Photo by Charles Champagne
In the tiny shotgun house that serves as his studio, Bourgeois paints at an easel inscribed with the names of artists he admires.
Douglas Bourgeois is a painter, collage artist, and sculptor known nationwide for crafting hallucinatory, intimately scaled paintings that, like his tiny St. Amant studio, seem bigger on the inside than the outside. Set back from an Ascension Parish byway, the modest, raised cottage and adjacent studio rise like islands from a riot of partially tamed vegetation. Both are crammed with gloriously diverse collections of art, iconography, and pop-art ephemera that occupy every surface. Aside from a few years during the 1970s, Bourgeois has called this unincorporated patch of Ascension Parish home most of his life and credits his semi-rural, edge-of-nature surroundings for supplying physical and spiritual sustenance for his creativity. Seated in his studio—a partially completed oil painting of funk pioneer James Brown performing atop a lake of lava as a backdrop—Bourgeois spoke in illuminating fragments, his conversation echoing the textured, juxtaposition-filled canvases for which he is famous.
Humble, cerebral, and highly articulate, Bourgeois takes a boyish delight in the collection, development, and production of his images and the pop-culture ephemera that he has amassed to populate them. Equal parts crafter and artist, Bourgeois collages his works with beads, toys, pins, moribund electronics, and other fractured imagery, stitching together multimedia portraits that do more than reflect the image of an individual. They build a netherworld for his characters to inhabit—familiar and nostalgic, but simultaneously otherworldly and surreal. During a conversation that was equal parts interview and modernist art lesson, Bourgeois had the following thoughts:
JFS: Many of your paintings feature highly recognizable artists, musicians, and writers. What draws you to depict—or not depict—a particular person?
DB: The tribute pieces are me honoring somebody. I did a painting of Bobby Womack and Lana Del Rey. I have done paintings of Emily Dickinson with the rapper Rakim, paired together on an island, because they’re both poets. There’s a vulnerability in these people who are high achievers artistically. And even if there’s ultimately a fall from grace, they’re still these burning stars to me.
It’s not about celebrity. But I do think some of these paintings are a meditation on fame. I have a quote on my desk that says, “Fame is a mask that will eat your face.” To me, what I see in the obscure performers and artists is the way they bring their gift to other people. That sort of makes them special. But it’s their human side that makes them like the rest of us.
JFS: Aside from a few years in New Orleans in the ‘70s, you’ve lived and worked your whole life on this property in St. Amant. How important are your surroundings to your work?
DB: I lived in San Diego for about six months—California, not for me. I missed dampness and the wide range of people; I couldn’t wait to get back home. I said to people, “I can’t wait to kiss the filthy streets of New Orleans.” And I did, at the train station. But truly, I think I was just trying to make myself into an urban person. When I needed to become myself, I came back here.
JFS: So is it important to have Louisiana’s natural environment surrounding you?
DB: It is. I didn’t realize how important until I got back into it. At a certain point, Louisiana’s landscape just started kinda creeping into my paintings, which before that had been more pop culture, sarcastic, ironic. I had people say to me, “What’s all this nature crap?” But I just kept plugging away, and the images got stronger and stronger until I realized that I really could reconcile both things.
JFS: Talk about placing a highly recognizable personality amid a landscape that seems about to reach out and swallow them whole.
DB: I think it’s a way to sanctify them in some way. I’ll take a singer or a poet and put them where there’s no microphone or no audience. So, why are they there? It’s a juxtaposition, but it’s also a way for me to take the fame out of the equation and leave them with their real selves—their natural gift—which is the same as the land. It’s showcasing all the things that are important to me: the landscape and the music. It’s my way of hybridizing them.
JFS: Major subjects include religious figures, Catholic iconography, music & movie stars, social & political issues around race. Environment. America’s pop culture. Talk about how your approach to the subject matter has evolved over the years.
DB: Catholic iconography is powerful because I was steeped in it as a young boy, and some of the first artwork I saw was in churches and prayer missals. One of the most powerful was seeing murals in churches, particularly by the Benedictine monk Dom Gregory DeWit, who did paintings at Sacred Heart, in Baton Rouge, and in Covington, at [St. Joseph] Abbey. When I was a boy, I went to the Knights of Columbus summer camp there. We would go to Mass every day, and the painting in the background called “Judgment Day” had sort-of an Edward G. Robinson kind of guy with a Derby and a cigar at Judgment Day and a lady with seamed stockings. And I was like … “Wow!” It was really powerful to see vernacular, common people, in a church mural. Now that I’m an adult, I know that it was part of the Moderne style. But [DeWit’s] was just so over the top—especially for this area.
JFS: Your paintings seem to explore the boundary between reality and fantasy. Is that a permeable barrier for you?
DB: The more I read about quantum physics and the malleability and temporariness of time and life, I think so. I’m still trying to figure it out, but it’s a way to reconcile not knowing what’s real and what’s not. That sort of emotional and spiritual striving, I think, can happen in art.
I’m not a photographic realist. I would identify more with a folk painter than I would with an accomplished, academically trained, painter. I endorse the permeability of both those worlds.
JFS: What’s next? What would you like to go to from here?
DB: Sometimes I think I overcook my paintings. But for the most part, I think I’m getting better at leaving things out. I’m trying to have a little more air in them. I think earlier, I had a horror vacui. I look at my older paintings and it’s kind of like a hoarder’s paradise. There’s a little bit of pack rat and I’m trying to clear space, to focus on what brings the painting home, instead of trying to overcompensate.
I have also been doing a lot of collage work and these linoleum block cuts that have always been a hobby-type home thing. But recently I have a publisher who is working with me to do small, fine-art editions. So that’s pretty exciting. As far as painting and subject matter, I have no clue about what’s next. I have so many things that I want to do in my warped brain list that I hate to give up any time. Time is so valuable now.
On October 31 and November 1, Douglas Bourgeois will be the featured artist on Louisiana Public Broadcasting’s Art Rocks program hosted by Country Roads publisher James Fox-Smith. lpb.org/artrocks for more information. In Louisiana, Douglas Bourgeois is represented exclusively by Arthur Roger Gallery of New Orleans. See new and classic works at arthurrogergallery.com.
Read more: In our May 2008 issue, Ruth Laney profiled Bourgeois and his collections in "Pop Culture Artifacts."
