The Struggle of the Artistic Soul

Spiritual symbols in Louisiana art

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In his work, the artist should be like God in creation: invisible and all-powerful. He should be felt everywhere and seen nowhere.

—Gustave Flaubert

Spirituality, that ascendency of the spirit over the corporal, comes as natural to Louisiana visual artists as it does to its writers and musicians. Listen to the lyrics and rhythms of the Delta blues or Southern spirituals to feel the soul soar, or read the novels of Anne Rice and Walker Percy to see anxious spirits in conflict. This spirituality is even more evident in the paintings of Sister Gertrude Morgan and Rolland Golden or in the photographs of Lynda Frese and A.J. Meek. That underlying spirituality is present in the grand landscape paintings that herald redemption and awe of creation. And what could be more spiritual than a photograph or painting of a dramatic sunrise or sunset?

A New Orleans gallery owner best described the nature of art in this part of the South: “New York art is more abstract. We have more soul.”

Artists in this region come by it naturally, considering their spiritual roots in Southern evangelical Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, and pervasive Afro-Caribbean spiritualism. Existentialist novelist Walker Percy described New Orleans—he could have well been describing all of South Louisiana—as a “kind of comfortable Catholic limbo somewhere between the outer circle of Hell, where sexual sinners don’t have it all that bad, and the inner circle of purgatory, where things are even better.” 

Spiritual symbols are clearly visible in the work of self-taught artists such as Hank Holland of Lockport, Louisiana, whose paintings are filled with scenes that reflect his spirituality. “I paint the stories I’ve heard while growing up on the bayou,” Holland said in an interview last year. “I heard how they lived and how people gathered around at juke joints to raise hell and then go to Mass the next morning.” That life on the bayou is prominent in his two most popular series—Juke Joints and The Circle of Life. “I do a lot of controversial stuff, like the Cajun Last Supper paintings,” he said. In these he depicts Jesus and his apostles sitting along a long table, eating crawfish. Holland signs his name upside down on the canvas followed by a cross. “I add the cross to show that God and I painted it. I can’t do anything by myself. Everything I do involves him.”

Pictured left: A self-portrait by Kenny Hill, a self-taught artist and recluse who spent a decade creating a garden of life-size angels and other spiritual figures. Photo by John R. Kemp.

Kenny Hill is another self-taught artist whose only purpose was to evangelize his faith. The mysterious Hill showed up on Bayou Petit Caillou in Chauvin, Louisiana, in the late 1980s and spent the next decade creating his mystical garden of painted concrete angels and other spiritual figures. Along the walkway stand small monuments, temples, and life-size angels with swords raised in a battle of righteousness over evil. And then there are two sword-bearing angels standing at the gates of hell, cautioning all those who pass through the portal to the tongues of fire belching up from the underworld.

In her landmark 1993 book Passionate Visions, art historian Alice Rae Yellen states that many Southern self-taught artists “create from an unbidden inner drive, often with a missionary zeal.” She continues: “Religious and visionary imagery range from works that literally describe chapter and verse to those reflecting an artist’s internal vision. Some artists profess to be following instructions received from the Lord, in dreams, or via visions. Others are powerfully, often obsessively driven by unarticulated, internalized sources of inspiration.” This was certainly true for New Orleans self-taught artist Sister Gertrude Morgan, who depicted herself as the bride of Jesus, entering New Jerusalem together.

The rich visual traditions of Roman Catholicism in South Louisiana also have preconditioned many artists in the region. “The Catholic religion is very sensual,” said Elizabeth Chubbuck Weinstein, curator at the Louisiana Art and Science Museum in Baton Rouge. “Growing up in this environment can be quite effective towards developing an early appreciation of aesthetics. Still other artists have been brought up in a religion but are trying to distance themselves from it. There are many lapsed Catholics that are drawn to produce art as a means to express their emotions and include references in their work that may link them to a Catholic heritage; yet, they may not wish to acknowledge that aspect of their lives.”

Weinstein cited as examples the work of Louisiana artists Hunt Slonem and the late Michael Crespo. “The animal and bird forms that dominate their artistic output represent spirits,” Weinstein explained. “Crespo, who grew up in Catholic schools and served as an altar boy in his youth, questioned his faith as an adult but nonetheless embraced the concept of images as conveyors of symbolic meaning. In his paintings, creatures such as deer or fish appear to be awaiting their fate, while the birds in Slonem’s decorative paintings are dissolving, caught in limbo between this world and the next behind his trademark hatch marks.”

