Art by Bob Tooke. Courtesy of Chris Jay.
“Les Falcons,” featuring Joe and Cléoma Falcon, who recorded one of the first known records of Cajun music.
Like many people who find inspiration in their surroundings, painter and musician Bob Tooke, age sixty-eight, begins each day by taking a walk. Unlike, one can safely assume, the vast majority of those same people, during those walks, Tooke plays the trombone.
“Walking is more like jogging when you’re playing the trombone,” he explained.
Born in the unincorporated community of Raceland, a sugarcane community in Lafourche Parish, Tooke studied education and the arts at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches and Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. He learned darkroom photography in high school, but said that he “had no idea about art” until an art history class at Northwestern awakened his interest in painting.
He was particularly attracted to what art critics in the seventies dubbed “Outsider Art.” The artists who comprised this movement were often rural, self-taught painters and sculptors who had little-to-no contact with the gallery system or the art world at large. A well-known example is Howard Finster, a Baptist preacher from Georgia whose otherworldly paintings were used as album covers for rock groups like R.E.M. and The Talking Heads.
Tooke first encountered Finster’s work as part of Baking in the Sun: Visionary Images From the South, a traveling exhibition of outsider art that visited Louisiana universities throughout the eighties.
“I was really influenced by that show,” he said. “It had a lot of seminal outsider artists.”
Still, Tooke doesn’t seem overly concerned with finding the correct label for his own work. “I don’t know if it’s folk art,” he said. “I just like to paint. I’ve always done stuff related to music. I mostly paint in the evenings while listening to music.”
Art by Bob Tooke. Courtesy of Chris Jay.
“Bethlehem Blues Boy.”
Tall and broad-shouldered, with a shock of silver hair and a friendly, soft-spoken manner, Tooke is better known to the international art world than he is to his Sabine Parish neighbors, where he lives in a secluded home in the woods near Zwolle. He paints and performs music as DM Bob (the “DM” stands for “Deutsche Mark”), a moniker he adopted during the twenty-three years that he lived in Germany.
While living in Hamburg, Tooke toured Europe extensively as one-half of a swamp pop-inspired duo called The Watzloves. He has produced ten albums of his own music, recorded two sessions with the legendary BBC Radio 1 producer John Peel, befriended and collaborated with Jem Finer (founding member and banjoist of the legendary Celtic punk band, The Pogues), and sold “well over two thousand paintings” at exhibitions in places like Hamburg, Berlin, Frankfurt, and Dusseldorf. He moved back to Louisiana in 2014 to attend to family matters, but still makes frequent trips to Germany to exhibit paintings or play music.
Tooke’s paintings—which are composed on salvaged building materials like roofing tin and reclaimed wood—frequently feature blues musicians, politicians, advertising mascots, and religious figures in absurd compositions that are informed by advertising design, pop culture, and political theater. In a self-published chapbook of his work titled, Jesus Sings The Blues (2015), he described his style of painting as “a rather crude minimal pop-style approach where humor and irony sometimes play a big role.”
“A lot of my paintings have to do with laughing at the absurdity of life, especially when it comes to politics,” Tooke said. “They’re relatively simple, with lots of space and humor.”
In “Bethlehem Blues Boy” (2022), an oversized Jesus Christ plays a monogrammed electric guitar through a stack of Marshall amplifiers while lit from above by a nimbus of holy light. One of Tooke’s recurring subjects, “Abe the Bluesman,” shows Abraham Lincoln busking on a streetcorner, strumming a Gibson Epiphone while confronting the viewer with an icy glare. Other paintings depict kitschy scenes of domestic life: A man fires a hunting rifle from the comfort of his above-ground hot tub (“Hot Tub Shooter,” 2014); a ceramic lamp in the shape of Elvis Presley carves a triangle of light out of the darkness (“Elvis Lamp,” 2009); a young man poses proudly with his camper trailer (“Boy With His Trailer,” 2008).
Lately, he’s been painting smaller, tin portraits of musicians while preparing to begin work on several uncharacteristically large paintings. He hopes to finish the new works in time to submit them for inclusion in the 2026 edition of Rendsburg, Germany’s enormous NordArt Festival.
Photo by Chris Jay.
Bob Tooke.
Though Tooke’s circumstances find him physically isolated, still he remains in contact with friends, collaborators, and galleries around the world. Despite living in communities as far-flung as Zwolle and Hamburg, he has developed a weird kind of intermittent prominence. It’s not exactly that everything he touches turns to gold, but some of it does—and often in unconventional ways. For example, he recorded the debut LP by the Canadian garage rock band, The King Khan & BBQ Show, which was released by Goner Records of Memphis in 2004. Nearly two decades after its release, the song “Love You So” became a viral megahit on social media. “Love You So” currently ranks as one of the most-used pieces of music ever on the social media app TikTok, where it has served as background music in nearly thirty billion user-created videos. The official video on YouTube has now been viewed six million times. For someone who dwells on the margins, Tooke is uncommonly adept at creating art that resonates with an enormous audience.
Finding an audience for his work at home in Louisiana has been more of a challenge. Several of the Louisiana galleries that exhibited Tooke’s work in the past—places like Barrister’s Gallery and Malarky Art in New Orleans and minicine? in Shreveport—have permanently ceased operations in recent years. Though he can still arrange exhibitions in Germany, he’s had a harder time establishing new connections with galleries in Louisiana.
“Usually, I don’t paint unless I have an exhibition planned, so it’s kind of slowed down,” he said. “But, who knows? Maybe I’ll find a place to show some stuff. After I talk to you, I’m gonna go cut up a piece of tin. Then I’ll water my garden, grab my trombone, and go for my walk.”
Tooke gladly welcomes communication from art lovers and galleries. He ventures “into town” once a week to check his email at the public library. He can usually be reached at dmbobtooke@gmail.com.
