Epiphany of the Mundane

an interview with Douglas Bourgeois

By Michael Sartisky, LOUISIANA CULTURAL VISTAS

Michael Sartisky: I was really struck coming out from the River, past the interstate, across the Airline Highway into St. Amant here that it’s a part of Louisiana — in Ascension Parish — I’ve never been in before. I gather your family has been a long time in Ascension Parish?

Douglas Bourgeois: Yeah, I really don’t know if they were born here, but I’m pretty sure they were, because my dad’s grandmother is spoken about, and I’ve seen pictures of her. My grandfather ran a grocery store and probably dozens of other little jobs. He also sold fence posts. It was a general merchandizing store, sort of a main hub of this area. My grandmother, of course, kept children. She had twelve children. My father, I think, is fifth oldest. I think they also took in two or three other children. It sort of worked out because they were born over quite a long period of time.

MS: Tell a bit about your immediate family.

DB: My dad was a barber. He was in the navy and then he was also a sign painter for a while. He was very good with brushes. Our first playing with paint was using his sign-painting brushes. He still, today, paints signs for people, but it’s volunteer — he’ll paint signs for church. My mother was from the Gonzales area. She was a Daigle and her parents were Daigle and Lenieux. In fact a couple of uncles still live in the same place where my grandparents’ house used to be in Gonzales. When I was a little kid, it was very country — my grandmother Daigle and Grandpa Daigle had a cypress, almost Cajun-French style house with the wood shutters in the door — no screens, just shutters. I think it was painted at one time, but when I saw it there was no paint left. I can remember the smell of the sun on the cypress boards on the porch. The boards were twelve inches wide.

There was just a million dollars worth of cypress by today’s terms. Playing on the porch and the sun hitting it … When I saw into cypress or smell it, it brings back that memory. Typical picket fence made out of cypress pickets, and crepe myrtle trees, calicanteuse tree, the Japanese honeysuckle — but on a trellis. You know, now it’s a weed, but she had it on a trellis. Chickens in the back yard. There was not a blade of grass, water cistern, outhouse …

MS: What a surprise you’re capable of visualizing this scene. Why did I know you might be able do that? That’s terrific. That’s exactly what I was curious about. Now as we stand here in your studio we’re what — three, four miles from Gonzales? Back then this was pretty much country?

DB: Yes, because they were, I’d say, a mile or two from the center of town. But now there’s a UPS company nearby and a paper company, and there’s a small industrial park.

MS: I saw slab houses one after another on the way over.

DB: Yeah. It’s very strange because Ascension is now becoming a bedroom community for Baton Rouge.

MS: There’s actually a painting of yours that emblemizes the very thing you’ve just described. The Development, 1993. We’re standing in this house and we’re describing the ones I just drove past on the side of the highway there.

DB: Right, a pile of bulldozed trees is such a common sight. We’re really used to it now. At first we were like “Oh my god that’s really amazing!” They just flattened ten acres —bulldozed it to build new houses.

MS: Well let’s look at this painting. It’s pretty clear which side of the fence your heart resides on.

DB: Yes, it’s not very subtle, is it?

MS: If one can ask an artist such a thing — I’m sure it’s a much more complex process than my question would indicate, so don’t feel confined to my question — what gave rise to your painting this particular painting?

DB: I’d just been given this piece of land by my father about four years ago. Even though my studio was always on the property it wasn’t mine legally, and I didn’t know if I would stay or maybe one day build on it. I was hoping that would happen, but didn’t really know it would and then at a certain point, my father divided up his lots for his six children. So mine is here and then there are five more in the back. And I started thinking I can plant things that I want to plant now. I always kept flower beds and a few things, but I knew I couldn’t plant trees or shrubs or anything major because it was his and I didn’t feel like I had the right. So, when I started researching plant materials just to learn what was what, I made a lot of mistakes. I would plant a deutzia in this clay and it would just die. It’s an oriental, flowering shrub, and it does well in the South. But almost everything you plant, in this parish anyway, you know it’s not like Highland Road in Baton Rouge which has all this nice ravine-type drainage. This is really clay; it’s really flat. So I had to learn which plants do well, and I was really drawn into a lot of native vegetation.

MS: This painting looks like a botanical encyclopedia of indigenous plants.

