-My name is Sean Diediker, and I'm a painter.

I've always designed my paintings based on travel and chance.

I love exploring the human condition as I look to find beauty in true, unscripted reality and then documenting that experience with paint.

♪ ♪ I love merging the craft of old-world masters with modern-day media to create and share unique windows into humanity.

♪ Join me as I canvas the world to explore the interplay between art and the human condition.

Every episode a place, every episode a painting.

♪ ♪ ♪ [ Engine idling, tape clicks ] -♪ Rocking in the gym, rocking in the hall ♪ ♪ Rocking at the sock hop, rock-and-roll ball ♪ ♪ Sixteen girls standing in a row ♪ ♪ One said, "Hi," I said, "Hello" ♪ ♪ I kept walking, no one said, "No" ♪ ♪ Sixteen girls standing in a row ♪ ♪ [ Car horn honks ] -I got octane and gasoline in my veins.

I think, in a past life, I was a car.

[ Engine revs ] [ Alarm blares ] What kind of car?

Probably started out as a '55 Buick.

Then I went to a '63 split-window Vette.

The two-lane blacktop going South on Highway 1, the scenery around it is majestic.

♪ If Heaven were on Earth, this would be it.

♪ [ Music playing on radio ] ♪ When I was a kid, my dad said, right out of the crib, my first word was "car."

I'd take little knives and forks out of my mother's drawer because I didn't have the toys, and I'd push them around.

The knives were trucks.

The forks were cars.

Didn't go well with my mom, but I had a great time.

First car I fixed up was a '64 Pontiac.

It was my dad's.

One day, he came home, and, all of a sudden, it had chrome reverse wheels on it.

He goes, "What happened to the hubcaps?"

I go, "They're in the garage, Pop."

"This is the family car."

"Uh, not anymore, Pop.

It's my ride."

[ Radio tuning ] -Power it delivers to the wheels equals that of a 160-horsepower conventional engine.

-Revolutionary DeSoto air-conditioning.

-Makes turning the steering wheel... -I love the iconic culture of what the '50s, '60s, and '70s were like.

-Lovely 1954 DeSoto.

-The car culture is in my blood.

The car culture is all over the Monterey Peninsula.

Highway 1 brings people to the car culture.

-Classic cars on the open highway are as American as Mom's apple pie.

It's hard to think of another stretch of road that compares with the majestic beauty of California's Highway 1.

-♪ A little bird on a wire told me yesterday ♪ ♪ Bob, it's time to travel miles away ♪ ♪ On the mountaintop and through the land ♪ -In the late '60s, Frankie Apollo packed up his faith and love of cars and left Brooklyn.

He had his sights set on Los Angeles.

There, he soon became an undercover cop who focused on keeping at-risk youth out of L.A.'s deadliest gangs.

Nowadays, Frankie pays his tithe to the community in a different way.

[ Camera shutter clicks ] -The classic-car world is huge up here.

You've got natural beauty, and you've got the beauty of these automobiles, which is one reason I put together the Carmel Mission Classic car show, a way to raise a lot of money for good causes through cars.

We've taken objects of art, objects of ego, which, let's face it, classic cars are, and we've turned them into helping people save lives and save souls.

-♪ Tree ♪ ♪ Bob, it's crazy all that you can see ♪ ♪ Spread your wings and... ♪ -When was the last time you went to a car show at a 250-year-old mission where a saint is buried that serves beer and wine and also has a bishop's blessing?

You haven't been to one.

Last year, we raised over $100,000, and we gave all the net away.

Something for the body, something for the soul.

♪ ♪ -After you've tucked a nice stretch of asphalt under your belt, perhaps take a pit stop at the Baja Cantina.

There, you will find like-minded road enthusiasts sharing stories and polishing chrome.

-♪ Cruising down the highway 'bout 65 ♪ ♪ Feels so good to be alive ♪ ♪ No place I'd rather be ♪ ♪ With the wind in my face, I'm feeling free ♪ ♪ Because I'm rolling, I'm rolling down the line ♪ -We live in such a beautiful area here.

You can get in your car, and you can go to the ocean.

You can go down the coast.

You can go up the coast.

You can go inland just a short ways, and you have mountains.

You can go to the snow within a few hours.

♪ -Any time I'm having a bad day, or it could be a good day, but if I want to make it better, I take my '61 Corvette, which is red and white -- It's a convertible -- I go to Big Sur.

I go to Nepenthe's or the River Inn, and it's like, "This is it.

Life is good."

If I drive from here to Reno or to Hot August Nights, I don't listen to music because I want to be in that car, and I want to go back to that time, like in 1961 or '55 or whatever.

I just want to channel my energy into that, and driving down to Big Sur, it's just so beautiful, you don't need anything to distract you, and you can really get into your mind and your soul, your body and the spirit.

It's just -- It's like a washout.

