Visions of Louisiana
Artful ‘swamp pop’ in Lafayette
By Lisa LeBlanc Berry, LOUISIANA HOMES & GARDENS
Francis X. Pavy, who studied under the late Elmore Morgan, Jr. (the dean of Louisiana landscapes) as a child, is a prolific Lafayette artist and an aspiring musician. A graduate of the University of Southwestern Louisiana with a fine arts degree in sculpture, he tells stories of Cajun life and myth with his vibrant art. Aside from paintings, prints, and multimedia constructions, he has lately been producing “Purple Dream” videos that animate his art, with his original music as the soundtrack.
“They tell a story,” he says. “I’ve been working on videos for a while. It’s about my paintings coming to life. I have always wanted the people in my paintings to come to life and the animations and videos are all about making that happen.”
Always a Prince, 2005
A lover of roots music who was selected as the 1997 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival poster artist, Pavy’s first original song he ever performed with a band was Zydeco Blues at a party in Cankton. “I played accordion,” he says. But his preferred instrument is guitar. “I still compose a bit. I am particularly interested in music, musicians, and the musical traditions of Louisiana.”
Born on Mardi Gras day in Opelousas in 1954, Pavy is among the Cajun legends who offer stylish depictions of the bayou state. He came to fame in the 1980s with his evocations of Cajun nightlife.
With a folk-influenced style, dreamy narratives, and abstract patterning, his work is reminiscent of Robert Gordy and Roger Brown. In his paintings, Pavy composes icons into silhouettes utilizing an array of images such as gators, hearts, snakes, rabbits, fish, crowns, and guitars mixed with found objects.
“I think of the images as icons, elements of a vocabulary,” he explains. “Sometimes a detail in a work leads to new work, to new imagery. So now I have a catalog of imagery I’ve used over the years. They each mean or represent different things. I was putting some of these down in a notebook the other day to make some sense for myself and a guide to my imagery, but I came to the conclusion that it seemed a bit too formulaic. The icons I use in a particular piece of work are placed intuitively so that each work takes on a different meaning at a particular place and time.”
These symbolic shapes are the backbone of Pavy’s art. Paintings are saturated with vibrant color and intricately detailed imagery, while his richly detailed three-dimensional constructions are magical wooden skyscrapers that create a fantasy reaching up to the sky.
“I am working on several series right now, including paintings, constructions, and one of-a-kind prints, in addition to animations/videos,” Pavy says. “The latest series is the ‘Bluebird’ series. There are four narrative paintings with bluebirds in the compositions. It’s a visionary series of images that came into my head as I was working. It is about hope and coming out of darkness into light.”
Over the past several years, Pavy has been making constructions that were an outgrowth of his paintings. He incorporates a unique method of image saturation, with deeply luminous tonalities. The constructions are layered with image over image, and are topped with plexiglass (he formerly owned a glass studio, and also worked in a glass shop making leaded and beveled glass windows).
“These multilayered, heavily saturated constructions not only have narrative imagery, but also have actual narrative, the written word, incorporated into the work. What I am doing in this vein now is called ‘Everybody wants to be King.’ Another large body of work that I’m involved with now is a series of linoleum cut prints. These one-of-a-kind prints are a further outgrowth of the constructions but lack the written word so far.”
Pavy says that he doesn’t paint or create constructions through observation. “My observation is intuitive imagery. I also like people to describe my work to me because it gives me a whole different image.”
Pavy’s has an upcoming show at Arthur Roger gallery in New Orleans in March 2009. His work has been collected by major corporations as well as by notable museums and individual collectors, including the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Morris Museum of Art, Ron Howard, Lome Michaels, Paul Simon, Walker Percy, Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, Antoine de Caunes, Philippe Djian, and Steve Cropper. He lives in the center of Lafayette in a beautiful house built in 1935 (formerly owned by the prominent Gerard family) that he recently renovated with his wife.