May/June 2012 Cover by Dr. Bob.

The first clues that Dr. Bob might have a northshore connection are warning signs featuring the Honey Island Swamp Monster (As Seen on TV) and the wild-eyed albino, Onion Head (Bonfouca Boogie Man), greeting visitors in the studio’s parking lot. So what exactly does an iconic “New Orleans” artist like Dr. Bob know about the mysterious waterways of Slidell? It turns out he knows quite a bit.

Born in Wichita, Kan., Dr. Bob is of Crow Indian, French and German descent. His dad was an engineer for aerospace manufacturing giant Boeing Co. The family was among the first wave of “come here” high-tech workers (“missile gypsies,” as Dr. Bob calls his family) who settled in the Slidell area after Boeing won the contract to build the first stage of NASA’s Saturn V moon rocket at the Michoud plant in New Orleans East.

Coming of age at the dawn of suburban development in St. Tammany meant endless adventure to Dr. Bob. “To a kid from Kansas, it was like being in Jurassic Park down here. Every where you turned, something moved, slithered, splashed, jumped or growled,” he remembers. “I started out discovering the secrets of the South, so to speak—all these opportunities to go fishing and hunting. Walking out your front door with a dip net and a flashlight or a frog gig made out of a nail and a broom handle—man, you could catch whatever you wanted to.”

Listen to Dr. Bob recounting his mischievous, if not misspent, youth spent in St. Tammany and it quickly becomes obvious that his time spent exploring the parish’s streams, woods and swamps has greatly shaped his art as much as his subsequent adventures later in life in New Orleans and throughout the South.

Dr. Bob poses with his wire sculpture of Tammanend.

Dr. Bob’s storytelling intersects modern pop culture and the places that “ain’t dere no more” when he explains why he thinks he knows what’s behind the recent sightings of the northshore panther. “We had a neighbor, Arthur Jones, who later on invented Nautilus fitness machines. He owned a snake farm by the old White Kitchen on the road to the Gulf Coast. [Reptile Jungle, where Highways 90 and 190 meet.] That’s where Jayne Mansfield was killed when her driver ran into the back of a truck. We were at Bosco’s Restaurant in Slidell when we heard that. They took her car to Eddie’s Esso in Slidell. I saw that,” he digresses, then gets back on track with the panther. “Mr. Jones kept wild animals and snakes in his home, too. He had a pair of breeding jaguarundis that he kept in a bathtub with a sliding glass door he kept jammed up with a broom handle so you couldn’t slide it.”

Intrigued about the northshore panther reports, Dr. Bob did some research. “The climate is just the same as in Central America, and they describe jaguarundis as cocoa-colored—and they are blackish-looking—and I’m getting tickled over all this.” He brought it up in a visit with his friend, musician Coco Robicheaux, who died last November. (Robicheaux became known nationwide in 2010 for performing a bit of voodoo on the HBO show Treme.) “He was raised in Slidell and his real name was Curtis Arceneaux. Curtis and I used to catch snakes and lizards to sell to Mr. Arthur to feed his snakes and reptiles and stuff. We’d get a dollar for a turtle. That’s big money in the ’60s. Before he died, Curtis and I got to talking about Arthur Jones, who moved from the middle of Slidell to Palm Lake subdivision. Did those cats get away from the old White Kitchen? Or in the move? Or when Camille passed Slidell? Somehow, people are seeing these things and I truly believe it could be those jaguarundis.”

Dr. Bob's northshore icons.

What about Onion Head, the Boogie Man of the Bonfouca? Turns out tales of the mythological monster were made up to scare the youth of Slidell, tales equally believed as tales of the Loup Garou are by the children of Acadiana.

To paraphrase Dr. Bob and make the tale fit for print in a family magazine, he says it all became too real one evening as he and a young lady were “necking” out by Bayou Pacquet. “We were in my daddy’s ’67 Impala and a pine cone fell and hit the roof. BAM! That was the end of that.” The girl (who will remain nameless) screamed, ‘Onion Head! Get the hell out!’ And when she screamed, you see three more cars’ lights pop on and everybody’s hauling ass out of Bayou Pacquet ’cause Onion Head’s coming.”

Dr. Bob’s Art

Dr. Bob is self-taught. The first piece of art that he made and sold was as much a product of the boredom he faced in an early stint as a forest ranger in northern Louisiana as any big creative urge. “There was nothing else to do with no cable and only two TV stations. The Album Hour out of Natchez was the first time anybody heard Lynyrd Skynyrd, so we’re out there turning the antenna up on the hill trying to tape it on a cassette player. We wanted some rock ‘n’ roll, living up in the boonies.”

Mr. Okra.

Going back to his days in the swamps, he carved an alligator. But it wasn’t just a wooden gator. It was a musical instrument. A “ga-tar.” “I can’t play, I can’t sing and I was told I couldn’t carry a tune in a No. 3 washtub, so I made a washtub base. I wanted the neckpiece to be like snakes.” With an alligator’s head carved into the end, he says, “I put the eyes and the teeth in it. It’s the ga-tar, boys! Play one string at a time.” When he unveiled it, he says, “Everyone laughed. It turned into my first piece of art and sold to a New York collector. Last time it changed hands was 15 years ago for $5,000, and it’s in a private collection in New Jersey now. ”

Dr. Bob has since carved two more of these alligators in a labor- and time-intensive process. It takes hours and hours of sanding, he says, and adds that, “Once I get through with the sanding, I do the steel wool and get that down to 0000, which is really fine. After getting the wax on, it’s like butter.” The carved gators serve as demonstration pieces at art shows, where Dr. Bob shows off their finish. “I like to take a rag and just throw it and it slides down the gator, it’s so slick. I take a lot of pride in making it. It’s dangerous. A piece can go wrong after you spent months on it, bust it all to hell.”

