“There’s so Much Life” : Michael Guidry
Memories of Louisiana wilds, posed within the artist's process
The first time Michael Guidry was ever called a “Louisiana nature artist” was the first time he submitted his work for consideration as a visual artist at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. “They sent me back the contract, and described my work as ‘Louisiana Nature Paintings,’ And I freaked out. I was like, ‘No, that’s not what I do.’”
But it was, sort of, what he had been doing. He had just completed his first solo exhibition as an artist at the now-defunct Moxy Gallery, titled Out of the Marsh, featuring a series of paintings engaging with materials and moments from Guidry’s fishing camp in Lafourche Parish. The series had been inspired by a clump of marsh grass he’d brought home from one of his frequent excursions. “We anchored, and I was right in the middle of the marsh grass, and it was probably autumn, and it was all maroons and blues.” On his way home, he dug up some of it to bring back to his studio.
“It’s just … I really love being out there, spending time out there. But then now doubly, thinking about what I’ll create.” —Michael Guidry
At the time, Guidry was approaching painting as he had while in school at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts: portraits and studies, experimenting with style. “And little by little … my art interests started showing up in my work,” he said.
This painting, nostalgic in its stillness, its simplicity—a chunk of mud pulled from its environment, held together by a thrush of marsh grass, roots jutting out—struck him. It inspired him to return to the marsh, again and again—but this time, as an artist.
Though he still to this day resists the restrictions of being defined a “Louisiana nature artist,” his paintings have continued to draw him back to the fishing boat, and all it promises. “After a few years, I just sort of owned it,” he said. “It’s just … I really love being out there, spending time out there. But then now doubly, thinking about what I’ll create.”
Today, Guidry’s depictions of nature have evolved considerably from that original marsh clump—his most recent bodies of work jumping from the canvas in a compelling marriage of compositional formality and brilliance in color. An albino alligator, and all of its scales, against a stark cobalt turquoise backdrop, mouth open as though ready to chomp down upon the three dragonflies fleeing from the frame. A blue heron, posed like a dancer, with frogs clenched in its beak and in its claws, leaping and diving into the water all around it. Birds of all sorts—pelicans, black necked stilts, white egrets, belted kingfishers—all in flight against a blue-purple sky, all headed in the same direction.
“I go out there and get lost, like literally lost,” he said. “I’ll sit out in the middle of the duck pond, and just kind of wait for stuff to start happening. You can pull into the middle of one of those little environments, and at first it seems like nothing is going on, but if you wait around, you start noticing that there’s so much life.”
Inspired by the style of ancient Egyptian art, once Guidry finds his subject and positions its pose, he returns to it again and again. Butterflies flying from the gator’s mouth instead of dragonflies; or its white scales shifting to pink, or green, or rainbow. “If I take my time and do a pose for something—I’m usually taking composite images, developing one little pose—every time I go back to that subject, I want to use the same one, and just sort of develop it a little further. That pleases me.”
"You can pull into the middle of one of those little environments, and at first it seems like nothing is going on, but if you wait around, you start noticing that there’s so much life.” —Michael Guidry
The stiff regularity of Guidry’s work is infused with the vibrant cant-look-away life of his color palettes, which actually evolved first from his efforts to use less color. “I wanted to simplify my studio,” he said, “and was trying to work from a very limited palette, and just do like four colors, and mix everything.” This led him to start studying paint, and traditional color palettes, and color theory, and pigments. “So then I started making my own pigments, and experimenting with new colors and textures, and that kind of got out of hand,” he said, laughing. “I was making paint all the time and ended up with way more colors. But I enjoyed it, so I went with it.”
Over the decade of painting Louisiana nature scenes, Guidry is no longer just painting intriguing things he sees in the Lafourche wild. “I feel like I’ve started putting things together, trying to tell these little stories,” he said. “It registers more as sort of memories than fixed scenes.”
An example he uses is the origin of many of his birds-in-flight scenes. “I was just cruising down this little windy bayou, and I turned this corner, and disturbed a rookery. And like five different species of birds just started taking off and flying, and it was like in slow motion, because I was kind of going the same speed that they were.” He said that he didn’t think much of it in the moment, didn’t think ‘Oh, I should paint that,’ or anything. And months later, a painting emerged, triggering the memory. “Like . . . that has to be where this came from,” he said. The birds had lived in his subconscious, altogether, always in flight, waiting to arrive on the canvas. •