by Stacey Paretti Rase

The northshore is well known for its abundance of artistic talent. It has been an honor for us at Inside Northside to become acquainted with some of these visionary men and women—we feature a local artist’s work on the cover of each issue of the magazine. Readers have begun to anticipate these images and what they reveal about their creators, just as they look forward to the content beyond the cover. It is a true testament to the artists’ talents when we hear our readers say that our magazine is displayed on their coffee table. Our hope is that each piece of art chosen draws visual interest and intrigue, not only at first glance, but also for many weeks after it arrives in the mailbox.

Over the past five years, each artist has been chosen for the unique look that he or she brings to the cover. Here, we celebrate the works and accomplishments of some of our past cover artists. They come from diverse backgrounds, with varying degrees of education and training. Working with different media and techniques, each has brought to the magazine his or her distinctive style. All are distinguished in the northshore community, and many have received accolades worldwide. But what ultimately binds them together is the love they feel for their home, the unique northshore environment that is the backdrop for their beautiful creations.

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Abita Springs’ own John Akers is an accomplished watercolor and acrylic painter whose style and palette are instantly recognizable. He has spent considerable time studying and researching the subjects of wildlife, waterfowl, coral reefs, florals and hummingbirds. Akers is also well known for his work in intaglio printing, an exacting and time-consuming process that involves drawing, copperplate etching, ink rolling and hand inking.

Recognized twice as Artist of the Year by the Louisiana Chapter of Ducks Unlimited, Akers has produced the official Louisiana Sportsmen’s Show Poster for the past 20 years. He created the official print and stamp for the Aquarium of the Americas, as well as the first print and stamp of the White Tiger for the Audubon Zoo. In addition, both Franklin and Danbury Mint have reproduced his works on collector plates. Akers’ amazing animal paintings can be enjoyed by even the youngest art enthusiast, as his works have been reproduced as puzzles by Hasbro Toys Company and published in three different languages for children the world over to enjoy.

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Mandeville painter Gretchen Armbruster studied art at Louisiana State University, the New Orleans Institute and the John McCrady Art School. Her work has taken form in breathtaking murals at locations including West Jefferson Hospital, Ochsner Hospital, Parish National Bank, and Oasis Spa. Armbruster’s art is well known in the New Orleans area. During the past Carnival season she created the invitation for the Krewe of Bacchus for the seventh time, and she recently produced the third in a series of Crescent City Classic posters.

Armbruster considers her specialty to be portraits, which she does in watercolors, oils and charcoals. She enjoys donating her time and talents to teaching in public schools and giving paintings to charitable organizations. “I have been fortunate to have been given a talent,” she says. “I enjoy sharing it with other people that can benefit from it.”

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Mandeville artist Emery Clark’s pieces have been northshore favorites for years. The blended pastel tones of her paintings evoke an understanding of nature and its soothing, relaxing effect. Clark is a graduate of the Boston University School of Fine Arts, Skowhegan School of Painting and Tulane University, where she received her Master of Fine Arts degree. Throughout her travel and study of eastern and European culture, she became fascinated with art’s integration in culture, which led to her influential works that involve what she describes as “the community creative process.”

Clark became well known for her involvement in the New Orleans Museum of Art’s 1977 Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibit, where she organized over 200 volunteers to paint an installation. She is currently dedicating much of her time to a collaborative project at Ochsner Hospital, where her artwork and imagery are being used in grand scale to promote healing. The work involves the participation of the pediatric hospital patients. “The philosophy of this project is based on the promise of hope and dreams that is inherent in nature,” she says.

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Linda Trappey Dautreuil’s paintings are influenced by themes taken from Louisiana folk traditions that relate to the physical landscape of the South. As a native of New Iberia, Dautreuil considers it important to preserve the Acadian culture through her artwork. She says that moving to Covington in 1996 actually gave her work a vibrancy and volume that she was previously unable to tap, as the unique northshore lifestyle reminds her of home. “Sometimes you have to step away from what you know to really get back to it,” she says.