He uses real alligator teeth in the alligator and dog pieces. “I get the eyes from anywhere that deals with glass or marbles; the guys at Studio Inferno around the corner are good at keeping me supplied. I buy my alligator teeth by the pound. People ask how I get ’em. I say, ‘Very carefully.’”

Found objects are the basis for much of his art. In an ironic twist, the storm that nearly killed him has ensured a steady supply of discarded signs, lumber, doors and window frames to forage in the decimated areas around his studio. “After the hurricane, I scoured the neighborhoods for what little bit of old New Orleans was left.”

Many of the bottle caps that he uses to bejewel his creations come from the Abita Brewery. He also has a stash of Barq’s root beer bottle caps and wood from the old Barq’s crates with the slogan “Drink Barq’s—it’s good!” stenciled on the sides. Dr. Bob recalls the old Conti St. warehouse. “It smelled intoxicating; that raw sassafras and birch just permeated that building. To this day, you walk in there and it knocks you over.

“The things that mean the most to me are things that come to me by magic,” Dr. Bob says. He has two rescued Union Beer signs from one of New Orleans’ first commercial breweries that are waiting to become part of some artwork, and, he says, “One of the only Dr. Nut signs in existence. It was on the gable-end of a building.” Dr. Nut, a local soft drink that ceased existence in the 1970s, is etched in literary history as the favorite beverage of Ignatius Riley in Confederacy of Dunces. Dr. Bob has cut an alligator-shaped portion out of the sign and, after adding eyes and teeth, will incorporate it into a piece assembled in tribute to the character. “I was thinking, I’ve got Ignatius done, and I want to make up some Dr. Nut bottle caps if I can’t find them online. I have to get the right eyeball to put on him to keep an eye on Ignatius.”

Be Nice or Leave

Even Dr. Bob’s catch phrase, “Be Nice or Leave,” has a back-swamp back-story. It started when Dr. Bob and some of his fellow St. Paul’s students took to the river to do some fishing on a holiday.

“We’d get a six-pack of Dixie, a pack of Marlboros and go out and act like we’re 14-year-old men. I drew the short straw, so I had to go get the beer,” says Dr. Bob. A Pearl River dive bar behind the St. Joe brick works was where the underage artist-to-be entered to buy the day’s “refreshments.”

“It was called Working Man’s Paradise, owned by a man named Edgar Ducre; it was painted red with black and white dice on the building and spelled ‘paradise’ for ‘pair of dice.’ It just intrigued me.” The scene inside the bar made an even bigger impact on Dr. Bob. “The interior was painted this turquoise blue that makes you feel like you’re in Haiti or something. On one wall was this big painting of Edgar Ducre’s son who went to LSU. He’s in his uniform riding Mike the Tiger and throwing a football. It’s awesome; it’s painted really good.”

Then he says, “That’s where I saw ‘Be Nice or Leave.’ It was written with a Marks-A-Lot on a piece of a cardboard beer box. When I got my order and turned to leave, the back of the sign said, ‘There’s Nothing in the World Worth Getting Killed Over.’ It hit me that I didn’t belong there, that I could get killed.”

His Be Nice or Leave signs can be found hanging all over the city, and he’s constantly commissioned to make signs with a personalized spin on the phrase. He has his own versions on sale as well. Be Nasty and Stay, Shut Up and Fish and Shut up and Eat are variations, and he paints Be Nice or Be Bitten signs that he donates to local animal shelters for them to give to donors and people adopting pets.

Dr. Freakin’ Bob

How did Dr. Bob, a man of no obvious medical training, get the name Dr. Bob? He’ll be happy to tell you. It was at the birth of the S.O.B.—the son of Bob, his boy Isaac. “My nickname came when I was helping deliver him at Lakeside Women’s Hospital. Lamaze failed, and we had to do an emergency C-section. I was in the sterile field, so I assisted with it. The nurse, Margie Vanderbeck, who I went to school with, said ‘Well, doctor freakin’ Bob,’ and that was it.”

Dr. Bob participates in many charitable endeavors in the New Orleans area and Bay St. Louis, where the first gallery to carry his work is located, and in Memphis and Washington, D.C. When Mr. Okra, a beloved New Orleans’ roaming vegetable vendor, needed a new truck, neighbors and businessmen rallied to help, as Mr. Okra had become a necessity in Katrina-ravaged neighborhoods after so many local grocery stores had closed. Dr. Bob helped organize the benefit and provided the decorative painting for the new truck. “My piece-de-resistance,” he says.

His work is now found in many private collections and museums throughout the South. Dr. Bob is a regular participant in the Kentuck Festival of the Arts in Tuscaloosa, Ala. A piece was featured in the Smithsonian Magazine in 1999; the Smithsonian’s affiliate, the Memphis Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum, also includes one of his pieces in its collection.

“I did it! I used to tell my friends, ‘Screw you, I’m going to be in the Smithsonian, and then I’m going into the Louvre!’” he says, with only one more internationally-known institution to go.

Dr. Bob’s work can be found at drbobart.net.

March/April 2012 Cover by Marcia Holmes

What has changed is that her career as an artist (she’s a recovering CPA) has grown. Steadily and surely, it has built since her first excursion into art in 1999 and her February 2004 IN cover painting of Venice’s St. Mark’s Square.

“It’s been a long time,” Marcia says. “I had just gone to Venice to paint plein air.” Her travels have also taken her to Paris, where, on one trip, plein air (when an artist paints on site, out in the open) took on a new meaning. “We [September 2008 IN cover artist Susan Morgan and artist Terri Ford] were set up and painting in a garden at the Louvre and they turned the sprinklers on!”

Over the years, along with her interesting travels, Marcia has developed a steady following among both art buyers and fellow artists. She’s also expanded her talents into a new medium. “I guess the biggest change is that I’m painting in oil,” Marcia says. “This past year, I really started to enjoy working in oil. I had stuck with the pastels because they were fast, and I was learning. Oil has been very freeing.”

