Pop Culture Artifacts

A figurative painter whose work has been selected for this year’s Jazz Fest poster, Doug Bourgeois has been praised by the arts writer for the Times-Picayune, who called his painting of a young Irma Thomas standing in a Louisiana swamp, “the best [poster] the Jazzfest has ever produced.”

Indeed, Bourgeois, who has an art degree from LSU, is considered by many to be one of the best artists the state has produced. According to David S. Rubin formerly of the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans, “Bourgeois is one of Louisiana's best-kept secrets. He is an extraordinary artist who is widely known in our own area, but deserves greater recognition elsewhere.”

Those comments were made in Baby-Boom Daydreams: The Art of Douglas Bourgeois, a fully illustrated color catalog for a major retrospective of Bourgeois’s work in 2004.

According to the catalog, “Bourgeois has always painted in a figurative style distinguished by meticulous detail and playful patterning. Influenced by memories of growing up in the 1960s, his early paintings are filled with vivid depictions of his favorite rock-and-roll stars, including Elvis Presley . . . . In Bourgeois's skillful hands, these and other pop culture heroes and heroines are treated like royalty or the clergy, with symbolic references affirming their important cultural status.”

At his tiny house and adjacent studio in St. Amant, Bourgeois has stockpiled a trove of tchotchkes, from plastic Easter bunnies to windup cars to holy cards. While he never met a flea market or garage sale he didn’t love, he also collects for art’s sake¬—many found items end up in his work. He often turns the objects he collects into subjects for his paintings. He collects paper ephemera to paste into collages, and he uses objects in shadow-box constructions inspired by the work of Joseph Cornell.

He also “cross-pollinates,” sometimes using a collage he has made as the jumping-off point for a painting. “Collage is my way of sketching,” he says.

He lives in a 700-square-foot cottage pieced together from two 1940s houses made of thick pecky cypress and covered with siding. He had it moved to his family’s property in 1991 and spent a few years renovating it before moving in in 1995.

Flooded with light from its many windows, the house is organized so the collections don’t overwhelm the space. The living-room walls are covered with art, much of it made by friends who traded pieces with Bourgeois. Among his favorites is a fabric portrait by artist Gina Phillips, displayed with a collection of African masks assembled from flea markets, shops and Lafayette’s Festival International.

The sunny kitchen houses part of his collection of American-made pottery in shades of green and blue. There is more in his office, which abounds in the small objects he prefers, both for reasons of space and for their innate appeal. “I love anything miniature,” he says. In a bookshelf he made from scrap lumber, Bourgeois has arranged tin toys, including windup cars, in bright reds, yellows, and blues. “They’re getting pricey,” he says. “They now cost fifteen or twenty dollars apiece.”

Then there are the Easter pieces—little yellow plastic chicks, bunnies, and lambs that once adorned Easter baskets. Another shelf houses his collection of “dead alarm clocks” from the 1940s and ‘50s. “I buy them just because of how they look,” he says. “If they’re broken, I can get them for less money.”

The dead clocks society is also grist for the artist’s mill. “I want to do alarm-clock portraits,” he says, grabbing one from the shelf and turning it around. “The backs of them look like faces.”

Atop an Art Deco cabinet Bourgeois displays his collection of replicas of the Infant Jesus of Prague, a famous seventeenth-century statue in the Church of Our Lady Victorious. Center stage is held by a two-foot-tall wooden polychrome statue (a gift from a friend), housed in a wood-and-glass case found at auction. Smaller versions of the Infant surround it, along with a couple of sculpted plastic Elvis Presley pieces from the singer’s swivel-hip days. Wearing a gold suit, Elvis embraces the mike.

Bourgeois has more stuff stashed in his studio, a quick hop over paving stones through a yard bursting with bushes and flowers. A serious plant lover who has volunteered at Hilltop Arboretum for years, he rarely has time to tend them. “My gardening philosophy is sink or swim,” he says cheerfully.

A 400-square-foot structure that started life as shotgun house in Carville, Louisiana, has been his studio since 1982. An artist’s worktable holds center stage, but the rest of the space is crammed with collections of this, that, and other things.

Like the four-foot-high scale-model dollhouse he bought as a kit in the 1980s. He began putting it together, but only got as far as the parquet floors and beaded-board ceilings before moving on to other projects. Now he is packing it up—complete with tiny baseboards, shutters, and shingles—to send to a friend who has more time to devote to it.

Utility shelving holds small metal file drawers and plastic boxes full of ephemera he uses in his collages, all separated for easy locating. “A label maker is your friend,” says Bourgeois, whose neatly labeled containers include candy and crab-boil boxes, trinket toys, and a pack of Elvis playing cards.

"People always send me Elvis stuff," he says. Elvis is also the star of his vintage-postcard collection. But he cherishes equally the images of James Dean, Little Richard, and the Dixie Cups, a New Orleans girl group famous for the 1965 hit "Iko Iko."

A couple of drawers contain every exhibit announcement he ever got, oversize postcards announcing an artist’s latest show. “You sign up for the mailing list and the galleries send them to you,” he says. “You can also pick them up at the gallery shows. I get them every way I can. My compulsion is to have duplicates. That way I can give one away and still have one.”

Then there are the vintage magazines, from Paris Match (for adding that certain je ne sais quoi to collages) to a sizable collection of Jet, Ebony, and Tan. (A 1953 copy of Tan carries the cover blurb, “I hated sex.”) He also collects music publications, which are dwindling rapidly since the advent of the Internet “I’ve subscribed to music magazines for thirty years,” he says.

Bourgeois has been on a high school yearbook kick for years—he’s amassed fifty-four and counting.

He prefers the pre-1970 annuals, which he culls for class pictures upon which he bases oil paintings.

“I used to cut out the pictures to use in collages, but I would never do that now,” he says. “I scan them and blow them up. I’m trying to do paintings of people with less idealized beauty. These innocent, sweet minds before they got crushed by the world.

“I’d love to do seventy-five or a hundred. I have ten so far, all monochromatic, but that could change.”

He picks up frames at yard sales—mostly wooden, but “every now and then an interesting plastic or metal one pops up,” he says. “They started out as just interesting objects, but then I started using them to frame my art.”

So enamored is Bourgeois of the hunt for treasure that it occasionally invades his sleep. With a laugh, he recalls, “The other night I dreamed I went out on my front porch and someone had left me three or four shopping bags of old frames.”

A writer based in Baton Rouge, Ruth Laney has written for national magazines. She can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net. To see examples of Doug Bourgeois’s work, go to arthurrogergallery.com.