DB: There was one huge field — probably four acres — in a prominent place that you drive by frequently. And it would be filled with Louisiana iris and hemerocallis, which is a spider lily that has the most incredible perfume. Then, all of a sudden, it was totally covered in big, truckload after truckload after truckload of rip-rap — which is torn up concrete — to raise the area. It was covered with dirt to build something– an important building. But you know, you could’ve called a garden group and said, “can we come and dig up all this stuff for you?” It was a feeling of frustration, that’s what inspired it. You know if you have a parking lot, that’s really a desert basically. Even a lawn with one tree, it a desert, biologically speaking.

MS: Looking at the visual symbolism, it looks like you have cemetery plots.

DB: Yes those are the little, brand-new pieces of sod. I call is instant law, instant landscaping, or “landscraping” is another term that I use for that, where they just kind of scrape everything away. Actually there are some positive changes. There’s more awareness now, especially in the Baton Rouge area. It is changing now, because even the most die-hard leafblower guy now is starting to miss birds. So it’s becoming more of a middle-of-the-road concern.

MS: One of the other things that strikes me about the painting is you have this very sterile, almost like a cemetery plot, suburban house. For all of its apparent influence and order, there’s something very anti-life about this side of the painting. But what makes the painting so powerful is that you haven’t in any way surrendered to it. You have this enormous resilient vitality that, though it is pressed cheek-to-jowl, demarcated by the board fence on one side and directly against it the stumps.

DB: Yes, you can tell that was still his property. Because he had the right to cut them down.

MS: What you really take away from the painting it that you are not overwhelmed by the onslaught of the sterility. You come away from the painting feeling the tension between the two.

DB: Because– even if you’re not in a political office where you feel you can control things in that way—one thing you can do is have control of your own yard. You can plant what you want. In some neighborhoods in some suburbs, you will be called to task for it. But if you live out in the country, there are a lot of places that had bushes planted in the front–never saw the house. It’s also a matter of privacy too, when you live on a busy highway. The shrubbery would absorb the noise of the cars passing by. Because maybe fifteen years ago this was rural. And it’s still rural, but at the same time it’s quickly suburbanizing and industrializing. So it’s an insulation against that, but I don’t know how long we can hold out.

MS: Look at the blessing civilization hath brought us. Speaking of which, let me transition over to another painting from the same year –1993– called The Traveler. Here again we have the tensions between the two value systems.

DB: The same themes more or less, but maybe a little more despairing and maybe a little more allegorical in that she’s obviously a salesman or a business person, because she’s got the briefcase and fast food and her accounting work.

MS: An American traveler to judge by her bed linens.

DB: American-flag bed linens. I called this at one time my grunge painting from that year because it was so anti-color in that way. Fake wood paneling and peeling paint and outmoded curtains and lamps and bad art screwed to the wall so that you won’t steal it. But she’s got this symbol for nature in a suitcase. She opened her suitcase and it’s a forest in miniature that’s healing her in these moments of stress, stress from her daily grind.

MS: Outside of the window here, this is a scene that look like it’s right from the river, right under the Sunshine Bridge.

DB: Exactly… I drove down River Road and just had my camera and would shoot outside, trying to keep my eye on the road and shooting pictures at the same time.

MS: You mentioned an allegorical dimension here, because what is most the center of the painting — that holds the viewer’s eye and commands the viewer’s heart — is this incredibly beautiful woman in very peaceful repose clasping directly…

DB: A lyre-leafed oak branch, which is a native oak tree that isn’t promulgated, isn’t talked about, but it’s a very good one because it grows on clay.

MS: So it’s hearty and resilient?

DB: Yes, hearty and resilient and it’s really part of our area.

MS: Here you have, unlike in the previous painting, The Development, you have, this almost bonsai forest in a suitcase. But the thing that really strikes the viewer in this post-industrial wasteland is what I think you referred to as allegorical — as if in a medieval painting — the light of grace that often shines upon the blessed. Nature is the source of that here.

DB: Yes, like a healing. You have to put it in the form of a ray so it’s, noticeable in the painting. That’s just that kind of strength drawn from experiencing that. As people go to Chicot State Park or any place untouched for many many years, or Yosemite, or any place like that. But you can even go into your back yard under two really nice trees and get the same kind of feeling on a great day.

