow down and focus on where you're at.

(Peter) I have to totally relax and focus just on mixing paint and getting paint on the canvas, and I can't think about anything else.

The rest of the world just goes away while I'm doing this, and I come away with a sweet taste in my mouth and a very relaxed demeanor, and it's just the best feeling to be out here and to be in connection with the environment, to watch things change, to feel the wind on me, and to just be 100% present for a few hours while I do this.

I really haven't found much else that does it for me like this.

♪ SOFT PIANO ♪ The Steinfeld Warehouse, originally built back in 1907, is a vibrant home for creativity, and it reflects the commitment of artists and community members to preserve affordable space where art can flourish.

[ TRAIN HORN ] ♪ TWINKLY GUITAR FADES IN ♪ (Dennis) The cool thing about being in a community like Steinfeld is, you know, there are 17 other artists that have galleries here and we interact a lot.

So it just adds another dimension to the art making.

(Shaun) Some of the things I wanted to pursue, like printmaking, I just could not do comfortably at home.

It's a shared space.

Some of the chemicals are kind of noxious.

When I go to my studio, that's what I can do, is I can make art.

(Chris) Artists move in and start revitalization— first in the downtown— and they eventually get priced out.

So that's how the concept of WAMO and the Art District plan came about, was to protect arts and keep it downtown.

The mission is to preserve, protect, and promote and program the Warehouse Arts District area.

We have probably about 60 artists as tenants.

(Deborah) Why Steinfeld?

Because I like to see this place grow.

I mean, it's a community art center and so it's exciting to have a studio here, but not only that, the community is very supportive and we all work together because this place is artist run (Janny) We're in the downtown historic Arts District.

We are on 9th and Franklin, more or less.

So we're really, kind of, in this place right now where we're just sort of entering, I think, that moment where people are starting to say, "Oh wow, look what's here."

(Chris) We also do a whole bunch of community programs.

We rebooted Art Walk after COVID.

We're now getting 300-400 people, every first Saturday, walking through, checking out the new exhibits.

We have space available to rent for special events.

We have performance space out in our courtyard.

This is the 10-year anniversary of Steinfeld.

The building's had improvements.

It was built in 1907 as a warehouse for Steinfeld department store.

It's right next to the train tracks, so it may be easy offloading the merchandise back in the day.

Steinfeld eventually went out of business and the Alamo Woodworkers, who did very fine woodworking moved in and used the building as a big wood shop.

Somewhere in there the state bought it.

Eventually they turned it over to the city; and the city put it out to bid, and WAMO bought it— Sunk about a million dollars into stabilizing it.

(Laura) And so I like it now because it's just more stable.

It's cleaner, and there's no leaks.

You know, for the most part things are nicer.

(Nyx) I started off downstairs in Subspace actually.

Honing in on my art skills but then also learning how to be relevant.

Which is important if you want to make a living at this.

(Sage) For me this is the first time that I've had like an out of home studio.

It helped me sort of sit down away from home, going from like: work, home, grocery store; work, home, grocery store.

To a place where like this is just for me to make art, and I'm doing this for myself.

And that's really changed my world.

(Jacqueline) I've been welcomed.

I've only been here I think it's maybe a year now.

They've been very open and— just supportive in the work that I'm doing.

You walk into the space, and you feel the energy.

(Janny) The future plans really are to just keep building on what we're doing— become a more well-oiled machine so that we, it just keeps going and growing.

Personally, and for the gallery, and kind of how I think about life: I think about life as sort of like this evolution that I get better, more evolved; that my art evolves; and that we evolve here.

And right now we're working on next year's calendar, and we'll see what happens.

But even next year has— is changing from this year.

The evolution is grand.

So I hope that we just keep going in that vein.

(Chris) Recently we've been getting grants to fix up things, and-or finding money from other sources: donations—that sort of thing— to do the courtyard, get some ADA improvements.

Our rents run one-third to one-half of what downtown rents normally are.

So we're trying to keep it affordable for artists to have space to work.

As a result we do have a waiting list of over 200 to get a studio.

We need to find the space to develop through them.

We do have some leads on one or two other buildings in the downtown area.

So we're looking forward to expanding as we move forward.

