A couple of months ago at a Baton Rouge exhibit opening of some sort, my wife was startled when a lady of advanced years tottered up and exclaimed, “I go to bed with your husband every Friday night!” Polite enquiry revealed that the lady was talking about Art Rocks, the TV show I have had the privilege of hosting on the Louisiana Public Broadcasting network for the past three years. Each week for Art Rocks we go in search of visual and performing artists statewide whose expressions of the world around them provide the rest of us with richer ways to appreciate our own surroundings. I’ve wandered a swamp with a sculptor, visited the studios of an Academy Award-winning illustrator, seen a catastrophic earthquake through the eyes of a once-speechless painter, discovered how Louisiana teachers are injecting arts into school curricula to help kids learn STEM subjects, and seen how a reformed alcoholic uses art to mentor those struggling with addiction. What’s more, Art Rocks dovetails elegantly with what we already love to cover in Country Roads, as I hope this annual Visual Arts issue serves to show.
And since my qualification to serve this role is limited to being able to read a teleprompter in a funny accent, this feels like an amazing, possibly unjustified opportunity. Because here’s the thing: as my LPB producer, Dorothy, has been at pains to make me understand, writing for television is different from writing for a magazine. If you’re a frequent reader of this column you’ll have noticed that I am apparently incapable of writing a short, simple sentence. On TV this doesn’t work at all. On the printed page I can force my long-suffering readers to navigate five-line, comma-strewn minefields of phrasal verbs and dangling modifiers, knowing that if they lose the thread they can always go back and re-read the sentence again. Not so with TV, where if the viewers have no idea what I’m talking about, they can hardly be blamed for switching over to Animal Planet or, worse, The Weather Channel. Since a presenter with a propensity for delivering run-on sentences in an unintelligible accent would seem to be a recipe for television viewing disaster, I am pleasantly surprised that the folks at LPB continue to trust me with their audience. And that that audience, with Art Rocks now well into its third season, continues to expand. I’m grateful to everyone who tunes in. And if you haven’t, please do! We’re on Friday nights at 8:30 pm, repeating on Saturdays at 5:30 pm on LPB-TV. If you like what you see (or if you don’t), or have a story you think we need to share, write and tell me so. My email is at the end of this column.
If I have any qualification to do this at all, it is that we have been writing about the rich visual art heritages of Mississippi and Louisiana for a long time. Since Country Roads first sputtered into existence thirty-five years ago, we’ve featured original local art on the cover much more often than not. When I became editor in 1995 it didn’t take me long to learn that when designing the magazine’s cover for any given issue there was always a piece by some talented local painter that expressed the subject matter better than anything we could come up with ourselves. Writing about gardening? Call up Judi Betts. Focusing on Mardi Gras? Terrance Osborne’s your man. Doing an ‘Outdoors’ issue? Carol Hallock, Rhea Gary, or Chase Mullen would have just the thing. Live music? Francis Pavy, James Michalopoulos, and John Lawson have the cure for what ails you. And as for cuisine … well, where to begin? Despite the fact that we were rarely in a position to pay, artists were almost always generous about granting permission for their work to appear on the cover—glad simply for the opportunity to share their particular manner of seeing, with a wider audience. So to every artist from Louisiana or Mississippi who ever said “sure!” when I called you up to ask permission to feature your art: thank you for making us look great. Our magazine, not to mention our way of understanding the world around us, would be poorer without you.
james@countryroadsmag.com
