The walls are covered with art and artifacts from friends and family in the Covington apartment where Gail Hood, our cover artist, lives with her husband, Henry. She was born in Michigan and lived briefly in Chicago, but for most of her life she has called St. Tammany Parish home.

Her father, a former engineer, decided that the country life was what he and his family needed. Thus convinced, he moved the family away from Chicago to a tung tree farm north of Folsom shortly before World War II.

“Mother didn’t like it,” Gail wryly recalls. “She had been raised on a farm and really liked Chicago. They moved to Folsom with all her electrical appliances, but the electricity had not yet reached that part of Folsom!”

The move to the tung farm was a calculated risk, although tung oil was a profitable business during World War II; it was used to make very durable paint. At the peak of the war, shipbuilding was yielding hundreds of vessels per month, all requiring paint to protect them from corrosion.

“He got into it at just the right time,” Gail says, “because after the war the development of synthetic paints made tung oil unprofitable on a large scale. Daddy sold the farm in the early ’60s and retired. But it was a wonderful life on that farm—and that accounts for my love of the Louisiana landscape today.”

With war brewing in Europe in the late ’30s and World War I still fresh in their minds, many European families sent their children to live with relatives in the United States. This is how Gail came to meet Dixie, the granddaughter of her elderly neighbors, the Valliants. Dixie’s parents sent her from Rouen, France to stay with her grandparents. The two girls became fast friends. After the war, Dixie returned to France, but visited Folsom years later with her family. That visit provided the opportunity of a lifetime, Gail recalls. “When it was time to leave, they said, ‘Don’t you want to come back with us and go to school?’” So Gail went to France, where she enrolled in the École des Beaux Arts in Rouen and traveled for ten months between her junior and senior years of high school.

Once back in the United States, Gail graduated from Covington High; she then earned a Bachelor of Arts at Carleton College, and a Master of Fine Arts at Columbia University in 1960. She has painted professionally ever since, and is an Associate Professor of Visual Art at Southeastern Louisiana University.

Gail credits her uncle, Darl Turnbull, a commercial artist and watercolorist, as her motivation to become a professional artist. During her childhood, he made annual trips from Chicago to visit and to paint the rural South. Because Gail showed a strong interest in his painting, her uncle let her accompany him on his outings. Gail recalls with great joy sharing both his company and his artist’s secrets. She delights in the paintings of his that she proudly displays in her home.

Of her many professional accomplishments, Gail finds teaching art the most satisfying. After teaching at Florida State for a few years, she returned to Louisiana, where she ran the Occupational Therapy program at Southeast Hospital. She then taught at northshore high schools and gave private lessons, as well. She was part-time at Southeastern before taking her current full-time position.

“I think of myself as a teacher as much as I think of myself as an artist,” Gail says. She finds it exciting to watch as each student renders a different interpretation of an assignment. “It’s very interesting to see the students grow in awareness. I think that it’s important to encourage them to interpret what they see and let them know that it’s all right to see things differently.”

As a professional painter, Gail is most known for her landscapes, particularly those of Southern Louisiana. Whether abstract or realistic, the present landscape is always there in her paintings. She normally paints in the studio from her photographs because of her teaching schedule; however, she was inspired by a recent sabbatical in France, where she painted the cliffs of Normandy in plein aire (on site). Back at home, Gail was eager to continue her plein aire experience, which resulted in our cover painting, an expressionist style done in acrylic on canvas, depicting hydrangeas in her garden. “I rarely have the opportunity to paint like that, on site. I thought the forms of the dying hydrangeas in winter were fascinating and would lend them to an interesting interpretation.”

One could say that life has come full circle for Gail, both professionally and personally. Near the entrance of her Folsom studio is a stand of tung trees.

Gail’s paintings are available at Brunner Gallery in Covington. Contact Susan Brunner at 893-0444.