One of the neatest things about Marcia’s kitchen is that her favorite place to paint is not far from the places that give her a lot of inspiration. A small grove of live oaks on the property is footsteps away from a pond, which in turn is just a skip and a jump from the Tchefuncte River. “People really love my oak trees. Every time I do a large oak, it sells right away,” she says.

While a veteran of numerous pastel workshops over the years, she doesn’t attend many now. The trees, however, got her out on a freezing cold day last November for a class with artist Richard McKinley that was sponsored by the Degas Pastel Society, of which she is treasurer. “Richard’s at the top of his game; I wanted to support the society, and I love the trees!”

The pond and river near her home inspired some creative muscle stretching with her newfound fondness for oils. “For the waterscape and water lily paintings, I just walk down to the river. It’s so pretty.” Marcia takes photos of these scenes and then sets off to painting. No matter what has changed in the world since Monet’s lily paintings, peace and beauty can still be found by gazing into a reflective pool, and Marcia’s work captures the same beauty that inspired the master so many years ago.

When she noted that one of her lily scene oils was sold recently to a family in Connecticut, Marcia was reminded of another positive change since IN last visited with her: “Now, I’m selling nationally from the gallery and my web site.” The two galleries she’s featured in, one in uptown New Orleans and one in Breaux Bridge, La., have also helped expose Marcia’s work to new audiences. “New Orleans gets so many people coming in, and that’s cool. People are buying who don’t know me.” Don’t make any mistakes, though—she still has a great following on the northshore. “My bread-and-butter is here, and that’s what I’m most appreciative of. It gives you validation.”

Validation has been coming in by the bushel from her peers. Every two years, the International Association of Pastel Societies has a convention. In 2011, she was presented with a gold medallion signifying her admission into the association’s Master Circle, an honor earned through points she received by winning awards at exhibits during her years as a member.

A Master Circle exhibit was held at the convention. Out of 50 paintings, only eight awards were presented. Marcia and her fellow Degas Pastel Society board members Alan Flattmann from Covington (an IN cover artist) and Sandra Burshell from New Orleans took home prizes. Marcia and Burshell, who won the exhibit’s top honor, were participating in their first years in the IAPS Master Circle.

In 2011, American Art Collector magazine asked three times to include her work. “I did a botanical feature, a horse feature and then an American expressionist. I’m getting calls from New York!”

So how did a corporate accountant find a new career as an artist? Upon reflection, Marcia says it really came to her, while maybe late in life, quite naturally. Her first paintings in 1999 didn’t come completely out of the blue; creativity runs in this Southern lady’s blood. (Marcia’s from Laurel, Miss., and an Ole Miss grad, to boot.)

“My mother, Arlene Perry, was an artist—she’s deceased; my dad built custom homes and now makes custom furniture; and my grandfather was a jewelry designer. So it all came through the genes!”
Her mother remains an inspiration. “My mother said you could paint anything—no rules! She did a lot of collages,” Marcia says. She suddenly recalls, “Oh, my God! She did acid on steel. She did burnt X-ray film! It probably could have killed her. I think somebody told her not to do that anymore.”

While the March/April cover piece, a pastel-on-paper work called Spring Reflection, might appear to be one of the waterscapes from her home, it’s actually the product of a trip to the Southwest with friends Connie and Jim Seitz. (He’s yet another IN cover artist—Marcia keeps great company!) “We went to a gallery in Santa Fe called Nedra Matteucci. They have a gorgeous sculpture garden with a pond and falling-water features. The sky out there is so blue. I took these water-sky reflection pictures, the blue-green water and some leaves.” Earlier, they had gone to see a well-established Santa Fe landscape artist, Forrest Moses. “His is a kind of style I admire. I had a photograph.” Inspired by Moses, she says, “I just zeroed in on the water.”

Marcia’s work can be seen at the Garden District Gallery in New Orleans, the Rue du Pont Galerie in Breaux Bridge, La., and online at MarciaHolmes.com.

“As long as I’ve been painting, I’ve been a portrait artist. It’s been people, people, people,” says Ryan.

This month’s cover is an example of Ryan’s meticulous style. While it’s a departure from the straight portrait perspective—he didn’t have anyone sit or pose for him—it’s still an exercise in capturing on canvas the person behind the image. He says it came about partly out of simple economics.

Artist Ryan Perea.

“The problem is that people don’t really want to buy paintings of faces that they don’t know,” says Ryan. “I was trying to think of a way where I could still do a face or a figure but make it so people—anybody—would want to have it.” Recognizing that many local artists, no matter what their normal focus might be, paint Mardi Gras scenes, he says, “I thought a marching band would be a good idea, really—just Mardi Gras in general.”

Ryan says he always had a knack for drawing and was in the talented art program in high school. He went to Southeastern Louisiana University but did not major in art. After graduating in 2003, he moved to New York. There, he encountered a serendipitous situation.

“It’s funny. I was living in a loft in New York around 2007. It was a slummy place, full of graffiti; it had character, though—it was neat,” he says, recalling the bohemian environment. “One time, I was taking trash to the trash room and there were three or four big canvases sitting in the trash with a bag of paints. I hadn’t painted in six years or done any drawing. When I saw that, I said, ‘I can’t pass this up.’ So that’s how I started. I had no idea what I was doing, but I loved it. It stuck.”

Not happy with the results he was getting, Ryan decided he needed some training. He found Rob Zeller, an artist who is originally from New Orleans, living in the Bushwick area of Brooklyn, near Ryan’s loft. “Rob studied with Jacob Collins in New York. Collins is a world-renowned figurative and portrait artist, a classical realist. Rob took everything I knew and said, ‘All right. We’re starting from scratch. I’m going to show you how to do this correctly.’ It’s all based on classical 17th- and 18th-century European drawing and painting techniques.”

