The Moth Code

Francis Pavy got into printmaking because he wanted to reproduce his paintings. “But I was a horrible printer,” he admitted. “I couldn’t really make editions [multiple prints struck from the same plate]. So eventually, I had all these blocks, and decided to put them together to make a unique piece.” The approach enabled him to bring disparate elements of his artistic experience—photography, sculpture, drawing, glassmaking—to bear on his picture narratives: snapshots, synthesized into a lush expression of elemental Louisiana in all its unrestrained exuberance.

During his decades-long career, the Lafayette artist has developed a distinctive visual language by trying one medium after another—succeeding with some, struggling with others, but always finding elements to incorporate. “When I was small I wanted to be a painter, but I couldn’t understand how to draw the human form,” he reflected. “I realized I didn’t have the motor skills to make a head like Michelangelo, so I started doing photography.” Pavy credits photography for his habit of taking mental “snapshots” of stories, songs, and anecdotes, which he stores until he works out how to articulate them. “A photograph or a painting is a frozen moment in time. You experience everything at once, so I think photography added much to my work by teaching me to capture the whole image.”

When Pavy got to college at ULL, he took a class with the influential landscape painter Elemore Morgan, Jr., “…and he taught me how to look.” With Morgan, Pavy learned how to understand positive and negative space, how to abstract three-dimensional shapes into two-dimensional images. “And then suddenly I could draw!” Armed with new skills, Pavy experimented with ceramics, leaded glass and printmaking, adopting elements of each. Those familiar with his work will recognize the influence of leaded glass upon his approach to color and line. “Glass has this linear quality,” he said. “To do leaded glass you’ve got to do these cartoons: big flat planes of color, and you’re filling in the negative shapes, that you then cut out and put together with lead. When I started painting, I started using these big, flat, transmitted panes of color in the background.” Fields of vibrant colors wash across his oil canvases, setting them aglow with inner light. 

The artist considers his work to originate in the Southern storytelling tradition. “I think of it as narrative. We told stories around the kitchen table, and I was always imagining what those stories looked like.” Drawing from that well of mental snapshots, the artist assembles visual impressions of the stories he hears—clusters of elements grouped in ways that, like memories, capture a mood, a feeling, or a place in time. “I’ll see something in the corner of my eye, a particular idea or motif that I hadn’t quite explored, and it’ll become something I incorporate. It’s almost like archaeology. Iconography in the landscape of society, interpreted through my subconscious mind.”  

For more on Francis Pavy, visit pavy.com. This month, the artist will be profiled on LPB’s “Art Rocks,” the weekly showcase of Louisiana’s visual and performing arts hosted by Country Roads’ publisher James Fox-Smith. Tune in Friday, December 15, at 8:30 pm, or Saturday, December 16, at 5:30 pm, across the LPB network. lpb.org/artrocks.