If you’ve lived in the area anytime in the last twelve years, then you probably already know a little bit about this issue’s cover artist, Garland Robinette - the former news anchor and environmental reporter.

Everyone watches the TV news, so you can admit it: Don’t you sometimes wonder what the news anchors do during the commercial breaks? Do they update the news reports with late-breaking facts? Or interview important newsmakers to get their perspectives on the day’s events?

While there are probably a million things that could be going on during those breaks, Garland confesses, “I would scribble in the margins of the script. One night, a Loyola student who was the floor director came to me and said ‘I hope you don’t get mad, but over the last year I’ve saved your scripts with your drawings.’” He had photocopied the drawings and made books out of them to sell to help pay his tuition. “He told me he had already sold fifty books, “ Garland chuckles. That series of events proved to be the catalyst for a career as a professional artist.

“My co-anchor (and wife at the time), Angela Hill, heard about the books and agreed I was good at drawing,” Garland recalls. She encouraged Garland to pursue drawing more seriously. “I started doing drawings of people, etcetera, and that got around a little, and then the Pope came to town.” The Archdiocese of New Orleans approached Garland about creating a poster to commemorate the 1987 visit of Pope John Paul II to New Orleans.

“I think they thought since I was that guy on WWL that draws and they’re the top-rated news, maybe we can get him to do a poster - and get some publicity out of it.” Garland spent an unprecedented two days with the Pope, following His Holiness around town during his visit, making sketches for the painting and subsequent posters. “The poster was fairly well accepted, so I started doing portraits.”

Among the many personal and professional achievements of his painting career are works for Children’s Hospital, WWL-TV, the Krewe of Rex and, most recently, the 2002 Opera Ball theme poster for the New Orleans Opera Guild, “Rhapsody in Blue.”

For all his successes and accomplishments as a painter, it is interesting to note that Garland’s style is largely self-taught. As he began to do more work with color, however, he took a course at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Art. There, under the tutelage of Auseklis Ozols, he learned the basics of setting up a canvas and how to handle color and brushes.

Garland also credits local artist Henry Casselli as being a major source of encouragement, information and much-appreciated critique. “It’s amazing that people don’t know he’s here,” Garland says of Casselli. “He’s done President Reagan’s portrait and he’s done every one of the astronauts’ portraits from the very beginning of the program.”

Their friendship began in the late 1970s, after Garland had noticed a painting of Casselli’s in a French Quarter shop window. The simple watercolor of a Civil War soldier so moved Garland that he sought the artist out to ask about receiving lessons or at least critiques of his work.

After some early resistance from Casselli and a lot of persistence from Garland, Casselli eventually relented and agreed to review some of Garland’s work. “He has been the guy that, if I progress over the years, it’s because of him,” Garland says fondly. That friendship continues to this day. In fact, on the day of our interview, Garland had just returned from visiting with Casselli to get his critique of a new portrait of Garland’s daughter.

“I’ve been lucky. I’ve always done what I love, but this is just magic stuff,” Garland says of his art. “Everybody should try to paint or play music. Everybody can learn rudimentary music and rudimentary painting. For many people, rudimentary means ‘not very good’. But when you’re doing it for yourself, rudimentary means being able to take an emotion that you don’t usually tap, but you can through music and art.”

Copyright 2003, M&L Publishing, all rights reserved.