MS: One of the things that to me most clearly distinguishes and characterizes your art — the signature of a Douglas Bourgeois painting — not necessarily every single piece, but certainly collectively were you to look at a group of them is that you have this spirituality or religiosity; you have a strong sense of something that is good and valuable or even divine. At the same time, and it’s a little unusual in a man whose consciousness and whose artistic imagination clearly is imbued with classical influences arid religious influences—yet you stand firmly also in contemporary life and have the ability visually to tell these stories in these paintings. Did you have any formal artistic training?

DB: Bachelor of Fine Arts from LSU. But when I was in school I think I avoided as much training as possible. I got taken out of a lot of classes and then told “You need to go off in a corner and paint by yourself.” I don’t think academic basics were stressed at the time I was in school unless you really wanted to. It was very, I don’t want to say it was hippie art school, but that was the feeling.

MS: That was the cultural era of rebellion.

DB: Yes, I think we were resisting the teachers we had, who were very basic figure painters. I remember Bob Warrens giving me permission to say, well yeah, you can paint like that. It’s not wrong to paint more fantasy. For instance, I was doing a lot of work based on found material, painting from photographs, but he had no problem with it. He was very encouraging. Once, Andrew Bascell’s son, Drew, asked me why I use brand names all the time in paintings and I said well it’s to anchor it into 1991 or if they change the brand you know what…

MS: With Burma Shave you know you’re in the forties.

DB: Exactly. Because if I do have an angel or I have, say, someone from another period — cross-temporal things — saints appearing here or there, it’s always to anchor it into our time. I’ll put Lays potato chips or Jell-O or this kind of deodorant. It’s important, even if the rendering is kind of formal, to put it in a contemporary setting.

MS: The other thing that’s clear in a painting like this is that sense of a tremendous classical influence on your work, the formalism of it, the technique of it, because you don’t simply stop, as so many contemporary artists do, with what an art history professor of mine used to call mimeograph art, by which she meant the guy’s got an idea and he kinda slaps it down but he doesn’t have any follow-through. There’s no depth, no layering into it. In your work instead, you have the major theme and idea imbedded in it, but then what becomes glorious is: you don’t stop. It then gets deeper and deeper and more precise, whether it’s down to the absolute precision of rendering a plant so it is perfectly identifiable…

DB: Well, that’s why the paintings take so long to do. For the garden I’ll have ten research books. Unless it’s a fantasy, you know the flower is supposed to be accurate. Although actually I’ve got to say none of these flowers would be blooming all at the same time. That’s the most unrealistic part.

MS: That’s the poetic license. But you render poppies as well as you do polyurethane.

DB: I would probably never have a vinyl chair like this, but to draw it is to appreciate it even if I wouldn’t own it, because it’s something you’ve seen a hundred times in waiting rooms, and hotels, or when you’re traveling and they put you in the hotel room and you get the chair with the stuffing coming out of the bottom, or you have to hang something up and the thing breaks. I’d look at it as glorifying the ordinary, which is common—a lot of artists say that—Joseph Cornell did it with his boxes.

MS: I want to look now at another one of your paintings. Mistaken Identity, from a couple of years earlier in 1991, which has some of the characteristics similar to what you previously described. You have the bottle of Purex bleach and Lysol and Glade and it has that high level of specificity, but of course those are only details you notice later. This is a painting where dramatic moment, the narrative moment. Like in a Chekhov play — where they say if a gun appears in the first act, you have to use it by the third. Here we have this supreme moment of tension that’s emblemized. Can you tell me something about this painting?

DB: Previous to this I was doing these apparition paintings where a saint would appear to someone in their room. I’ve done that frequently throughout my painting. Someone asked me later if it was because of the Rodney King thing that I did this, but I think was finished before that, I’m not really sure. But basically it just came into my head that instead of having a saint appearing to someone in the midst of a daily task, he’s in the bathroom about to shave — a cop was there instead of a saint. I know people that this has happened to; they’re at home and the police have come to the wrong address. At first I thought no, that’s just a really rare occurrence in New Orleans. Then when I would see one of these tabloid shows like COPS or articles in the paper I realized while it doesn’t happen every day, it happens frequently enough.

MS: But it disturbed you. You thought it was worthy of visual commentary.

DB: Oh yes. Even though it’s referred to as political because he’s black and the policeman is white, I thought of it almost as a Hitchcockian horror fantasy I’ve read a biography of Hitchcock and one of his worst horrors, which influenced a lot of his movies later, was when he was a young guy he got into trouble and they’d put him in jail overnight, and instead of his dad bailing him out he let him stay in jail. It’s the same kind of thing — it’s a situation you don’t deserve to be in, an injustice. In this case it’s really random, mistaken identity. We don’t know what’s going to happen next. Is he going to let the guy explain or … And it could be the policeman’s just doing his job; he may have gotten the wrong number, the wrong door of the apartment. It’s sort of open.

