The Contemporary Louisiana Landscape

In his new book, art critic John Kemp explores how thirty-seven contemporary Louisiana artists respond to a changing landscape

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Since the late nineteenth century, Louisiana’s mystical and mythical landscape—with its dark cypress swamps, vast coastal marshlands, pine forests, prairies, radiant sunsets, and warm, misty light—have been dominant themes in Louisiana art. Today, as in the past, Louisiana painters create images that reflect upon the beauty of nature and a changing landscape precipitated by time and urban growth. After all these decades, contemporary Louisiana landscapes are as much about place as those painted a century ago.

In writing Expressions of Place (2016, University Press of Mississippi), I approached the project not as an art critic or art historian, but as a journalist who has spent over three decades writing about Louisiana art and artists. Expressions of Place is not an encyclopedia, catalogue, or history of the visual arts. Rather, the artists, in their own words, provide insight as to what they paint, how they paint, where they paint, why they are drawn to the Louisiana landscape, and what they are trying to say in their interpretations of that landscape. The book is as much about the landscape of their imaginations as it is about the land itself, documenting the ways in which land, environment, and nature have become an important part of artists’ lives and worldviews.

Just as nineteenth-century artists looked to nature in its bucolic state to find metaphors for spreading industrialism and the destruction of the wilderness, many contemporary Louisiana landscape artists have returned to nature in response to urban blight and crime, ecological changes and disasters, traffic gridlock, and suburban sprawl. They often portray human intrusion into nature in subtle, harmonious ways—depicting a barn or pasture, a highway cutting across the land, furrows cut deep into the soil, a rice mill planted firmly in a broad vista, or as a neglected, decaying city neighborhood. 

In selecting the thirty-seven artists for Expressions of Place, I considered geography, subject matter, painting style or accomplishment, and whether or not urban or rural Louisiana landscapes were the primary focus of their work. Many are acclaimed professionals whose paintings are included in major private and public collections regionally and nationally; others have found their followings closer to home. All, however, are driven to express their impressions of the land and light. 

To give a complete picture of the various artist styles, I chose paintings that range from traditional nineteenth-century realism by artists such as Simon Gunning and David Noll to abstract microcosms of the broader world by Allison Stewart and Meghan Fleming. Diverse in style and subject matter, the work of these and thirty-three more contemporary painters confirm that landscape painting is as strong in Louisiana today as it has ever been. “From the nineteenth century to the present,” wrote art historians J. Richard Gruber and David Houston, “artists have continually reinvigorated the approaches defined by Impressionism, Tonalism, Symbolism and Expressionism to explore the symbolic both as an expressive power of landscape painting and an exploration of place.” That continuum is clear in Gunning’s masterful vistas of the Mississippi River and in Melissa Bonin’s misty tonal images of Bayou Teche that call to mind Alexander John Drysdale’s ubiquitous paintings of oak trees. It is there in the “abstract realism” of Rolland Golden’s rural and urban Louisiana, and in the  “romantic realism” of Alan Flattmann’s French Quarter scenes. It is there again in George Rodrigue’s mystical landscapes of rural Acadiana, in the social realism of Shirley Rabé Masinter’s and Willie Birch’s gritty New Orleans street scenes; and again in sun-blazed images of South Louisiana by Rhea Gary and Elemore Morgan Jr. Others, such as Jacqueline Bishop, Francis Pavy, Gaither Pope, and Robert Warrens, have created subtle and often not-so-subtle allegorical and symbolic imagery that explores contemporary eco-political, environmental, and social issues. 

According to art historian John Arthur, those “monumental and urgent ecological problems” facing the natural world “haunt” most contemporary landscapes painters. “Their images of the American landscape are not passive, for these works point toward a more positive side of life. Each is an open reminder of the eloquence and harmony of nature, and of our physical and emotional dependence on it.” 

Harmony is often the underlying spirit in most Louisiana landscapes. Flattmann likened that harmony in his paintings to writing poetry. Billy Solitario, however, unable to find an uncluttered natural landscape in New Orleans, paints dramatic cloud formations that hover above the city skyline. Charles Smith lives in a busy Baton Rouge suburb but paints many of his landscapes in a nearby pasture populated by curious cows and rolls of hay. Morgan’s rice mill in a southwest Louisiana prairie seems at peace with its surroundings. Bill Iles, of Lake Charles, finds solace in his imaginary pristine landscapes of Southwest Louisiana; and Melissa Smith, of New Orleans, paints the coastal marshes from her boat or from the back of her truck. 

Looking at the work of contemporary Louisiana landscape painters in context with earlier generations, I am reminded of what the French Impressionist Edgar Degas once said about his experiences in New Orleans while visiting American relatives during 1872 and 1873. Everything he saw fascinated him—the people, machinery, and marketplaces. In a letter home to a friend, Degas wrote, “I am accumulating plans which would take ten lifetimes to carry out.” He returned home without realizing those plans; but generations of Louisiana artists who have followed continue to fulfill that dream. 

John R. Kemp and Expressions of Place will be profiled on Louisiana Public Broadcasting’s Art Rocks program on Friday, December 23, at 8:30 pm, with an encore on Saturday, December 24, at 4:30 pm. lpb.org/artrocks.