After three years of study, Ryan left New York. He says, “I decided to move home just to focus on painting. New York’s pretty expensive. I taught talented art for a year when I got back because I needed a job. But painting full time was where my heart was sitting, and I said if I really want to do this, I can’t be doing two things at once.”

Upon coming home to Louisiana, Ryan realized that with the change in geography came a change in the artistic environment. New York City has seen a revival in classical realism, the genre that best represents his artistic focus. “Coming down here, I didn’t see as much of that; it was more whimsical, colorful things—which is great, but I didn’t see anybody in a more classic style until I saw one of Gretchen Armbruster’s nudes at Mo’s Art Supply. I said, ‘That’s the person I need to be talking to.’”

January/February 2012 Cover.

He ended up getting in touch with Gretchen (whose work has been featured on the cover of Inside Northside) and took some of her classes. Gretchen introduced him to Bobbie Chassaignac at the Louisiana Artists Gallery in Mandeville, which now features his work. He has one still life of apples there, but mostly there are portraits or figurative work that he’s painted from photos of his good friends. “I try to do other things, too, but nothing grabs me like doing people,” he says. He’d rather paint from life, but notes laughingly that his friends won’t sit still for eight or 10 hours.

The conundrum facing Ryan is, given that buyers seldom purchase portraits of people they’re not connected to, how do you make a living painting people before having a steady stream of portrait commissions? He’s finding the answer in creating images like his cover piece.

“Coming back to New Orleans, I noticed a lot of Mardi Gras scenes. I don’t want to fall into the same-old, same-old New Orleans scene. But if I do one, it has to be a scene that really grabs me, I’ll have to really feel it and I’ll have to ‘bring it’ whenever I paint it. I don’t want to run on the coattails of other people.”

With the cover painting, which is his interpretation of a photo of the Warren Easton High School marching band, Ryan certainly did “bring it.” “When I saw the photo, I was ‘Whoa, that’s a great image!’ Those guys made me feel like I was there, and that’s what I wanted to portray,” Ryan says.

The meticulously detailed painting took several weeks to complete, with, he says, at least two weeks spent getting the reflections in the marcher’s helmets just right. “Any time I’m doing something, I hear Rob Zeller’s voice saying, ‘You’ve got to keep going; you’ve got to keep going.’ That’s what makes me excited about painting—to try to get the person to be there, to be real. And to get their personality. It doesn’t do it for me if I can’t capture that,” says Ryan.

“There’s something about being able to portray a person on canvas that excites me to death.”

And that, for any young portrait artist, says it all.

Ryan Perea’s work is featured at the Louisiana Artists Gallery, 813 Florida St., Ste. A, in Mandeville. 624-7903. ryanperea.com.

“You know, I hardly drink, but when I have to be social I like an Old-Fashioned,” Todd says. Readers might also know the Old-Fashioned as the preferred cocktail of Mad Men’s Don Draper, and it’s no coincidence that Todd and his artwork have been inspired by the smoother, more suave Rat Pack days of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

ISNS Nov/Dec 2011 cover, Todd White's "Who's Got This Round?"

Todd grew up in an artistic household in San Antonio. His mother was a painter and an art teacher. “I was mom-taught as an artist,” he says. “I basically bolted out of high school. I needed a job where I was going to be paid to draw. It was all I was really good at.” He had bolted to Hollywood, where he was hired to do animation at Warner Brothers. There, he says, “I climbed that ladder, starting at the bottom and worked my way to the top. At the end of it, I was the lead character designer on a lot of shows.”

Todd worked on the animated series Tiny Toons and Freakazoid at Warner Brothers. In the television business, Todd says, “What happens is, when a show ends, you bounce to another show. I landed with Nickelodeon in 1997 or 1998 and did a four-year stint there. I was the character designer.” At Nickelodeon, he designed the characters for programs including The Angry Beavers and everyone’s favorite, Spongebob Squarepants.

Although he had worked to the top of the animation world, Todd says, “I was getting a little tired of working in the corporate world and wanted to do my own thing, so I was really painting a lot at that time. I was entering art shows in the park and such. One night, Nickelodeon let me do an art show there, and I sold out of all my originals. I just decided at that moment to do that full time. The beauty of that was I could work freelance doing animation at home—I still needed a paycheck—but I could still be painting and hustling at the shows.”

Artist Todd White at work.

His experience in creating expressive characters for TV and his appreciation for the Rat Pack/Kennedy-era style—in music, clothes and design—really show in his fine art paintings. He says his favorite artists include Erich Sokol, Egon Schiele, Max Beckmann, Frank Frazetta and Robert Williams; looking at their art, one can easily see how their work has influenced Todd.

Todd strives to express the subject’s character and personality visually. “It’s more important to me to get that right than any other element.” He works off memory, mostly, although he says, “I do look at references sometimes, mostly for women’s hair styles. I’m the only guy in the bookstore buying a bunch of magazines on women’s hair!”

Giving Back to the Art World

Since striking out on his own in the fine art world, Todd has enjoyed a remarkable measure of success. But, he says, “I didn’t really expect it to take off as well as it did. I knew I would do okay; I knew I would survive.” His work is carried in galleries all across the United States and he has a huge following in the United Kingdom. He laughs and says, “I don’t want to compare myself to David Hasselhoff, but I’m quite popular in Europe.”

Todd was chosen as the official artist of the 2006 Grammy Awards and was invited to contribute art for the 70th anniversary celebration of The Wizard of Oz. Recently, he says, “The royal family commissioned me to do Princess Diana last year. I painted her, and we handed it over to a children’s charity fund. They’re going to auction it off this year.”

Now that he’s at the top of his game, he is working to give something back to the art world. “We have some really positive things in the works. I started something called the Todd White Art Project.” Todd has seen how cuts to arts funding has affected schools all over the country, and his mother’s situation as a junior high school art teacher in Texas really brought it home. “Her class gets $700 for 30 kids per class, six classes a day, for the entire year.”

