Perspectives: Billy Solitario
Where land and water meet, Billy Solitario paints what’s above and what’s below with equal passion
When Billy Solitario answered the phone, he was getting ready to lead a cloud-painting workshop. A group of painting students would be joining him on a New Orleans rooftop to learn what this accomplished artist knows about capturing the atmospheric drama of summertime skies on the Gulf Coast. “Living in the South, where everything is horizontal, I’m fascinated by vertical things,” said Solitario. “So I love to paint the summer cumulonimbus clouds. They’re extremely difficult to paint from life though, because there’s a lot of depth there. That makes them complex to understand. The fact that they’re moving makes it even harder.”
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Solitario grew up in Gautier, Mississippi, where the twin constants of the sky and the sea shaped his artistic sensibility. “We lived on the water, where we had crab pots out all the time. There was an oyster bed eighty yards out, so I grew up catching crabs and shrimp and oysters. When I was young I never thought of them as beautiful objects, but when I started painting I began thinking of them differently.”
Working in the spirit of Dutch still life masters like Floris van Dyck and Pieter Claesz, Solitario now devotes as much attention to capturing the beauty of the coastal Gulf’s sea creatures as he does to the skies above. “I love the early Dutch because they were interested in finding the absolute truth of what was there,” he said. Unlike the Dutch masters, though, who tended to fill their paintings with allegorical imagery (lilies for purity, bread for humility or the Catholic host, and so on), Solitario prefers to focus on capturing the ethereal beauty with which a blue crab, or a newly opened oyster, will reward the careful observer. “For me, the allegory is less important than the design,” he explained. “Once you include man-made things, then there’s a story. Add a knife, and you’re turning the fish into dinner.”
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Out of his studio and back on the coast, though, Solitario notes that for him, painting the small things beneath the sea and the big things above it are inextricably linked. “A week ago we were out fishing. I was in the bow studying a red snapper we’d caught, and there was a storm coming up. I’m taking notes and photos of both. You’ve got what’s below the water and what’s above the water, and you’re this tiny island between the two. You’ve got to paint both parts of that to make it all make sense.”
This August, Billy Solitario and fellow artists Mia Kaplan and Demond Matsuo join forces with Chef Michael Gulotta (MoPho, Maypop restaurants) for the second annual Art of Food Dinner. Chef Gulotta will interpret works by these three acclaimed Louisiana artists to create a series of unique dishes, which will be served with paired wines and cocktails at Ann Connelly Fine Art Gallery. Sunday, August 19 in Baton Rouge. $150 tickets for this unique dining experience go on sale July 1 at BonTempsTix.com. Proceeds benefit the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting.
Billy Solitario Fine Art
4531 Magazine Street
New Orleans, La.