Other artists such as Samuel Corso and the late Paul Dufour of Baton Rouge have pursued a centuries-old tradition in secular and liturgical art. Their sculpture, stained glass windows, furniture, and mosaics can be found in public buildings and in Catholic and Protestant churches across the state. An impressive example of their work is the front door at St. Mary of the Pines Catholic Church in Shreveport with its inset bronzed high-relief images of saints and other church symbols. Another is the large stained glass window in the baptistery at St. Aloysius Catholic Church in Baton Rouge.

In that same tradition, Hank and Karen Schlau, working in Natchez at their gallery In the Company of Saints, make religious statues, reliefs, and medals. “I’ve read a great deal of medieval literature and traveled to Mexico and lived for awhile in New Orleans, places with strong traditions in iconography,” said Hank, a former college English professor and Catholic theological book editor. “I’ve always been interested in the great meditators in all traditions. They spent their lives meditating and getting to the ground of everything.” Prior to sculpting his icons, Hank reads extensively about his subjects, carves the image in clay, makes the molds, and then casts the statues. Once they have dried and cured, Karen paints the figures.

One doesn’t have to look hard to find spiritual symbolism in the paintings of Louisiana artist Rolland Golden. In one titled Another Day in Paradise, for instance, a blood-stained white cross stands alongside a country highway across from a sharecropper’s shack and cotton field. That single cross has many representations: slavery, sharecropping, crucifixion, and resurrection. During his long career, Golden has developed an almost spiritual reverence for the land, especially the Southern landscape.

Less direct, but equally striking, are the playful mixed-media paintings of St. Amant, Louisiana, artist Douglas Bourgeois. Bourgeois’ images are poignant commentaries on how contemporary pop culture in the United States idolizes stage and music stars, much like the golden calf in Biblical times. This parallel is clearly visible in his mixed media composition Audio Signal, showing a silhouette of a rock singer super-imposed over images of Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

Drawing from non-Christian traditions, the late New Orleans artist John T. Scott explored the region’s African-Caribbean culture in creating his vibrant kinetic sculptures that often explored themes such as the “diddley bow” from West African mythology.

Pictured left: From “Rolland Golden: Journeys of a Southern Artist” by John R. Kemp with paintings by Rolland Golden, © John R. Kemp, used by permission of the publisher, Pelican Publishing Company, Inc.

Internationally acclaimed sculptor Lin Emery also acknowledges an understated spirituality in her work. “I have a very deep belief not in any practiced religion but in the search for unity and spiritual understanding,” she said. “I think most of my work is based on spirituality. I once called my pieces Angels, they’re now called Flight.”

Baton Rouge photographer A.J. Meek is more direct in his photographs for his recent book, Sacred Light: Holy Places in Louisiana. Here, Meek explores the interiors of churches and synagogues in cities, towns, and on back roads of South Louisiana. People are not present in these images, yet in the warm glow of natural light one can sense a presence. “It’s a kind of ministry for me,” he explained. “I put the camera gear in the church, sit a bit, and perhaps say a little prayer.” The photographs of Lynda Frese of Lafayette are at the opposite end of the image spectrum. At the same time, the spiritually of her work is no less obvious. Her mixed-media composites, such as After the Sin, contain medieval and neoclassical religious imagery that dominated the art world from the Middle Ages to the early nineteenth century.

To photographers George Yerger and Leslie Addison, the land is an ever-present spiritual narrative that drifts through their dark and gauzy black-and-white images of rural Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta. In a series titled Phantom Winds: A Mystic Hymn of Louisiana, the two reveal a deep reverence for the land that lies along both banks of the Mississippi River. Eudora Welty’s stories, located deep in the Mississippi Delta, resonate with Yerger and Addison. “It’s not just her mentions of familiar places,” says Addison. “It’s her soulful understanding of the more ethereal qualities of the area.”

In essence, Rolland Golden’s Day in Paradise, Hank Holland’s Circle of Life, Lynda Frese’s After the Sin, and all those other artists who explore their spirituality through their art, call to mind the words of the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky: “Art is not vague production, transitory and isolated, but a power which must be directed to the improvement and refinement of the human soul.”