Twenty Years of Solitude

We met for lunch in Baton Rouge. The glaring sun and brutal summer heat led me to suggest a quiet, well-insulated restaurant where the air is deliciously icy; the Italian cuisine authentic, robust, and reliable; and the staff solicitous and keenly observant.

As we placed our drink orders, I thought how much I had been anticipating an excellent visit with this woman, who can be described as stately, vital, and engaged. Jan Beauboeuf, artist and photographer from Moncla, Louisiana, began her artistic career while living at 1014 Dumaine Street, a property and residence owned by Tennessee Williams in New Orleans’ French Quarter. She pursued her interest in light and photography, and other creative endeavors evolved, resulting in sculptures of neon and Plexiglas. These works were first exhibited on Royal Street at the historic Orleans Gallery and Galerie Simmone Stern.

Her highly technical and innovative creations caught the attention of the New Orleans corporate community, and soon her works were exhibited in galleries, museums, commercial buildings, and public places in New Orleans, Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Denver, Chicago, Indianapolis, and New York.

“I’ve always been interested in the healing properties of light and color in the environment,” said Jan, “long before it was popularized by designers and architects.” One aspect that drew Jan to the Southwest was the marvelously radiant quality of the light; the same luminescence that attracted other artists before her, like Georgia O’Keeffe and Agnes Martin. It seemed to be the perfect place for experimentation and discovery in the field of light and art. Beauboeuf spent twelve prolific years in Santa Fe and Nambé, New Mexico, exhibiting and working on commissions for commercial establishments and private patrons throughout New Mexico and across the United States, including a landmark neon installation in the ruins of the historic Oratorio de Lorenzo Lopez in Santa Fe. “I was very inspired by the place and its culture,” added Jan. “The drama of the natural beauty was amazing.”

“So how did you happen to return to Louisiana? And how, after all those years of sculpting with light, did you decide to switch to color photography?” I asked as we shared an arancini appetizer.

“I never said, ‘I’m going back to Louisiana to take photographs.’” she replied. “I said I was going back to Louisiana to take care of my mother.”

Jan explained that she began to take digital photographs as a way to pass the time in the rural area of Avoyelles Parish, where she grew up. “It was as if I had come full circle,” she said, “following those little footsteps I had made when I was a child.”

Her many years as an established artist enabled Jan to explore the still-pristine landscape of her youth with new eyes. “We are on the river, and the land is beautiful and varied,” Jan offered. “On our land there are woods, a pond, a nice meadow, and a swamp. Swamps seem full of secrets,” she added, “and they are … secrets about light, love, being … and most of all, swamps entice the creative spirit.”

The creative spirit that is Jan Beauboeuf was born in Vick, a small community across the Red River from Moncla. “Vick was named after my grandmother Victoria Belgard. For years we were plagued by river flooding. It flooded all the time, destroying crops—everything.

“After the big, devastating hurricane and flood of 1940, my daddy loaded us into a flatboat and we crossed the raging river, landing at Brouillette, where Clarence and Agnes Edwards (parents of former governor Edwin) ran a small grocery store on the banks of the Red River. I was just a little child, and I was scared. Our family set up housekeeping in a cousin’s barn in Moncla. Daddy bought a parcel of land at the highest point in the parish, then he and his cousin built our house by hand. Building materials were scarce back then, so they had to piece the house together from what they could purchase and salvage. It’s a typical Louisiana farm cottage.”

After Jan’s mother passed away, she moved all her belongings into the house, removed interior walls, and “made it work.” She installed new cypress floors with wood from a lake located across the woods from her house. Out back, she built a deck “so my old dogs wouldn’t have to lie on the ground.”

And all the while, she took sensitive photographs of the changing seasons, of the wildlife, of the lush, remote landscapes around Moncla. Now, twenty years later, Jan Beauboeuf has amassed many jewel-like images of her native Avoyelles, some of which will be shown in an upcoming gallery exhibit in Alhama de Granada, Spain. The intense colors captured in Beauboeuf’s shots have been likened to those of the layered, glazed paintings of Maxfield Parrish. One critic wrote, “Her photographs, though they are landscapes, are somehow nostalgic. They remind one of the best literary works of some great Southern writer. It’s as if the writer put down the pen and picked up a camera.”

“I think maybe making art is not so terribly important anyway,” she mused over coffee and cannoli, “but there are some of us who go crazy if we don’t do it.” She paused. “Farming is a noble profession. I’m too old to be an organic farmer, so I guess I’ll just have to keep taking photographs.”