Dautreuil received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and a Visual Arts Fellowship from the Louisiana State Arts Council in 1998. Earlier this year, she was recognized as Visual Artist of the Year at the St. Tammany Parish President’s Arts Awards. Her paintings may be found in the permanent collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art, The Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum in Lafayette, the City of New Orleans Public Art Collection, the St. Tammany Parish Public Art Collection, the Ochsner Foundation Collection, the FARA Collection, and numerous private collections in Houston, Atlanta and New Orleans. She has exhibited in New York, California, Belgium and France. Recent paintings may be seen at Brunner Gallery at the Shaw Center for the Arts in Baton Rouge.
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Alan Flattmann was born in New Orleans, but now calls Mandeville home. At the age of seventeen, he received a New Orleans Art Association Scholarship to study at the John McCrady Art School in the French Quarter. It was there that his lifetime interest in painting the French Quarter began. “I have a sentimental attachment to the French Quarter,” Flattmann explains. “Everything about it intrigues me—the old architecture, the restaurants, night clubs, markets, the changing weather and, of course, the many characters.”

In 1973, he was awarded a grant that enabled him to live and paint on the West Indies island of Barbados for one year. He received the Master Pastelist distinction of the Pastel Society of America in 1991, the American Artist Art Masters Award in 1996, and was featured in 2001 in the Inaugural Pastel Artist International Magazine’s Awards for World-Wide Excellence. Flattmann has been listed in Who’s Who in American Art since 1981. His paintings can be found in hundreds of private and corporate collections around the world, including The New Orleans Museum of Art, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Oklahoma Art Center, Longview Museum of Art, Mississippi Museum of Art, Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, Meriden Arts Association, New Orleans Art Association, University of Mississippi, Belhaven College and Alton Ochsner Medical Foundation.

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A graduate of the John McCrady Art School, Folsom artist Rolland Golden displays a vibrant style of abstract realism and reveals some of the natural abstraction that is found in almost any subject. His goal in this style of painting is to bring that abstraction forward without overpowering the emotionalism of the subject. “I like to create an analogy or similarity in images that most people wouldn’t think of,” he says.

Golden is listed in many art directories, including Who’s Who in American Art, and has won countless awards from New York to California. He has had over 100 one-man shows in galleries, cultural centers and museums in the United States, as well as one-man touring exhibitions in the (former) USSR in 1976-77 and in France from 1993-95. A book chronicling his work, authored by New Orleans writer John R. Kemp, was released last summer. Titled “Rolland Golden—Journeys of a Southern Artist,” it includes 184 color reproductions and seven lithographs of his work. Golden’s paintings are featured at the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

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Mandeville artist Marcia Holmes uses free-flowing strokes and intuitive color in her abstracted paintings from nature. These instinctual choices help explain her ability to slip in and out of several artistic styles and media and still maintain paintings that exhibit a vitality for life. She describes her signature style as “figurative and impressionistic, taking a subject from realism to abstraction.” Holmes enjoys experimenting with different media, often combining different types to see what the outcome will be. “To try is the only way you can grow as an artist,” she says.

Although she has only been painting for six years, Holmes’ recent accomplishments have literally taken her coast to coast: from San Luis Obispo and the prestigious Pastel Society of the West Coast Exhibit to Raleigh, North Carolina for the International Association of Pastel Society. She has even gone back to her birthplace of Laurel, Mississippi, where one of her botanical paintings was exhibited at the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art in conjunction with the Degas Pastel Society. Last year, Holmes completed a one-woman show in Austin, Texas at The Gallery at Spicewood, and International Artist Publishing has invited her to contribute to an art instruction book entitled, “How Did You Paint That? 100 Ways to Paint Flowers and Gardens.” Her work can be seen at Brunner Gallery at the Shaw Center for the Arts in Baton Rouge.

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Gail Hood was born in Michigan and lived briefly in Chicago before calling Covington home. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Carleton College and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University. She has found the unruly landscape of Southeast Louisiana to be the source of inspiration for her abstract paintings. Of her many professional accomplishments, Hood finds teaching art the most satisfying. “I think of myself as a teacher as much as I think of myself as an artist,” she remarks.

Hood has taught art at Florida State University, various northshore high schools, and for the Occupational Therapy program at Southeast Hospital. She is recently retired from her position as an Associate Professor in the Visual Art Department at Southeastern Louisiana University. Her paintings may be seen at Parish National Bank in Hammond, the Chevron Texaco Building, the Entergy Center restaurant and Meadowcrest Hospital.

