9 minute read
Cover Artist: Rebecca Rebouche
Deeply Rooted in Louisiana
Rebecca Rebouche has a story to tell.
BY: CAYMAN CLEVENGER
Rebecca Rebouché finds herself uprooted.
The Louisiana artist known for paintings of allegorical family trees and a decade-long collaboration with popular retailer Anthropologie, relocated to London with her fiancé and their newborn daughter to open a new venture.
Though she plans to spend time across the pond working on small-scale paintings in her flat, it’s clear Rebouché can’t stay away from Louisiana for long.
Rebouché was born in the bayou town of Franklin, La., a sleepy town of sugar cane, oak trees and unadulterated nature that grounded her and informed the ethos she would later incorporate into her work.
“One of my earliest memories is playing under the table at a crawfish boil in the backyard, playing with live crawfish and crawling under a quilting beam, looking up at it as the needles went in and out of the fabrics,” she said.
Rebouché’s works feature the landscapes, subjects and the collective memory that surrounds her. Alligators, bayous, oaks, cypress trees and waterfowl are dominant players in her works.
“When you leave Louisiana, you see it much more clearly,” Rebouché said. “The general mood of the essence of life, being close to the soil, close to the weather, close to your family, and close to the seasons of life is palpable in South Louisiana. The flora and fauna are very inspiring, but I first fell in love with the stories and people of the region. The literature, the music, the food, the richness of life, are major influences on my work.”
Rebouché describes her style as surrealist naturalism. Drawing elements of Salvador Dali’s surrealism, Rebouché’s work has an almost dreamlike quality, filled with imagery and symbolism. She seems to tap into her own subconscious to create works that link the rational with the irrational, the ordinary with the absurd, all while using the natural world as a backdrop.
Rebouché came to her unique style organically and spontaneously.
“I arrived at a place where I felt like I finally had something to say. One day, I drew this apple with a party hat on top of it. I could not explain it at the time, it was a feeling I had, and once I did it, the piece fully communicated exactly what I wanted to communicate,” she said. “That became my rule for a while.
I started by taking two objects and putting them together on a page, and the combination of the two objects created some dialogue or told some story. It grew from there and got more complicated, more complex and more intimate. I had amassed a large library of symbols, and I started to repeat symbols, almost like characters in a book. As I repeated them in different circumstances they took on different moods and that became the language I started to speak.”
The recurring symbols in Rebouché’s works are numerous: the swan, the white dress, the rabbit, the hats, the trees, the birds, the eggs, the night with the stars. “They don’t always mean the same thing, and I hesitate to articulate too much of their meaning because art is a conversation with the viewer. I think the viewer is the heroine or the hero of the story being told by the art,” she said.
Rebouché begins her process using a sketch she considers a form of free writing or journaling. “When I sketch, I am working things out. I edit that until I come up with a composition and then I translate it to the canvas,” she said.
Rebouché sometimes paints from the stream of consciousness, but she mostly paints from reference. “I love to go to the Audubon Zoo and paint ibises or tigers or whatever animals I can. I love to paint from life or sketch from life, if at all possible. If it is not possible, I use naturalists’ guides because they show birds in different positions and at different times of year.
“The ultimate triumph is when I can paint something in such a way and such a position that totally conveys the nuance of what I am trying to say and it comes entirely from my mind, without reference to anything. I have had such a triumph only a handful of times, but when I do it, it really gives me a zing of happiness” she said.
In her early years as an artist, Rebouché made her living traveling “circus style, with a tent and all my paintings visiting art shows and art fairs.” She bookended her travels with a residency at Low Key Arts, a nonprofit arts center in Arkansas.
While there, Rebouché got incredibly homesick. That heartache fueled her creative process.
“I tapped into my roots of home in South Louisiana and the centerpiece became this tree, which began as a sketch on a small piece of paper. I put all these objects that had become important in my work and it became my tree—my story, my sense of home, my sense of place, of love and comfort.
Things that related to my childhood and my family, and I translated that onto the largest canvas I had, which was four feet by six feet. I showed that painting a number of times and people fell in love with it.”
What followed was a trove of commissions for family tree paintings.
To begin a commission, Rebouché shadows a family in their homes with a notepad and a camera. Through questions and observation, she discovers the family’s identity – “what beats their hearts and makes them cry and everything in between.”
“I take all that information back to my studio where I begin a process that is half research and half magic. I sift through the information and research geography, mythology, anthropology, history, and literature and art and music and anything that applies to that family’s story. It is like wandering through the forest until I see their tree, which appears to me fully formed. My trick, so to speak, is that I am blessed by God or the universe to translate it to this visual allegory that I do not truly, fully understand,” she said.
Rebouché creates her large-scale artworks in her eclectic Abita Springs home studio. Nestled among the trees, the house was originally built by artist David Able using plans ordered from a catalog in the 1970s. Rebouché’s transformation of the home was featured in “Architectural Digest” in 2021.
A work of art itself, the home allows Rebouché to reconnect with nature and feel free to create. She draws inspiration from its heart pine wood floors and large windows that welcome the light and offer a glimpse of the lush foliage outside.
Rebouché’s work appears, perhaps unknowingly, in the homes of tens of thousands of people, thanks to retailer Anthropologie. Her collaboration with the popular retail chain began in 2010 and “came about organically with a bit of magic and luck.”
A client knew a team of Anthropologie buyers were coming to New Orleans to scout talent. The client replaced her whole art collection so she could display Rebouché’s work for the scouts. The team fell in love with the work and hired Rebouché to create a painting for the New Orleans store opening. After that, the buyers expanded the collaboration, including Rebouché’s work on the store’s dishes, rugs, bedding and wallpaper.
Her most recent effort for Anthropologie was a line of children’s accessories featuring a piece titled “Let’s Take the Train,” a dreamy and whimsical collection with objects and symbols associated with childhood and the passing of time.
Since 2017, her work has been primarily influenced by an autobiographical dream that was so intricate, so big and so complex, she woke up and wrote it down. From the dream grew a project she calls “Exotic Memory.” The project is made up of chapters, each becoming a new series of paintings, and features the characters, stories and themes Rebouché encountered in her dream.
Rebouché is also working on a new release called “Portal Paintings.” She describes the paintings as “time travel art that is small enough to be transported through the portal, if you will, but also small enough to travel back with me to Louisiana.”
Though she splits time between two continents, Rebouché’s heart remains in Louisiana. She shares the same romantic view of New Orleans that has kept so many residents here.
“New Orleans is great for giving you moments you could never have orchestrated. It has to come as a gift from the universe; you find yourself at the right place at the right time,” she said. “The sky opens up and the whole world smiles upon you. I feel like that is what New Orleans, and Louisiana as a whole, do best. It gives you the special moments no amount of money can buy you, no amount of planning can get for you.”