The Todd White Art Project started with a unique way to raise money. “I have the greatest fans of any living artist on this planet,” Todd says. “My fans will buy t-shirts that I’ve worn, pants, paintbrushes, anything I have sitting around the studio, anything other than art. I don’t need to sell that stuff to make money. I’m selling it and using 100 percent of the money to go into this fund. When I get to about $10,000, I can go to Grumbacher Art and Windsor & Newton and say, ‘Why don’t you sell me a thousand pounds of your student-grade paint in all different colors?’ Then, essentially, what I’m doing is making monstrously big gift baskets of art supplies that should last one class a full school year. I don’t trust handing bureaucrats cash; I would rather hand over supplies that they have to use.”

The project is similar to the George Rodrigue Foundation’s George’s Art Closet program available locally. Todd’s project is also really taking off. “Originally, this was supposed to be a U.S. thing, starting in L.A. and Texas, but some monster corporations have gotten involved and want it to go to a global level.”

Todd adds, “It’s good stuff, trying to give something positive back.”

Todd White’s work is available locally at Robert Bruno Gallery, 70325 Hwy. 1077, Suite 101, Covington, 792-7110, and Galerie d’Art Francais, 541 Royal St., New Orleans, (504) 581-6925; his work can also be seen online at toddwhite.com.

“When I was a kid, I wanted to be a famous actress. I told my grandmother I was going to be Miss America and that I was going to have a limo, and she would get a limo with her name on it,” says the effusive Milo. Milo and her husband (and fellow painter), Mickey Asche, started their journey in art together doing theater, which is how they met. Now they spend a lot of time together—at home painting together, on the road showing and selling art together and displaying their work on their joint website.

Milo Asche-Stephens. Copyright 2011, Abby Sands Miller, abbyphoto.net.

The couple began painting after Katrina hit and wiped out their home on Highway 11 in Slidell. Milo was traumatized, remembering, “I was a mess. I’d never seen anything like that; I was a bit of a basket case.”

Not long after the storm, Mickey injured his knee and needed surgery. “The doctors couldn’t see him for two months and said he needed two months for recovery. So we had four months,” Milo says. “After a week of watching movies, we went to Hobby Lobby and bought some paint. He taught himself watercolor; I taught myself acrylic.” Both eventually moved on to oil as their favorite medium. “We sold several pieces before Christmas that year, and it wasn’t much longer before Mickey took a big leap and quit Chevron to paint full-time.”

Milo’s Style

While Mickey started with and continues to specialize in painting wildlife and landscape scenes, Milo’s preferred subjects have ranged over time from figurative work to her newest interest, painting birds in whimsical settings. But whether she’s portraying sad and brooding nudes or birds playing with a Rubik’s Cube, she’s always trying to connect her emotions with those of the viewer.

“I think one of my least favorite things is when I see a painting and have no idea what it’s about or where the artist was coming from. I want my pieces to connect with people.” During her gloomy-woman phase, Milo remembers, “My favorite thing was when we did a show in Colorado and a woman came in and started crying. It was awesome. I thought, ‘Cry baby, cry! Let it out!’”
Her latest works are more on the lighthearted and whimsical side and draw on her childhood experiences. The new pieces are also inspired by their frequent trips to area swamps, woods and marshes, photographing birds for Mickey’s wildlife scenes. “After doing that a while, you just get that itch, ‘I think I want to paint that bird.’ But I wanted to tell a story of sorts, and I wanted to be whimsical.”

The result is a series of oils featuring birds painted in details correct for the species interacting with pieces of her life. A painting of kingfishers on a chessboard is titled King Me. (“My father was an avid chess player.”) One of crows with a stack of scary horror novels is called The Murder Book Club. (“I loved scary murder books and there’s the play on words, a group of crows is called a murder of crows.”) The Figurative Artist, a woodpecker shaping a puppet from a block of wood, is a play on her years as a figurative artist. (“The wooden figure is in the pose of Rodin’s The Thinker.”) She says, “It’s kind of a play on words on each of the paintings, so each would tell a story.”

That viewers connect emotionally with her work, even in these whimsical pieces, came to life when she showed one of the paintings to her family. “I did a painting with three little red-wing blackbirds and a tall grackle. The way the grackle was positioned just had a neat but imposing character to it,” Milo says. “I put the painting where my cousins could see it; it was amazing the conversation that started because of that painting. It brought up all those old memories of me being a bossy cousin to them, keeping them in line! I realized I was on to something with that!”

It’s been fulfilling for Milo, who says painting the birds realistically fulfills her need for sophistication as an adult artist, while the whimsical settings let the child in her paint. “As long as those two people in my head feel like they’re expressing themselves, it gives me balance. I’ve come up with a ton of them; I’m far from done and I hope I’m only going to get better.”

The Harvest Cup Polo Classic Poster

Milo’s submission last year was not selected for the Harvest Cup poster, but it was featured as part of the event’s patron party. She says 2009 was the first year she heard about the match and submitted a painting. “I didn’t know what to expect; I had never even been to a polo match. Then, last year I submitted to win again and thought for sure I had it. But I didn’t. I was definitely going for it this year.”

She’s grateful for the exposure the event has given her, as she and Mickey have their sights set on national shows. While Mickey was selected for shows in Charleston and Atlanta, Milo is making her first national submission for the next show in Charleston. “We don’t want to stay in our simple life. We have big goals; we have big dreams. We want to go national. I think I always wanted to be a household name!”

Plus, Milo says, “I still gotta work for that limo for grandma!”

Milo’s work can be seen at the couple’s new gallery, Asche Studios and Art Gallery in Old Towne Slidell; Just Picture It in Mandeville; at Terri Galleries in Metairie; and online at AscheStudios.com.

