As if in a Dream: St. Amant artist creates biographical fantasies
The remarkable narrative paintings of Louisiana artist Douglas Bourgeois take us on a journey through fantasy and other worlds with imagery that melds pop culture iconography and the sultry soul of south Louisiana’s unique cultural landscape. Although many of his paintings include portraits of famous musicians, Bourgeois explains, “I’m not into being a portrait painter,” he says. “It’s more about the story I am telling.”
Bourgeois’ precise, skilled works are rendered in rich, fanatical detail and are often punctuated with charged symbols and mythic overtones. Depicting the clash between creative life and the outer world, Bourgeois creates biographical dream scenarios of musicians, writers, and movie stars offset by mundane backdrops and everyday unsung heroes. “He is one of the very best artists in Louisiana, one of the best in the country,” stated John Bullard, director of the New Orleans Museum of Art.
Although he is rather obsessed with blues, soul, and rock-n-roll musicians, Bourgeois seems equally inspired by social and political injustices. At the time of this interview, the St. Amant artist had just finished a painting that portrays a soldier meeting with his girlfriend in a rental cottage. As Bourgeois was chatting in the small, shotgun studio that overlooks the farmland where his parents, sister and brother-in-law, aunt and uncle live “in a sort of compound next door,” the artist reflected on the painting he had just completed.
“They are in the middle of nowhere,” he explains. “One of the soldier’s arms is missing. His girlfriend is there with a little gift for him. It is their first meeting since his return from the war. It is the eternal story of soldiers coming home. The room is cut open like a dollhouse.” Outside the cottage, Bourgeois painted two angels who are witnessing the event. “It’s about guys returning from war and they can’t get good medical treatment. Instead of making a blanket statement about the war, it is their personal story with a universal theme.”
A prolific artist, although he works rather slowly on the larger paintings (he produces numerous small yearbook portraits), Bourgeois has portrayed such renowned musicians as Lenny Kravitz, Billy Holiday, Prince, Johnny Cash, Marvin Gaye, Gladys Knight, Percy Sledge, Aretha Franklin, Madonna, James Brown, and such silver screen stars as Paul Newman, Gary Cooper, and Marilyn Monroe. Executed in an Old Masters style tinged with surrealism, the subjects appear in settings that suggest a weird dream.
“I’ve read a lot of biographies in my life,” he says. “I’m doing people I admire, from Edgar Allen Poe to Elvis Presley. They are unique American icons. You realize that these artists who are put on a pedestal have human frailties as well as a divine gift. So I try to depict them as almost ordinary.”
Few other artists would consider producing a double portrait with the unlikely combination of rapper Rakim with forlorn poet Emily Dickinson. “One person was dead, the other was alive,” Bourgeois explains. “It was like they were collaborating because they are both poets. I had all these are opposites: white and black, man and woman, and they are 200 years apart. It is the impossible, their emerging and coming together,” he says.
The artist’s smaller, singular portraits are derived from photos found in old yearbooks. “I have collected 65 yearbooks,” Bourgeois reveals. “I happen to be in a yearbook phase right now. They are of real people, but the hair and the eyes could change,” he explains. “I look at them as a writer looks at his characters, and I imagine what their life would be like later. It’s about people before they get released into the world. It is fun because it makes you concentrate more on the expressions on the face.”
Bourgeois is perhaps best known for his 2008 Jazz Festival poster, “American Address,” depicting the Queen of Soul, Irma Thomas, during her 1960s era. Standing in a swamp, she is wearing a silky, sexy golden pantsuit and is surrounded by lush foliage and an oak tree with eerie snake-like limbs. Designed as an allegorical commentary on flooded New Orleans post-Katrina, Bourgeois’ painting had to undergo some electronic revisions to fit the Jazz Festival’s criteria prior to it being printed and sold. The original Katrina-ruined refrigerator was removed in addition to the tattered furniture, thus minimizing the portrayal of flooding that followed the hurricane. An old record player and a microphone were added to produce an iconic image for the 2008 Jazz Festival poster. The original painting was done in 2006. For Bourgeois, Irma Thomas had become a symbol of New Orleans and its post-Katrina struggles. His inspired painting of the Queen of Soul clinched the Jazz Fest poster deal with festival organizers.
“Taking it from an existing painting, they isolated the picture of her,” Bourgeois says. “The new version was more celebratory,” he explains. “Irma Thomas is phenomenal,” he adds. “She is an all-around survivor and role model. Her image was from the 60s, so it was about both hurricanes Betsy and Katrina. It was mainly to glorify her as the Queen of Soul. I met her in the process of doing this and she was so warm, she is a total sweetheart.” Bourgeois connected with Thomas after she took refuge in Gonzales near his hometown of St. Amant following the flooding of her home in east New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina.
Perhaps the most successful obscure artist in America (because he works slowly and only exhibits every few years), Bourgeois combines history, romance, and fantasy in paintings that tell offbeat stories. He explores the mysteries of the human experience with dream-like magical realism (Gabriel Garcia Marquez meets René Magritte). “I’m sort of in a transition,” he says. “A lot of people refer to my paintings as narrative. For example, in the ‘Ghost of the Crooner,’ I have Dean Martin appearing to a nude woman in her room. She’s in bunny slippers and she is mortified. Not only do people expect this of me, but I can’t help it. It’s my southern storytelling tradition.” ✦