♪ TWINKLY GUITAR FADES OUT ♪ The fashion industry contributes up to 10% of global carbon emissions, according to many estimates.

But you're going to see how a Tucson based fashion designer has spent the last 20 years trying to counteract that trend by taking vintage textiles headed for the waste stream and giving them new life.

(soft music) ♪ ACOUSTIC GUITAR ♪ I've had a passion for textiles since I can remember.

At first I picked up t-shirts and different kind of garments, and I started tearing them apart and reimagining them into something other than what they were intentionally made for.

I was doing it as a creative problem solving endeavor as a maker who was being creative with my resources.

Having inexpensive resources allowed me to invest more time in my skill set.

I discovered fast fashion as a problem when I was shopping in the thrift stores.

The resources available to me for quality fabrics was diminishing quickly, and there was this influx of these fabrics which I identified as petroleum-based fabrics, polyester, synthetics.

That wasn't of any interest to me.

And so I started researching what was going on.

Where were these labels coming from, and why is there so much of it?

At first I thought I was just rescuing these good garments from the thrift store that were doomed for the landfill, and now I said, no, there is value to what's going on here.

These are saving items that just because somebody didn't like them anymore, now we're reimagining them into something that can go again.

I'm inspired by the materials, so I spend some time with the materials and see what maybe they would like to be.

My goal in working with garments is to see if I can maintain the integrity of the details of the garment.

So whether it's the stand on the collar or the button plackets or pockets or certain features that are on the garment, I try to use those as my launching point.

So that's in my work, it's more about timeless, how long can it last, how many trends can it endure or be compatible with, as opposed to the way fashion, fast fashion is working that they want it to be.

The shelf life is determined to be short.

The denim collection was when I made the conscious decision to establish a zero waste hierarchy within the products that I was creating.

So all of the denim I collected and deconstructed, I started with the largest pieces to make the outerwear.

And then the scraps from those I used for the bags.

And I incorporated remnants from the sweater collection, the upholstery collection, I merged those together to make the collection of bags.

So my idea was that at the end of this denim collection, there would be just a little tiny bag of scraps that needed to be discarded.

The top three polluting industries on the planet are fashion, agriculture and petroleum.

Textiles is in bed with petroleum and agriculture.

People need to understand that this is a problem that is not going away.

It was a good thing when I moved here that I had a lack of resources because it forced me to be more creative and think outside the box.

And that was when this entire project of upcycling, recycling, reimagining, reinventing all of those re-words that have sprouted up during the past couple decades.

That was really where it all started for me.

I'm grateful that there are, again, a younger generation who's talking about this and looking at the situation and exposing it to the consumer base at large because that's where the beginning of the shift happens.

That's where the systems can break down and be reinvented.

That story was produced by recent University of Arizona School of Journalism graduate, Sydney Sutton, who produced a lot of good work for AZPM during her spring 2026 internship.

So thanks, Sydney, and good luck in everything you do.

Each year, the Radio Television Digital News Association recognizes excellence in broadcast journalism with Edward R. Murrow Awards, and this year, AZPM won 8 Murrows.

This program won 6, including one for this story about artist William Lesch for feature reporting.

Congrats to producer, Özlem Özgür, and recently retired videographer, Robert Lindberg, and everyone else involved in putting this story together.

We miss you, Bob.

♪ INSTRUMENTAL GUITAR ♪ (William) We are here for this brief instant.

All the plants, the animals, the clouds are here sharing that time, but all at different rates.

To the mountains, we're just like that.

We're there and gone.

And even to this tree, we're kind of here and gone.

If we could learn to think a little bit more like a tree, we might pay more attention to how we're treating everything.

(Mary) I've known Bill Lesh for 30 years.

He loves the Sonoran Desert.

And I find that he has a real fascination for the weather here as well, and the energy and in the weather.

And many bodies of work show that.

(William) Coming from the Midwest, I had a lot of trouble learning to be in the desert.

And it took me quite a while to come to a place where it felt like home to me.

Just a lot of walks, looking at things, mostly just paying attention.

(Cynthia) And always presenting the desert in images in ways that nobody had done.

The kind of science that he practices in terms of observations is just inspiring.

