"Awaken the Dreamer"

Rebecca Rebouché, a Dreamer, a Naturalist, a Myth-Maker

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When New Orleans painter Rebecca Rebouché first started painting the white dress, it was tinier—designed as though it were for a child, short and scalloped with a Peter Pan collar. The dress—like many of her early subjects painted during the city’s post-Katrina creative renaissance—was rendered in a naïf style reminiscent of Wayne Thiebaud’s.

“I was tired of being sad,” Rebouché said. “I was tired of everybody being so sad from the storm, and I wanted the opposite of that. I just wanted reasons for hope and joy. So, out of the blue I just started painting and drawing these really simple little objects and things.” A pear on a swing. An apple with a party hat. And from these sweet little paintings, Rebouché began to—at first subconsciously, and then with intention—curate patterns, symbols, techniques—a visual language all her own. 

“When I started painting these symbols,” she explained, “I was really painting the human condition. That was what I was representing. Naturally, I think, just like a child learns words and forms sentences, it was kind of like that … I learned symbols, and informed stories around the symbols to kind of explain my experience of the world. It just came about naturally, and it got more and more complex over the years.” 

As her work evolved over the next decade and a half, Rebouché carried her motifs with her. The white dress grew, shapeshifting into the figure of a woman, gaining length and sleeves and billow. Across her broad body of abstract and allegorical work, the dress hangs from a pear tree; sparkles as it floats on the water’s surface, encircled by alligators; is pulled from the Gulf by a passing crane; gets tangled in the roots of a lily pad as it sinks to a pond’s bottom; clings to a bending cypress as the crane, once again, tries to carry it away. It lays atop a sandy patch of grass stretching over the globe’s surface, peering bodiless into the celestial expanse.

[Read this: Emma Fick—Guided by curiosity, the Covington artist’s work is a witness to, and evocation of, life’s patterns]

Drawing from a trove of subconscious wonder, intuition, and reaction—which she mines as source material through a daily journaling practice—Rebouché plays with familiar imagery and imagined realities, weaving in tensions and harmonies as universal expressions of the human condition. 

Her 2019 collection, Exotic Memory, for instance, was conceived from a dream. “I’d had a very rough year personally and woke up one morning with this recollection of this very complex dream,” she said, sharing that she’s been trying to write it into a novel ever since then. “I felt like the story was sort of borrowed memories of another place or time. It felt so surreal, so I just started illustrating it, if you will, following the chronology of the story.” 

"I sort of made myself into a naturalist. I forced myself to go out into the world, into nature, to get dirty, to get uncomfortable, and really draw from life and be an observer.” —Rebecca Rebouché

Though Rebouché’s work is rooted in a deep and powerful interiority, it is also informed by a host of creative forebears, including Southern Gothic authors William Faulkner, Walker Percy, Tennessee Williams, and Eudora Welty—particularly for her collection The Unlikely Naturalist. Victoria Finlay’s Color: A Natural History of the Palette “has been a constant inspiration for me in terms of the way the artist moves through the world.” But it was the naturalists who shoved the suburban-raised artist into the wild—writer Diane Ackerman, and artists like John James Audubon and Maria Sibylla Merian. 

“I wasn’t a naturalist when I started out,” she said. “I wasn’t outdoorsy, wasn’t accustomed to that lifestyle. But it was something I fell in love with through the works of other people, and I sort of made myself into a naturalist. I forced myself to go out into the world, into nature, to get dirty, to get uncomfortable, and really draw from life and be an observer.” Today, not only are the artist’s landscapes and symbols culled from the waterways, forests, and wildlife of South Louisiana’s natural environments—but she paints them from a forest in Abita Springs, in a renovated treehouse that has been featured in Architectural Digest and, more recently, on the Magnolia Network’s The Cabin Chronicles. “And so now I’ve come full circle. It’s been kind of this slow romance with nature,” she said. 

For over a decade now, perhaps the most principal motif in Rebouché’s work is the tree. Rather than a symbol in itself, she explained, “The tree is more of a house for other symbols. It’s sort of a framework or structure in which to hold an allegory of symbols on the canvas.” The concept of a tree laden down with various objects—each holding its own symbolic meaning—recurs across each of her collections. But it also serves as a model for her “Family Tree” commissions: heirloom works created as a “portrait of people who share a home”. “These involve more of my anthropological self at work,” she said, describing how she spends hours interviewing members of a family, gathering their stories and traditions, and bringing it all back into her studio. “And then I do a bunch of research afterward as well, as I determine which symbols to use. It’s part science, part magic.” 

When I spoke to Rebouché in early March, she was cradling her most recent creation, her seven-week-old daughter Camille. Much of her pregnancy, she said, had been spent preparing for the October release of her latest collection: nineteen naturalist paintings interpreting themes of rebirth, titled Awaken the Dreamer. 

“I started the collection before she was conceived,” said Rebouché. “The seed of the idea was already planted before she was, and it was manifesting this next phase of life, which is all about blossoming and birth and awakening to a new day. So, it definitely is an instance of ‘life follows art,’ ‘art follows life’—which comes first? I do feel that in a way, my daughter is the dreamer, now awakened.” 

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