The Baton Rouge native says he did a bit of painting in high school. “But in my third semester in college I took a painting class under professor Denyce Celentano. I took to it so well she recommended that I take a class in New York for the summer.” The summer program he entered was at the New York Studio School, which offers intensive marathon workshops in different subjects. Zach chose a landscape session. “We went out for a few weeks; they took us to Westbury and Governor’s Island.” This month’s cover piece is of a wooded scene from a session at Westbury.

For Zach, his varying interests complemented each other. “It’s interesting to see the history of painting alongside the history of science. In a way, they sort of follow each other. Sometimes art may precede physics; sometimes physics would influence art.”

He cites the often-explored topic of Einstein’s theory of general relativity and the cubist art movement of artists such as Picasso and Braque. “The cubist idea of fragmented space and general relativity’s multiple perspectives influenced a lot of the cubist work that’s influenced me.”

Zach Cummings at work in the studio.

Quantum mechanics is another area of physics that comes into Zach’s mind as he’s creating abstract work. “When you paint abstract, you don’t paint objects as recognizable things. I would think of it as multiple things, or many things combined. The viewer interprets them in the same way that a particle’s wave functions are the superposition of many different states before the observer measures them.” Art, Zach feels, can be a universal language, like math, but unlike math, it’s a language that appeals to both one’s emotions and intellect. While that may seem a bit esoteric, his ideas have translated into a couple of pieces painted for his senior show that were chosen for an exhibit at the Shaw Center for the Arts in Baton Rouge. His scientific studies have obviously had a major influence on Zach and his art. He’s also spent a lot of time working in science fields, in 2009 as an intern at Caltech and at Caltech’s LIGO observatory facility in Livingston, La. In 2010, as a Starlab program instructor, he developed an astronomy curriculum for elementary school students in Zachary, La.

But it’s art that has won his attention post-graduation. He’s been accepted into the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, where he will pursue a master of fine arts degree in studio arts. “I really didn’t want painting to be just a hobby. I found I connected more with the professors and the students in the college of art, and I think it made for a more meaningful experience.”

Zach’s work can be seen online at zacharycummings.weebly.com.

Pirate’s Alley show co-chair Jane Brown says the Art Association is making an effort to involve more of the area’s young artists in the show. As IN publisher and proud mother Lori said in her note, our cover artist, Lauren Murphy, is a young artist and a high school senior. Lauren is just the type of artist Jane wanted to be involved with Pirate’s Alley, and Jane invited her to show there this year.

“A lot of our members have been doing it for 30 or 40 years; they started when it was with Spring Fiesta. We have a lot of senior artists in the show, so we’re trying to promote young artists so we can go on another 80 years. When they’re young, and there’s no place to show their work, it kind of gets stuck in the closet and they just don’t pursue it. So if they get the bug of being in a show, especially one with a great reputation and history that promotes the city of New Orleans, it gives them that extra inspiration to keep painting. And that’s our focus, to promote the artists of New Orleans,” Jane says.

Lauren’s interest in art began at the age of 8 with her first visit to the Musée d’Orsay. It sparked a unique interest in art history, particularly the works of the French impressionists. Soon after, she enrolled in art classes under the direction of Diana Schayer and has been studying ever since, attending the half-day program at NOCCA for the last years of high school, receiving instruction in painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, ceramics, photography and graphic design.
Her style is characterized by collage and the layering of many media. Her work has expanded to fashion, and she has recently created a line of dresses inspired by the pop art works of Roy Lichtenstien and Sigmar Polke. Her piece Sounds from the Rooftops appears on this issue’s cover.

Lauren Murphy's From the Rooftops, 2011.

Lauren had a great experience at Pirate’s Alley this spring, showing her work for two days to crowds of festive people, and, most encouragingly, eight pieces of her art were sold and will be enlivening the walls of their new homes and the lives of their owners.

If you missed Lauren at Pirate’s Alley, you can catch her work on the web at LaurenMurphyArt.com.

The painting features an alligator. John’s son, who knows his way around alligators—and gorillas and elephants, for that matter, but that’s another story—told him, “You painted him brown. That alligator should be green.”

One of John E. Brown's paintings featuring "Toulouse la Croc."

But John says, “I wanted the alligator to be this ugly old, mean-looking crotchety old man. Then I scattered the marbles around him.”

He explains, “I’m constantly thinking about what the next painting should be. I want it to be off-the-wall; I want it to be an eye-catcher, because I know my limitations. I don’t do landscapes. It’s more like still-lifes, putting together things that you wouldn’t think should go together.”

He had entered the painting in the Louisiana Watercolor Society’s 40th annual international exhibition, judged in 2010 by nationally acclaimed artist Soon Y. Warren. Warren had first whittled down nearly 600 entries to the 75 that made up the show in May. After the show, Warren told Jane, John’s wife and president of the society, that as soon as she saw the alligator she knew it was going to win a big prize. “She’s a very talented person. We should have her as judge every year,” laughs John.
In addition to the Watercolor Society, John and Jane Brown are very active in the local art community as officers, board members and/or committee chairs for the St. Tammany Art Association and the New Orleans Art Association. An annual rite for the duo is overseeing the Pirate’s Alley show during French Quarter Festival weekend each April. Besides getting to work with a lot of fabulous artists, they are able to spend some quality time in one of their favorite places.

John says, “People ask, ‘How come you go to the Quarter so much?’ It’s because it’s new! You always see something new that you never saw before. We live in a creative environment. Whether you make pottery or jewelry or paint on slate or paint on fence posts, we have a lot of creative people in the area and it makes you want to be part of it.”

Cover artist John E. Brown. Copyright 2011, Abby Sands Miller, abbyphoto.net.

The father of two children, John is also “Dad” to everyone who knows him. Jane says it started when their son John was in his teens. “I’d yell ‘John!’ and they both would answer. So they called him Dad and I started calling him Dad and then everyone else started calling him Dad.” It’s also a matter of family practicality. There are seven “Johns” in his family: his father, his son, son-in-law, grandson and son-in-law’s father and grandfather.

