Perspectives: Douglas Bourgeois

Figurative and layered with tension, the New Orleans artist’s work is still a joy to make.

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During the long slog of lonely pandemic days, Douglas Bourgeois reminded himself that he still knew how to draw. As a working artist with decades of experience, having shown his paintings from Honolulu to New York, he should have never had any doubt. But a stray negative comment from the public is a form of evil magic. It can lodge into your brain and fester there for years, decades even, overpowering all of those accolades and awards and museum shows, forcing you to remember why you do this thing at all. Bourgeois got to work, pencil in his hand, creating portraits of stranger’s faces from his collection of old yearbooks and other found sources. As the weeks passed, he upgraded from paper to washed book covers and illustration board, brushing washes over the surface to give it an old-timey look.

[Read a Q&A between Bourgeois and Country Roads Publisher James Fox Smith from 2015 here.]

“God, it was so much fun,” Bourgeois says, glowing from the memory. This was his element, and he was good at it, though photorealism was never the point. “I think I finally kind of accepted that. I’ll never paint like, you know, that perspectival painting. I don’t really want that. I prefer ‘non-realist’ realism.”

A retrospective of Bourgeois’ work, sixteen paintings created from 1989–2020, is on display at the West Baton Rouge Museum in Port Allen through September 4. There you’ll find vivid, melancholic representations of Bourgeois’ dreams and preoccupations, oil-rendered fragments of Americana rooted in a Cajun Catholic upbringing in Ascension Parish as they collide with his insatiable curiosity about his surroundings and the artists he admires.

This was his element, and he was good at it, though photorealism was never the point. “I think I finally kind of accepted that. I’ll never paint like, you know, that perspectival painting. I don’t really want that. I prefer ‘non-realist’ realism.”

Born in 1951, Bourgeois has spent most of his life in the unincorporated village of Saint Amant, where he lives and works today. After earning an art degree at LSU in 1974, he moved to New Orleans and began to hone his style. Once there, he met a gaggle of other artists, including the Ecuadorian painter and curator George Febres, who represented Bourgeois’ work in his Galerie Jules Laforgue, which took up the first floor of his Marigny home, a space that doubled as “a little homemade salon,” Bourgeois recalled. The gallery shut down in 1984, just three years after it opened, but it was established long enough to put Bourgeois and a small cohort of artists on the map.

“He would arrange shows for us,” Bourgeois said. “He was really good at getting the work seen.”

Critics noticed, too, and in 1990 one of them dubbed the group the “Visionary Imagists”. “We didn’t choose that name,” Bourgeois said, “and we would kind of play it down.” Nevertheless, the term stuck. It was a handy way to emphasize that unlike some of their New York contemporaries pushing minimalism, conceptualism, and abstract expressionism, the art of this group (comprised of Jacqueline Bishop, Charles Blank, Dona Lief and a few others) was imagistic and narrative, exploring pop culture, humor, puns, history, and nature.

[Read about Bourgeois' use of pop culture in his work in our story from 2008 here.]

Bourgeois’ paintings are typically small, oil on panel, and saturated in detail. The subject might have a halo around her head, like a saint, and occupy a claustrophobic interior space, or otherwise stand among unforgiving Louisiana flora, surrounded by dreamy depictions of any number of nostalgic consumer products: wooden toys, dolls, postcards, musical instruments, transistor radios, and so forth. Pop cultural figures are a frequent subject: Motown icons, gospel singers, hip-hoppers, rock-n-rollers, even Edgar Allen Poe. Mixing cultures is Bourgeois’ jam and always has been. When those cultures are in conflict, like his religious upbringing and his love of rock-n-roll, then he’s compelled to explore the tension with brushes and paint.

“It’s all hybridity,” Bourgeois said about culture in general. “I mean, it’s just always one overlapping the other and that’s what’s so great about it.”

Bourgeois has long been concerned with how our culture elevates a select few people, only to swiftly tear them down. “Fame is so fleeting and meaningless,” he said. His piece, “The Pop Singer,” gets at heart of this matter, with a dapper man standing center stage at a microphone, apparently belting out a number, while background singers and a guitarist help him put on the show. The audience, though, doesn’t seem to care all that much. One woman reads a book, another fixes her makeup, and someone appears to be asleep. An old Genie lamp sits at the edge of the stage, as though to suggest, “be careful what you wish for,” Bourgeois explained.

“It’s all hybridity,” Bourgeois said about culture in general. “I mean, it’s just always one overlapping the other and that’s what’s so great about it.”

For his own part, Bourgeois is content to stay out of the limelight and keep doing what he does. He’s still got plenty ideas. He’s still inspired by his musical muses. And he’s still very much having fun.

Art by Bourgeois is on display at the West Baton Rouge Museum until September 4.

Bourgeois’ work is also represented by Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans.