With the sympathetic understanding of the insider and the objectivity of the ethnographer, artist Willie Birch furthers the social documentary tradition of photographers Helen Levitt, Roy de Carava, and Robert Frank.
Art, by its very nature, is worth more than the ingredients that give it shape. A clay pot is worth more than the lump of clay from which it was formed, a painting more than the paint and canvas. Similarly, the bronze sculptures in John Scott’s eastern New Orleans studio were worth more than the bronze itself.
The thieves may not have known what exactly they stumbled onto when they climbed through a broken window of a nondescript warehouse in eastern New Orleans.
Allison Stewart is yet another abstract romantic, but her temperament is distinctive. Although she is conceptually allied with Marden and Dunbar— complete with an overmastering theme — she does not share their restraints.
Douglas Bourgeois, both magician and mechanic, deconstructs and reconfigures reality as a hermetic and skewed detail-packed world. He is an artist of these times, this country, and, specifically, New Orleans.
NICOLE CHARBONNET’S CURRENT body of work, entitled, The Truth about God, deals with subjects such as the temporality of the material world and the power of nature. Charbonnet portrays these thoughts in a series of canvases, all done in mixed media and acrylic. Her works are at once alarming but offer a sense of calm in their soft, fresco like appearance, reminiscent of the colors of Pompeii, muted almost to a whisper with the patina of time.
Simon Gunning has an edgy way of viewing southern Louisiana’s almost mystical landscape with all its beauty and harshness. His paintings of vast, watery marshes; dark, almost impenetrable swamps; gritty city streets; and the Mississippi River coursing through the endlessly flat coastal delta are not the grand romantic illusions favored by the mid-19th century Luminists or Impressionists.
When you ask Willie Melvin Birch, “How did you get here?,” you want to ask him in every sense: how did he get here, as well as how did he get here. The Maryland Institute College of Art alumnus journeyed a curiously circular road to being a fall 2006 artist-in-residence at his alma mater with two showcase exhibitions.
Working day after day in his St. Amant, La., studio near Gonzales, it usually takes Douglas Bourgeois three years to create enough of his small, hyper-detailed artwork for a show.
This time, Hurricane Katrina delayed his planned exhibition, adding another year to his intensive work schedule.
It’s something the almost never happens, a once-in-a-lifetime event. Ordinarily it takes Douglas Bourgeois, the most meticulous artist in Louisiana if not the world, ages to complete a single, modestly proportioned canvas.