Being “Dad” is also an occasional source of confusion—and humor. Jane says,  “Once, we were at my friend’s house. She and I were in the kitchen, and John was outside with her husband. Another couple came up outside, and my friend’s husband introduced John, saying, ‘Hey, do you know Dad?’ As the woman came inside, she began staring at me until I finally asked if something were wrong. The woman replied that she was just amazed at how young I was, and said, ‘I just met his dad. Aren’t you his mother?’”

John’s coming to painting late in life wasn’t without some indication that he had a hidden talent. He was a real estate appraiser for more than 40 years. Jane recalls that back in the “prehistoric” days before digital photos, “He’d come home with his tablet with these little thumbnail sketches of Victorians on St. Charles Avenue or little cottages in the French Quarter. The next day, when the photographs would come into the office, he’d attach them to the reports.” She loved those little sketches and always remembered them. After she began painting in the 1980s, she became involved in various art guilds and associations, volunteering to hang shows and prepare for receptions and award ceremonies. “We do everything together, so John became my ‘grunt team,’ loading and unloading paintings from the van, setting up tables and being bartender. I thought, ‘If he’s doing all the work, he ought to be having some fun.’”

She signed John up for a drawing class, unbeknownst to him. When the day came, Jane told him to get ready; their friend (also named Jane) was going to pick him up. John remembers what happened next. “I said, ‘Where are we going?’ She said, ‘To Paulette Purser’s drawing workshop.’ I told her I didn’t know anything about that. Jane said, ‘But we’ve been talking about it for two months!’”

“I wasn’t lying,” laughs Jane. “‘We’ was Jane and Jane, not Jane and John.” They had not expected John to agree to go, but once he did, he loved it. He’s been creating art, almost exclusively watercolors, ever since.

He had one hurdle to get over, though. Jane had been bitten by the painting bug and had been painting for several years before she thrust John into that drawing class. They had converted their son’s room into a studio of sorts for her. Jane came home a few weeks later and found him at her desk using her paint. She asked, “What are you doing?” John told her he was adding color to his pen-and-ink. Jane had created a monster. She said, “Oh, no you don’t. Don’t touch my stuff!” She promptly got on the computer, ordered him a drafting table, a chair, paints, pallets and brushes.

“And now she can’t touch my stuff!” says John.

This issue’s cover is from John’s series of Cajun zodiac symbols. The pair of crabs represents Gemini, the sign of the twins.

In November of 2010, John got some bad news. After going in for routine blood tests, he was diagnosed with leukemia. Luckily, it was caught early enough that he’s expected to make a full recovery after treatment.

He was diagnosed not long after finishing his work for this year’s Chef Soirée poster. He signed posters from his hospital bed while undergoing his first round of chemo. It’s another fun piece, featuring a white alligator he calls “Toulouse La Croc.” The reptilian character was inspired by his son, a volunteer at the Audubon Zoo from the time he was 12 until he was 25, when he began an eight-year adventure in Africa. John was also inspired, as the name would suggest, by the French artist Toulouse-Lautrec, one of his favorites. “John’s a Toulouse-Lautrec groupie. We had to trek around Paris to find the Moulin Rouge because Toulouse used to go there and draw on tablecloths,” says Jane.

His philosophy and positive attitude are sure to see him through. “I think you can get real constricted when you have to worry about too many rules. That’s why I think it’s better just to go with the flow. I like to do different things. I like to do fun art. It has to be fun to me.”

His dad was transferred to New Orleans in the late ’60s, and the family’s appreciation for the arts continued to develop. “With my parents’ love of books and the arts, our weekends were spent going to museums and symphonies and theatre; I was always around books. I always felt the importance of expanding my knowledge and learning. That was the emphasis.”

I was going back in there during study halls and skipping other classes to go into her class and do art. She did not chew me out; she just let me be.”
St. Martin’s Episcopal School provided an environment rich in creative opportunities for David. A memorable art teacher there, Carolyn Boone, helped him along. “She would give us basics, teach us technique and then turn us loose to create,” he recalls. She was also very indulgent. While he remembers the school only allowed one art class while he was a senior, “I was going back in there during study halls and skipping other classes to go into her class and do art. She did not chew me out; she just let me be. They might be working in clay and I would go in there and paint. She gave me a certain amount of leeway that she didn’t give some of the other students.”

Ms. Boone didn’t just teach David how to mix colors and work in different media, but something more important. Even today, David says, “When I’m trying to get that first bit of paint onto a canvas, I still hear her words: ‘Paint what you see and not what you know.’ She was teaching us that what you think you know to be true about an object or a thing might not be true at all. That encourages you to paint with your feelings, and through that, you can paint greater works that have more meaning to the people who see them.”

He didn’t major in art in college at LSU, but, as at St. Martin’s, he managed to sneak in a little extra instruction. “I studied journalism, advertising, marketing and a little bit of economics. It was my way of throwing a little art in with graphic design.”

“Through high school and college, I worked in a scuba-diving shop, so I traveled a lot,” David remembers. He continued to travel, sailing to Florida and the Caribbean at times. “I worked my way through college taking groups to the Yucatan on dive trips. But the most dangerous dives were in caves in springs in Florida. They had a sign there that said, ‘Twenty-three divers have died here. Could you be next?’ There were parts where it got so narrow you had to take the tank off of your back and push it in front of you to fit through. We do things when we were young that hopefully we’d never do when we get old.”

After one trip taking a group to Cozumel, “I put everyone on the plane and called home from the airport. My parents asked if I missed the flight, I told them, ‘Yes, intentionally.’” He stayed in Mexico two months, eventually coming home after deciding to ride his rented motorcycle to Belize and running out of gas in the middle of the jungle. “I said, ‘It’s time to go back.’ Nobody knew where I was and they wouldn’t even know where to look.”
Married shortly after graduation, David was soon the father of two girls and found a career in medical sales. He began taking classes with an eye towards getting into medical school, but circumstances led to abandoning that path. But then his marriage failed, and his creativity fizzled.