-♪ Yes, I'm rolling ♪ ♪ I'm rolling down the line ♪ ♪ I've got to find my baby ♪ ♪ We're going to have a good time ♪ ♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah ♪ -Your experience along Highway 1 wouldn't be complete if you didn't get out of the car and take a moment to breathe in the great divide between land and sea... ...paying respect to the forces of time and erosion that ultimately shape the view from where you stand.

♪ ♪ ♪ -Artists love to come here and Carmel-by-the-Sea because of all the various places that they can paint.

It is so scenic.

♪ You just can't beat the variation in the scenery.

♪ This town was started by artists that used to live in San Francisco, and after the fire in San Francisco, artists moved here, and it was an artist colony.

♪ It's still that.

It hasn't changed.

♪ ♪ ♪ -There's something very unique and almost surreal about the landscape surrounding Carmel-by-the-Sea, and, to me, it's obvious why artists come here to paint.

♪ As I was walking past a gallery in Carmel-by-the-Sea, I saw a bunch of paintings by early California painters.

Of course, I went in and had a look.

There on the table, I saw a book -- this book right here -- and I just like the image on the cover.

It was a book all about Armin Hansen, whom I've never heard of.

♪ -Absolutely telling the story here.

Armin Hansen is very unique among these artists in that he's a native son.

He was born in San Francisco, where most of his peers were transplants from abroad or other states.

He entered the academies in San Francisco, the Mark Hopkins Art Institute, then headed off to Europe and studied in Germany, which was quite different for any of these early California painters.

Most of them had their eyes on Paris.

That was where the great academies were.

It was kind of the center of the art world.

Hansen came back with this wonderful, expressive style, bold brushwork, and really set about creating a mood in his paintings rather than focusing on a beautiful landscape.

After his studies, he spent four years in Belgium working on fishing boats, worker for a steamer, sketching the whole time, and coming back with this great body of work.

Armin Hansen sought out to show the daily life of the Monterey fishermen, and one of the things that he would see regularly was the fishermen walking along the shore, carrying their oars to their boat.

♪ There's a painting here in the gallery now called "Wrecked."

It's three figures sitting on the rocks.

They're looking out off into the distance.

We have a voyeuristic vantage point.

We're looking over their shoulders.

It looks like they're looking at more rocks and rough seas.

If you really look at the painting, you realize they're looking at their ship.

They've run aground.

Then you start to notice their body language.

They're hunched over.

Their shoulders are rounded.

They're defeated.

And this is kind of the epic theme of Hansen.

It's very, very often man against the sea.

♪ ♪ -I'm always looking at other painters.

As a creative, that's how you learn.

You look at people that did it better than you, and you try and absorb and learn from their experience.

♪ -I always say, if there's a genius in the group, it's Armin Hansen.

It was his own vision.

Beyond that, we get this great historical record of this area where I grew up.

♪ ♪ -He would paint people's reactions to a recent shipwreck.

He would be the first on the scene, and, to me, that's a way of being a reporter.

♪ ♪ ♪ And as we were filming here in Monterey and we spoke to a few of the fishermen, one opens his bag and dumps out a pile of redfish, same pile of redfish that Armin painted maybe 100 years ago.

The passions and personalities Armin Hansen painted back then still echo on the docks today.

-There it is.

-There it is.

-Being able to be this close to the fishery like this, it's something not a lot of people have.

When I'm on the ocean, it's a stress reliever for me.

You forget about everything, and you're just focused on the fishing.

♪ -You can see what's in here.

See what's in them.

If they're real bad, then just get rid of them.

[ Indistinct conversations ] -Sometimes, I follow the birds around because they're looking for the same thing I'm looking for.

I haven't caught a fish before, so... At least on the shore.

[ Laughs ] What am I going to lose if I don't catch something?

Come on, Jesus.

Give me a fish.

-Every now and then, you come across a personality that has so many stories.

They seem to come out all at once, and John was one of those people.

-It says in the Bible there that God says that if we don't praise Him, that the rocks and trees and mountains are going to cry out.

♪ So I started just going out in my backyard and preaching -- preaching at the rocks.

And then it finally got to where I was doing it so often, then I started preaching down through my church down on the street in the ministry.

Next thing you know, God is telling me, "I want you to start washing their feet."

So I had all the team members over that night, had about 10 bowls and 10, 20 towels, and put them out.

We started off with the husbands washing their wives' feet.

Next thing you know, the ministry is running on its own because everybody is washing feet and giving haircuts and giving away clothes.

Now I got the homeless feeding the homeless with everybody else.

And it wasn't about me directing or telling them or nothing.

It's just about letting people work with the gifts God has given them.

Just let them be them.

-As Big John cast his line, his stories painted imagery in my mind, and only moments later, the good Lord smiled down on Big John... You caught that from the shore?

-Yeah.

-Get out of here.

...with his first-ever catch from the shore.

-[ Laughs ] -How does it feel, John?

-Good!

It's my first one.

I'm happy as heck.

-Awesome.

-All right, fellas.

It's a good day.

