Art Rocks: Douglas Bourgeois

This month, the artist Douglas Bourgeois will be the subject of a profile on LPB’s Art Rocks—the televised weekly showcase of Louisiana’s visual and performing arts hosted by Country Roads publisher James Fox-Smith. Here is an excerpt from an interview conducted in fall 2015. For a look inside Bourgeois’ tiny, fascinating studio, tune in to Art Rocks on August 27 at 5:30 pm or August 28 at 4 pm.  

Douglas Bourgeois is a painter, collage artist, and sculptor known nationwide for crafting hallucinatory, intimately scaled paintings that, like his tiny St. Amant studio, seem bigger on the inside than the outside. Set back from an Ascension Parish byway, the modest raised cottage and adjacent studio are crammed with riotously diverse collections of art, iconography, and pop art ephemera that occupy every surface. Humble, cerebral, and highly articulate, Bourgeois takes a boyish delight in the collection and production of his images and the pop-culture ephemera that he amasses to populate them. During our interview Bourgeois spoke in illuminating fragments, evoking influences from across the landscape of western art and music. One senses a mind in constant motion.

JFS: Many of your paintings feature highly recognizable artists. What draws you to depict a particular person?

DB: The tribute pieces are me honoring somebody. I did a painting of Bobby Womack and Lana Del Rey. I have done paintings of Emily Dickinson with the rapper Rakim, paired together on an island, because they’re both poets. There’s a vulnerability in these people who are high achievers artistically. And even if there’s ultimately a fall from grace, they’re still these burning stars to me. 

[My paintings are] not about celebrity. But I do think some of them are a meditation on fame. I have a quote on my desk that says, “Fame is a mask that will eat your face.” To me, what I see in the obscure performers and artists is the way they bring their gift to other people. That sort of makes them special. But it’s their human side that makes them like the rest of us. 

[Read this: Southern University professor Randell Henry has quietly achieved milestones in the art world.]

JFS: Aside from a few years in New Orleans in the ‘70s, you’ve lived and worked your whole life on this property in St. Amant. How important are your surroundings to your work? 

DB: I didn’t realize how important until I got back into it. At a certain point, Louisiana’s landscape just started kinda creeping into my paintings. Which before that had been more pop culture, sarcastic, ironic. I had people say to me, “What’s all this nature crap?” But I just kept plugging away, and the images got stronger and stronger until I realized that I really could reconcile both things.

JFS: Major subjects include religious figures, Catholic iconography, music & movie stars, social & political issues around race. Environment. America’s pop culture. Talk about how your approach to the subject matter has evolved. 

DB: Catholic iconography is powerful because I was steeped in it as a young boy, and some of the first artwork I saw was in churches and prayer missals. One of the most powerful was seeing murals in churches, particularly by the Benedictine monk Dom Gregory de Wit, who did paintings at Sacred Heart, in Baton Rouge, and in Covington at [St. Joseph] Abbey. When I was a boy, I went to the Knights of Columbus summer camp there. We would go to Mass every day, and the painting in the background called “Judgment Day” had, sort of, an Edward G. Robinson kind of guy with a Derby and a cigar at Judgment Day and a lady with seamed stockings. It was really powerful to see vernacular, common people, in a church mural. Now that I’m an adult, I know that it was part of the modern style. But [de Wit] was just so over the top—especially for this area.

The Annunciation paintings, where the angel Gabriel appears to the Virgin Mary and tells her she’s been chosen, became a template. So in a lot of my later paintings, that would be switched out by a saint appearing to an ordinary person, and frankly not a very elevated person—a guy with tattoos or a girl in her bedroom slippers. Then later, instead of sainted or sacred figures, it might be Dean Martin, or someone famous like that. There’s another painting where I had this African American man in his bathroom and he’s shaving. And he’s got no clothes on and you’ve got the stained, 1950s interior. And instead of the angel appearing, it’s a policeman with his gun drawn. I think this was 1990. I didn’t think of it as a political painting, but I guess that by default it sort of is. It was called “Mistaken Identity,” because I knew people that that had happened to in New Orleans. He’s an everyday person like in an Alfred Hitchcock movie, where the wrong person gets hauled off to jail. We know that this stuff happens. But if you were black and saw this painting, you’d assume that it was a social commentary. And you could see it that way, certainly. But I wanted to represent black people as like the rest of us, going through our day, until something horrific happens.