It became an introspective time for David. “Basically, 20 years slid by and I lost my creativity and did not do much in my creative life. My marriage failed, and at that time, I lived on my sailboat. I became a minimalist. I did away with things I didn’t need. I was fairly isolated, even though I had a career in sales and traveled during the week. On weekends, I was on the boat. It was a very lonely place to be during the week, especially in the winter time, icy-cold and the wind howling.” He still didn’t paint, but began writing fiction. He spent a lot of time trying to figure out who he was and what he was going to do, he says, when he grew up.

“The painting notion didn’t really come back to me until one day when a gal named Tina came walking down the dock. I was talking to her about my life and told her how much I enjoyed the arts and painting. She asked me, ‘Why don’t you paint?’ I said I hadn’t painted in 20 years. She said, ‘let’s go,’ and we headed on down to Mo’s Art Supply and picked up $120 worth of paint and canvass. She said, ‘let’s see what you can do.’ The first painting I did was of her, and it blew her away. I married her a year later. So my inspiration was back, and I’ve been painting ever since, non-stop.”

Now he’s married to his muse. “I paint best when she’s sitting right besides me. She paints with me now.” He enjoys the challenge of painting pet portraits and set up a website for his alter ego, Roger Vandendog. “My wife says she only allows me to have one delusion a day.” Vandendog.com is where you can see his pet portrait work and contact him for commissions (and it does have a space for Art by Henson). David’s passion right now is painting abstract landscapes like the one gracing this issue’s cover. That’s for right now, because he’s not finished his creative journey yet.

“I took a quote from Walker Percy that inspires me. His being a local writer and existentialist, it just hit home for me. It sums up the reason I paint better than anything I could come up with: ‘The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk into the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be on to something. Not to be on to something is to be in despair.’”

“So,” David says, “I try to stay on to something.”

David’s (and Roger Vandendog’s) art can be seen at Vandendog.com.


“He had the most extensive art collection. I think that’s where I got the inspiration to paint. Everywhere you turned, it was there. That was my first real exposure to art,” Schoen says. “His office was like a museum of sports art. How often do you get to see art like that up close?”

Mecom had purchased an entire collection of work by Ernie Barnes, a former professional football player whose paintings portray elongated figures and a certain fluidity that became his trademark. “You could just get lost in them. His movement was wonderful. He’s a real inspiration to me,” Schoen says of Barnes, who died in 2009. “I encourage everyone to read about his life. He was very driven and stayed true to himself.” While her style is not similar to Barnes’, you can see his influence in her choice of colors.
Schoen’s art is “random.” She puts her brush down and paints some forms, but then “whatever happens, happens.” She doesn’t have a plan when she begins, but a theme or emotion emerges eventually. Some of her pieces are whimsical, others more dramatic. If you look closely, shapes, faces, animals or flowers begin to appear.

Her paintings start with a black primer, which helps the colors stand out. She generally uses oil or acrylic and works on two paintings at once. “Sometimes I have to allow a drying time so the paints or colors don’t get muddied or blended.”

Schoen says her artistic side showed through at an early age, even before she found inspiration in Barnes’ work. “I always made stuff; I didn’t play with toys,” she recalls. “All my mom did was buy me glue, scissors, construction paper and colors.” Although she took art in high school, she didn’t start painting in earnest until she entered Delgado Community College. “The teachers encouraged me to paint, and I did. I had great teachers. They let you go and explore and find out what type of artist you are.” She graduated from Delgado with a degree in fine arts in 1995.

In 1996, Schoen moved from Metairie to Covington with her son. She gushes about her adopted home. “I love the community I live in. It’s easy to raise children here. Everyone looks out for everyone’s kids.”

After moving to the northshore, Schoen began a jewelry business. She uses vintage beads and describes her pieces as functional but unique. “No pieces will ever be exactly the same,” even though they may be similar in style, Schoen says. She also incorporates wire wrapping and does repairs of her own pieces for past customers. “It’s very touching when someone comes in with something I made eight years ago that they want fixed.”

Her jewelry business quickly grew so much that she had to stop painting to keep up with the demand. Although she is painting everyday now (“My whole house is a studio.”), she is available by appointment at The Factory in Covington for custom-designed jewelry or repairs.

Photography is also among Schoen’s many artistic pursuits. She says current Saints’ owner Tom Benson used to give her pre-game field passes, and she had several opportunities to take photographs in the Superdome during the past three football seasons. “I love my Saints collection of pictures,” Schoen says. She has made one of her photographs of Saints quarterback Drew Brees into a giclée image, which she’ll sell in limited numbers at the Harvest Cup, along with her jewelry and other paintings. She will donate a portion of the sales revenue to the Saints Gulf Coast Renewal foundation, which the team formed to assist those affected by the Gulf oil spill.

Four weeks after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, Schoen drove into New Orleans with her camera. She parked on an I-10 overpass overlooking the city. “I looked at the Dome, and it brought tears to my eyes,” she remembers. She photographed the skyline, and then drove downtown. “The pictures don’t reveal how quiet the city was. The horns, the hustle-bustle—all that was gone.” Her Katrina collection includes pictures of desolate streets and homes on the Gulf Coast. She plans to donate her pictures to The Katrina Museum that is opening in Biloxi in 2012.

Schoen’s art is featured exclusively at Chez-Soi in Covington. She says, “I’m painting day and night for all the upcoming events. It is very exciting and an honor to have my work selected for the 2010 Harvest Cup poster.”

The poster may be a bit of a departure from Schoen’s free-form, abstract style of painting. But if you look carefully at the background, you’ll notice the lifelong Saints fan has snuck in an unmistakable signature: black and gold pine trees.