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Artist Toni Nelson has mastered the subtle transformations of the northshore region in her works of art with great attention to the gentle light, unique detail and an enriched reflection of the liveliness of the land. Her subjects vary greatly, including paintings of ballerinas, horses, portraits and architecture, in styles ranging from realism to impressionism to folk art. Nelson spent much of her early career as a commercial artist and graphic designer, but found that she craved color after working many years in pencil and charcoal illustrations. Her current technique vividly exhibits that yearning, as she uses what she calls “transparent layers” of color in application.

Nelson has exhibited and earned numerous awards with several art guilds, and in 2001, she fulfilled a life-long dream when she opened the Toni Nelson Gallery in downtown Hammond. On display at the gallery are her extensive collection of award-winning original oil and acrylic paintings, photographs, giclées, prints and cards. She also teaches classes and conducts workshops at her gallery and regionally for students of all ages.

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Life’s journey has taken Mandeville artist Jim Seitz on quite a ride. An avid artist since childhood, Seitz’ art became serious while attending Stephen F. Austin State University, where he was hired to prepare medical illustrations for lectures and textbooks. Later, his work as an oil company engineer took him through exotic locales and cultures, which transformed his artistic focus. Seitz takes a free-form approach now to his art, both technically in his painting methods and mediums, and also in the way he chooses subjects to commit to canvas.

Seitz’ signature free-form landscapes are instantly recognizable due to his technique of layering colors in acrylics over a gold leaf foundation. Much of his work depicts scenes painted from his own memories of locations near and far, combining subtle elements to elicit different responses from viewers. Seitz’ work can be seen locally at gallery nu in Covington.

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New Orleans native John Preble was known for his Creole paintings before becoming the creator of the wonderfully bizarre and eclectic UCM Museum in Abita Springs. He admits that even before he knew he would be a museum curator, he had explored every junk shop, garage sale and dumpster in Southeast Louisiana—hunting and gathering all of the strange artifacts that now make up his unusual vision of the South. “I have two art lives and they are extremely different,” he explains. “The paintings are one thing, and the museum is another.”

The museum is a gallery, of sorts, for Preble’s interesting and self-designed exhibits. He describes the museum as an expression of himself that encourages people to see the artistry in ordinary things. His critically acclaimed “Camille” series depicts portraits of a mythical Creole beauty, an image chosen by Preble because of the Creole Indians’ heritage and their proximity to Abita Springs.

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Patricia Whitty of Slidell received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Tulane University and a Master of Fine Arts from Washington University. After leaving school, Whitty began to develop her individual take on Contemporary Realism. Working with simple objects, flowers and plant parts, ribbons and plastic, glass vessels and dimly mirrored surfaces, she carefully renders the scene before her until it gives the illusion of reality. She works from photographs to capture the light which changes every moment in this fluid and light–reflective setting. Whitty prefers to paint exclusively with oils on imported Dutch linen, which she says allows her time to replicate the visual effects she sees in her subjects. “The infinite ways to put oil on and manipulate it are fascinating to me,” she notes.

Whitty has shown her work throughout the country, but has exhibited most often in her native town of New Orleans. Her work is included in such public collections as the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Louisiana Governor’s Collection and the Mississippi Museum. Her paintings are in the corporate collections of Pan American Life, Caddo Management, Freeport-McMoran and the TJM Corporation. In addition to her still-life paintings, Whitty enjoys portrait painting. She is represented by LeMieux Galleries in New Orleans, where she had a solo exhibition this spring.

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Mandeville’s Ernie Jordan found art a form of escape as a fighter pilot in the Korean War. The Jackson, Mississippi native’s first training was with a Japanese portrait painter who spoke no English. After many years, his desire to paint was re-ignited after a trip to southern France ten years ago. He became fascinated with the landscape’s walkways and cobblestone paths.

Jordan’s love of the sea and water is also evident in much of his work, as he draws inspiration from his sailing experiences—including racing his sloop from San Francisco to Hawaii. Jordan continues to study various forms of art under the direction of Adrian Deckbar of New Orleans. In addition to portraits, he enjoys impressionism as well as gardens, lakes, rivers and bayou scenes. Jordan’s work is handled exclusively in Louisiana by Nancy Robbins Fine Art.