MS: So you’re not necessarily making a moral judgment and coming down on the side either of the policeman as the authority figure or the black man as the victim and assuming that one is necessarily in the right, though you do call it Mistaken Identity.

DB: Yes, it is a mistaken identity. It depends on what he does next. If he says I’m sorry, then … it depends on how he reacts. If he treats the mistaken suspect in the correct way later, once he realizes he’s wrong, then that’s fine—things happen.

MS: So this painting is poised on the edge of possibility?

DB: I can understand people seeing it as political, but to me it’s just…when you get a chill up your spine, when you think of something horrible happening. There are so many other horrible things that could happen nowadays since 1991, this is sort of tame. You know, when you think of the kid in Mississippi murdering his girlfriend and classmates, what chance do you have in that either?

MS: That leads me to an interesting question. I’m looking here at detail of The Travelor. First of all, did you use an actual model?

DB: No, I have lots of anatomy books, and some that are just reference books. I also have, I save the advertisements from JC Penny, or whatever. I just stockpile.

MS: So this is an imagined woman?

DB: An imagined woman based on a photograph but slightly altered to my purposes.

MS: You made her Creole. Was there a particular reason?

DB: It’s easy to paint and more fun to paint and also it’s kind of ‘the other,’ representing not the usual. But in Louisiana, almost anyone can be ‘the other’; we’re such a mixture of people. You can say I’m from the river, I’m Creole from New Orleans, I’m Creole from southwest Louisiana. There are so many mixtures, but there’s still those pockets of prejudice; if no longer oppression, then just prejudice.

MS: But again the level of detail of things that see, whether it’s the trail of rust leaking from the air conditioning unit or…

DB: Try to keep something here without it rusting. After two years you’re going to get some kind of mildew or rust.

MS: But you even catch the tiniest vein in her eyelid.

DB: I get really nervous the day I paint the figure, because to me it’s the crowning point of the painting. I almost hyperventilate sometimes when I’m doing these faces and there’s lots of cursing, scraping paint, away, and trying to get it right. Sometimes it succeeds and sometimes I’m disappointed. In this one I was really pleased with the way it turned out.

MS: Tell me a little bit about The Kitchen.

DB: The Kitchen again is another one of those paintings, an apparition painting. I did probably three or four paintings where the Blessed Virgin appeared to people. This one just came into my head. I have a collection of holy cards, and I saved, a lot of little textbooks, and I have a little collection of statues of the infanta. What I like about this figure is in different cultures it looks a little different. This one is from a Mexican holy card. It’s just very elaborate: the child has rings on. And I just thought it would make a more interesting vision, a child, the infant child.

MS: Why do visions appear in the paintings? From your Catholic upbringing?

DB: I think the first paintings I ever saw were Annunciation paintings, classic religious paintings. The first paintings I saw were probably in prayer missals. I don’t think I went to a museum until I was an adult. I didn’t see paintings in person for a long time, everything was from books. Another source would be National Geographic and that was it. Because I really wasn’t interested in art history probably until I was about nineteen or twenty. But I don’t know why that appeals to me. I guess it’s from maybe the stories, the gospels over and over again: angels appearing, an angel appears to St. Ann to say Jesus is coming.

MS: What is it about annunciation you find so compelling or intriguing?

DB: It’s a moment of epiphany; it’s almost like “can I really see that?” had moments in my life when, you know, you have sort of a realization. I think maybe that’s what they symbolize.

MS: Let me ask you to look at the milleiu in which you place the annunciation. Here again we have a working class scene.

DB: It looks like my student apartment: metal cabinets that are falling apart…

MS: Yet you elevate into that space with a figure whom, if it’s fair to say, the other human figure doesn’t exactly appear to be acknowledging, deserving, or receptive. There’s an incongruity between the visitation and the recipient of its glory.

DB: I like that contrast or contradiction. You read stories about some of the saints, how they didn’t want their particular vision to occur, or they disbelieved it. I think that’s a common theme in genuinely holy people. They resist it; then they give in.

MS: Reluctant epiphanies. Let me ask you again about a similar theme in two pieces: The Basement and Thrown Away 1992.