♪ ♪ -One of the primary reasons I enjoy art is simply how artists see identical things so differently, documenting their own interpretation of beauty in their own unique voice.

I think about how Armin Hansen experienced this area.

As I walk through the scenes that inspired his paintings, I marvel at what I can see above the crashing waves and imagine what I can't see below.

♪ ♪ [ Waves crashing, seagulls crying ] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [ Birds chirping ] ♪ ♪ While scouting for places to sketch, I came across a guy named Feynner.

His story is not unlike that of Tarzan.

♪ -I grew up in the jungle in Costa Rica.

At age 11, I was already hunting in the forest with a dog.

It was not for sport.

It was for survival.

I was starving.

-Feynner eventually tried to make a living as a gold miner in the Amazon.

However, after falling in love with a grad student from Berkeley, he made the decision to immigrate to the United States.

-It was the best decision to come to the United States because now, today, I'd be dead in the Amazons or in Costa Rica because, in Costa Rica, all my partners we spent mining gold, only one is alive.

The rest of them are dead.

-While he may not have struck it rich in the Amazon, he discovered something far more valuable in California.

After 11 years, his marriage unraveled, and he took refuge in the arms of the forest.

He began living alone atop a hill in Big Creek overlooking the ocean, eventually becoming the steward, father, and protector of over 8,000 acres in the Big Sur area.

As time passed, he fell prey to loneliness and thought purchasing a television might be the remedy.

-So I decide, you know what?

I learn from Homer Simpson.

I'll get a TV.

TV give you so much and never asks you for anything, and so, I got my TV, satellite disc, all the technology put in my house.

Couple months later, I start thinking, "Oh, no, I married the devil."

-Feynner explained that a television was not the answer.

He became so consumed with the content projecting from this little artificial window that he began to neglect what was outside his actual window.

His obsession got so bad that he almost burnt down his house because what was on the television took precedence over the burning chicken in his oven.

That's when he decided to draw the line.

He cut the cable, got rid of the TV, and vowed never to neglect his forest again.

-It took me after that, eight months later, to start dreaming about the jungle, the animals again, mm-hmm.

-So what lesson did you learn?

-Keep away from the TV.

-My conversation with Feynner reminded me of how easy it is to fall victim to the screen, scrolls, and likes enticing us to abandon our own experience for someone else's.

Big Sur is the perfect place to turn the phone off and reconnect with what matters most.

♪ ♪ [ Birds chirping ] ♪ ♪ It's not my first time in Big Sur or my second.

It has called me back countless times, and each time feels a little different, always magical but different.

In the case of Armin Hansen, I have to assume his call to this region was so strong, he couldn't leave.

I can see why.

♪ For now, all I can do is document it in my own voice and take home modest reminders of the beauty consumed along Big Sur's Highway 1.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ -"Canvasing the World" fine-art reproductions, printed on pure linen and museum-quality cotton rag, are now available.

To order your own fine-art reproduction of "Red Sea Cliffs on Highway 1" or any editions from the "Canvasing the World" television series, please visit ctwgallery.com.

If you'd like more information on the series or a peek at what's currently on Sean's canvas, you can follow "Canvasing the World" on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, or visit us at canvasingtheworld.tv.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ -Guys, it's a video.

[ Laughter ] ♪ ♪ -One of the locations that I used to shoot the reference for the painting, it was a newly-cut trail, so we got to the edge of the cliff, sat down on the cliffside next to a little bush, and it turns out that bush was poison oak.

It didn't look like it because it was under another bush, and I thought, "Oh, I'll be fine."

And about four days later, poof, the whole body, head to toe, with a rash.

And so, when you are exploring the Big Sur for yourself, steer clear of poison oak, and make sure you know what it is.

You know, when we're filming on the road, you never know which stories are going to be the one that actually inspires the painting, and in the case of Big John, who was probably my favorite interview in Big Sur, it was not scripted in any way.

I was trying to fly drones over the pier to get, you know, the nice pier shots and the floating boats to match the Armin Hansen segment, but my drone wouldn't fly because it was too close to the airport, so, of course, we respect that, but as we were packing it back up, this guy is getting ready to go fishing, and we have a small chat, and two minutes later, I say, "Hey, can we throw a mic on you, and is it okay if Bruce films you?

And I'm going to draw you while we're on the beach."

He's like, "Yeah, yeah, it's fine," and so he lets us do it.

-It was just one of those very spontaneous "Canvasing the World" moments that ended up being a very substantial and meaningful experience for us.

The magic of "Canvasing" is finding people like Big John and getting to know them even if it's only for a moment, sharing stories, hearing his stories, and then having an opportunity to share that with our audience.

-Start to finish, filming this season of "Canvasing the World" has been 10 years.

It's been pretty amazing coming from just a simple idea into having a team of people that embrace this idea, as well, and make it their own and help shape it and make it better.

It feels really good.

I still have to pinch myself a little bit.

We're on the air.

♪ ♪