“I’m drawn to rustic things,” admits Gretna artist Terrance Osborne, whose luminously colored acrylic-on-wood relief paintings celebrate the architecture, the resilience, and the “What the hell” spirit that is Louisiana life. Osborne’s paintings incorporate raised wooden reliefs, cut out with a jigsaw, so every house and boat and mailbox bursts from the background in a startling flood of colors.
“I love color; I like to think I’m a pioneer,” says Osborne, although he’s quick to credit painters Richard Thomas and William Tolliver, Michaelopolis and John Singer Sargent as influences. “That guy was a master,” says Osborne of Sargent. “You know the idea that Michaelangelo would look at a piece of stone and see the image inside? I think that Sargent saw the image and just had to put sunlight on it. I call it ‘painting with sunlight.’ I just do what the sun says.”
Osborne has been painting hurricane and water-related subjects since long before Katrina darkened these skies. “You live around the Gulf, hurricanes are on your mind,” he remarks, noting that right after the storm, he did Katrina-related pieces, mostly as a reaction. “But after a while I got tired of seeing that stuff, and I think everybody else did too. So I decided I would poke fun at it. If we have to live with it and be reminded of it, why not be reminded in the best way?”
Giclées of Osborne’s works are available at around thirty New Orleans-area retailers. For originals, he also has a home-based gallery and a Web site:
www.galleryosborne.com or (504) 232-7530.
August 2008: Countrypolitans (The Design Issue)
