Art of Improvisation

In her chosen home, live portrait artist Emilie Rhys sees things as they are

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If you frequent Palm Court Jazz Café, Snug Harbor Jazz Bistro, or Bayou Bar, chances are you’ve noticed a woman with a sketchbook at one of the htables, raplidly drawing the performers onstage.

That artist is Emilie Rhys, whose live portraiture has captured the spirit of New Orleans music again and again since a fateful day in 2011, when she sat down in Preservation Hall beneath the portraits on the wall, many of them painted by her late father Noel Rockmore, and began drawing. She’s filled over one hundred sketchbooks with vignettes of New Orleans’ musical life since.

Rhys—who was born in New York and spent most of her childhood in Portland, Oregon and San Francisco, California—grew up without knowing her father, who left the family when she was almost two years old. After meeting him for the first time at age nineteen in 1976, the next year she decided to move in with him in New Orleans—the artist’s city. She was already an artist in her own right, working with live models frequently. But Jackson Square was where her “real portraiture training ground was,” Rhys said. As a “Fence Artist,” she offered passerby full-color pastel portraits, drawn from life. “Back then, there [was] a goodly number of quality portraitists on the Square, and people came from throughout the South to get a portrait done,” she said.

[Read about the whimsical instrument sculptures created by Baton Rouge cellist Dennis Parker, here.]

Her father wasn’t easy to live with, but being in the city granted her access to its thriving art scene. She stayed for a spell at the “Skyscraper building” at 638 Royal Street with Louise “Gypsy Lou” Webb, friend and muse of Rhys’s father and many other artists (she’s the inspiration for Bob Dylan’s 1963 song “Gypsy Lou”).

[Read about Japanese New Orleans jazz sensation Haruka Kikuchi in Jason Christian's story, here.]

“She asked me to paint something there,” Rhys said. “Perhaps she thought I might paint something decorative, I don’t know, but I ended up creating a rather epic painting, titled 'The Skyscraper Mural’.”

Rhys parted ways with her father after ten months, and moved on to New York, Paris, back to New York, and finally Santa Fe, where she found the first inspiration for her live sketching, drawing musicians like Bill and Bonnie Hearne. In 2001, a creative drought descended, plaguing Rhys for almost a decade.

“Good musicians will always find ways to improvise." —Emilie Rhys

Her ultimate return to New Orleans was seemingly heralded by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, when they made a tour stop in Santa Fe in 2011. At the show, the band began a second line through the crowd, which Rhys and husband John Heller recognized all too well. Before they knew it, the couple ended up on stage with the band, in front of an audience of local friends clapping along to the music. In a sort of epiphany, Rhys suddenly sensed that this was her future, with the New Orleans musicians on stage, and her time in Santa Fe was her past. After the show, Ben Jaffe, the son of Preservation Hall founders Allan and Sandra Jaffe and the current Creative Director of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, said the words that sealed the deal: “You’re family. Come to New Orleans. Come to the Hall.”

Rhys has called New Orleans her home base since 2012, where she continues to experiment with style and learn from the musicians she renders.

“Good musicians will always find ways to improvise,” Rhys told me. She follows suit. Her subjects are playing a live show, not sitting for a portrait: they move, sweat, switch soloists. Her view gets blocked, the image she’s capturing ends. And so she moves on as well. When the only view she has of a trumpet player behind his instrument is “a sliver of their cheek,” she has to seek out new perspectives. Even when artists sit for oil painting portraits in her studio, she doesn’t require them to hold one pose. “I don’t like prescribed times,” she said, and so she and her subject move and “improvise” together.

Rhys and her father reunited before his death in 1995, and repaired their relationship. On the brink of the pandemic, an exhibit showcasing both Rhys’s and Rockmore’s work opened at the New Orleans Jazz Museum. It ran from January 30, 2020 to November 7, 2021 and is now catalogued in the book New Orleans Music Observed: The Art of Noel Rockmore and Emilie Rhys. You can find Rhys’s studio at 1036 Royal, filled with canvases depicting so many of the creatives who make up the city’s musical world just outside. 

See more of Rhys’s work at scenebyrhys.com or visit her gallery in person at 1036 Royal Street, open seven days a week by appointment.