(William) I had this background in sciences and I actually had no background in art.

Digital didn't exist at that point, so this was totally film-based photography.

I loved the whole chemistry aspect of it.

I mean, to me it was like a combination of science and art.

I always wanted to push the edges of what I could do with either developers or filters.

(James) 32 years ago, I saw one of his images on a poster called "Blue Saguaro in Jupiter."

It stopped me in my tracks.

I couldn't figure out what I was looking at.

For years, I kind of followed his work.

I started working at Tohono Chul 10 years ago.

He submitted his work for one of our exhibitions And we've been working together ever since.

I follow him over the years as he would change what he was doing.

Things where he shot from up in the air, show what the environmental damage of something was.

He inspires me.

I've stolen from him.

(William) I remember one time watching like a tree just a really windy day and it was just blowing all over the place and I was like, "I wonder if I could photograph that and somehow get that feeling of that thing dancing."

I slowed the film down to where I could take a one or two second exposure to that.

I started shooting clouds that way.

(Tony) Bill sees life in a different way than we do.

He's there with his hands and like, "Oh, I see this, I see that," but we don't know it until we see it on paper.

(William) In 2008, I had an accident in a surf off Santa Cruz.

It made me realize how thin that line is between living and not living.

I came this close to dying.

I realized if you've got things that you wanted to do, you better damn well do them, because you could go anytime.

I had in mind for a photograph, I went out on the other side of Gates Pass, took that photograph five different times a day, plus I went out at night with a light, basically paint with the times of day.

We have tended to think of photographs as being like that, and I wanted to stretch out that time.

I wanted to talk about what happens before the photograph, after the photograph, you know, the time frame where that landscape is a lot longer than that little 60th of a second.

(Mary) One of the great things that he found with digital technology was his painting that he also loved to do could come back into play and to be something that he could in a sense customize.

So he keeps evolving his creative practice and there's always something new to explore with Bill and that in turn gives us a chance to see the desert in yet another way.

(William) When I was in the cave in the Grand Canyon, that's a great example of where digital can do things that you weren't able to do with film.

When I was setting it up, I was kind of like, "Oh my God, look at all those footprints.

What could I do about those?"

That's 30 years worth of footprints in there.

People going through there, leaving little bits of their spirit.

I saw afterwards that people had moved, so I decided after the fact that I wanted to ghost the people in the Grand Canyon.

We also inhabited it with the ghosts of the people who were there before.

Painting kind of steals time kind of stops time.

Where somehow with the photography, because of the layers that he's doing, I think, you get this depth to them and this multiple movement of things going this way and that way, and different levels that you're there.

And I don't know many artists that can do that.

He's not really taking a photograph.

He's making an image.

A lot of these things kind of talk about time and how time is revealed slowly.

And so these things take, you know, a day to make, setting up his camera in various locations and photographing the same scene over and over and over and then merging them together.

(William) Timepiece photographs, the sun comes up every day, it goes across the sky, the moon's coming up, the clouds are going over.

There's a endless rhythm there.

We just perceive that rhythm in such a limited way because of how long our lives are.

Now it's gotten even worse.

We have to be productive every second.

How often do we go out and see time isn't our phones.

Time is what's going on out there in this endless cycle.

He captures something that I think in poetry they call it "The eternal present."

You know it's that thing but it's happening right now but it seems like it's happening like this.

All the time you just didn't know it And it's going to keep happening exactly like this.

To see a full list of Arizona Illustrated's six Edward R. Murrow winning segments, go to azpm.org/Murrow Before we go, here's a sneak peek at a story we're working on.

I am a graduate student at the University of Arizona working towards my MFA in studio art.

My work consists of methods or techniques like drawing, sewing, painting sometimes.

I'm often working on like 20 to sometimes even 30 or 40 pieces at the same time.

I'll have other works pinned up on the wall and I look over and I think, oh, that line, that little moment, that rock pile or that well space or the place of winnowing kind of needs to go into this space over here and then I'll do like a blind contour drawing so it's a much more gestural moment or just like a trace.

Like, follow, and subscribe follow and subscribe to Arizona Illustrated on Facebook, Instagram, and X. Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

We'll be back next week