
Francis Pavy
“Ossan,” 2024.
When Francis Pavy was a young child, there was a day when his mother took him and his siblings out to Cankton to pick blackberries. Despite the fact that Cankton was merely fifteen miles from their home in Lafayette, Pavy somehow got the idea that they were headed to the “Wild West.” “We were at a farm, and there was barbed wire, and blackberry bushes with their thorns, and I just distinctly remember equating that with cowboy country, bucking broncos,” he recalls.
The image stayed with him, and acquired new texture years later when he was picking up a girlfriend, waiting for her to get ready. “I was walking in the newly plowed field, just killing time. I turned around, and the sun was setting and illuminating all these briars and thorns. They had these real fuzzy, kind of red thorns on green stems.” More than half a century later, the scene, the briars in particular, remain imprinted in his brain, one of many that “seem to haunt” him, manifesting in variations across his vast body of artwork. “I have a lot of things that visit me or make an impression in my memory,” he said, describing them as “visual memories—memories associated with color and form and shape, instead of language.”
“I mixed color in my head all the time, throughout my childhood. Like when the sky was pink, I’d wonder what I would . . . what colors I would use to make that. I thought about it all the time.”
—Francis Pavy
Other such “Pavicons”—as the artist’s friends refer to them—include accordions and coffee cups, clouds and cane grass, distinct from the marsh grass motif, which Pavy believes he collected from a map his father’s geologist friend showed him when he was young. Likewise, Pavy’s birds come from memories of a high school friend who dreamed of becoming an ornithologist. Vignettes of couples dancing can be traced back to a seminal night of swamp pop in Vacherie when Pavy was three or four, at his aunt’s wedding—a night that forever instilled within him a love for Louisiana French music.

Francis Pavy
"Triplerow"
This collection of iconography emerges from Pavy as something viscerally familiar for others who grew up in Acadiana, holding shared understandings and interpretations between the artist and his community. Examining Pavy’s work, we know, instantly, where we are.
Pavy’s is an artist’s mind, nurtured by a succession of influences beginning with the early 1950s Saturday morning television show, Learn to Draw. The program featured fifteen-minute lessons by artist Jon Gnagy. Pavy joins other artistic giants—including Andy Warhol—in being inspired by the show, begging his parents for the official Jon Gnagy art kit.
[Read about Francis Pavy's images on our February 2025 cover, here.]
When that didn’t satisfy him, Pavy’s parents signed him up for art classes with the internationally-recognized contemporary landscape artist Elemore Morgan Jr., who was at the time teaching at the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette). Pavy took Morgan’s children’s class in Girard Park, where he recalls learning the art of color-mixing, turning blue and yellow into green. “After that, I mixed color in my head all the time, throughout my childhood. Like when the sky was pink, I’d wonder what I would . . . what colors I would use to make that. I thought about it all the time.”
Years later, after switching from USL’s music program (“I was a blues freak,” he said) to fine arts, he and Morgan reunited. “He’s who taught me to draw,” said Pavy.

Francis Pavy
"Hot Accordion Player from Lydia"
When the time came for him to follow the conventional path of the Louisiana artist undergrads—attending graduate school somewhere far away—Pavy felt an overwhelming inclination to stay. “There was too much to investigate here,” he said. “I didn’t want to go and be an artist anywhere else.” During this time, he found subjects in the center of the emerging late 1970s “cosmic Cajun” dancehall scene of the time—marked by experimental takes on the Louisiana French music traditions led by bands like Michael Doucet’s Coteau. His senior thesis project was a ceramic work depicting a full Cajun band.
[Read more about Michael Doucet's role in the history of Cajun music, here.]
After graduation, Pavy opened up a studio in his garage shed in Lafayette, working an offshore oil job to make ends meet. Eventually he got an opportunity to work at a glass shop in Lafayette, and it was around the 1980s when he returned to the idea of being a painter. He dates the beginning of his professional life as a full-time artist as 1985.
Over the course of his career, memorialized in a retrospective book published in December 2024 by UL Press titled Francis Pavy: Forty Years, Pavy’s work has become instantly recognizable, despite his resistance to being bound by style or form. “I don’t limit myself in any way, to any one style,” he said. Though the majority of his work tends toward formalism built from abstraction, symbolism, and bright color—he has also created several remarkable photorealist portraits of Louisiana icons, including artist and musician Dickie Landry, multi-instrumentalist and record producer Joel Savoy, Creole accordionist Cedric Watson, and artist Douglas Bourgeois. “Sometimes I want to challenge myself,” he said of this stylistic shift. “I want to see where my chops are, and I’ll decide to paint something realistic.”

Francis Pavy
"Cowboy Zydeco"
Most of the time, though, Pavy describes his work as like jazz—improvisational. “I’m always kind of inundated with ideas,” he said. From these, as well as his collection of mental images and his notebooks of drawings, he’ll decide what he wants to explore. “It’s intuitive,” he said. “My work has always fed on itself. I am always kind of looking at my peripheral vision as influencing color themes and ideas. So, it kind of builds over time. Very few things come out full-fledged.” Though, when they do, it’s often like magic—a burst of obsessive inspiration, all at once. Pavy describes one evening after he had been out, dressed up. He sat down to paint and didn’t stop for five hours, completing the entire thing and covering his nice clothes in paint.
[Read this: A Guide to Art Galleries in Acadiana]
The process of putting together his retrospective, gathering works from the past forty years, reminded Pavy of many ideas and themes he didn’t feel he’d finished exploring. The works he is creating today are largely inspired from earlier versions of himself. “I figured this was a good opportunity to go back and start at the beginning again,” he said, “embracing those old themes and coming back with the skills and knowledge of these past forty years.”

Francis Pavy
"Full Moon at the Blue Moon," 2024.
Many of these pieces will be featured in an exhibition of new works, called Echoes of Hue and Song, showing at the Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans this February, including “Full Moon at the Blue Moon,” which emerged from a particularly magical night at the Lafayette dancehall jam. Pavy, who plays the lap steel guitar, described the musical synergy as “like two people making ten, like an orchestra. It’s multiplication instead of addition.” The night was an incredible one, with a full moon, he said. “So, I made a painting.”