Two powerhouse artists who show their work in the French Quarter have strong connections with New Orleans culture.

— by Saskia Ozols

New Orleans, particularly the French Quarter, has long nurtured the artistic voice.

We are a city deeply connected to art, inspiration, and creativity. We are also a city of artists: of performers, painters, poets – and the people who love them. Despite the broader world of light-speed development, rapid homogenization and radical cuts in arts education and funding, the arts help New Orleans exist as unique and play a vital role in our cultural identity.

With an eye on the arts, and painting in particular, two contemporary local voices emerge. Emilie Rhys and Gretchen Howard stand out with the work they are currently creating, as well as their deep connection to art in the French Quarter.

Their similarities bind present and past. Rhys and Howard are both powerhouse painters – each body of work dances and sings in its vibrance and connection with the culture of our city. Yet, considered together they offer the potential to transform our understanding of the visual arts and its relationship with the city.

The two artists address New Orleans culture and the creative climate of our city in very different, but equally powerful ways. Both artists understand unequivocally what it takes to communicate visually. Both incorporate the structures of expression in their paintings – despite different paths for painting. They share a similar background as children of artists who worked in New Orleans, rebelling in certain ways against artist fathers who also kept studios in the French Quarter.

Most importantly, Rhys and Howard also maintain their own vibrant painting practices and exhibit their work in the French Quarter today. Considering their contributions to the New Orleans art community through dedication and perseverance in painting, we encounter a place where color, form, and communication exist not only as a silent song but as a bursting, growing, and developing entity connected to our cultural identity.

Gretchen Howard’s recent paintings offer instant connection with icons, images, and visual metaphors that reflect an intuitive navigation of New Orleans’ unique environment. Her works present abstract spaces, colors, and forms that invite interpretation from any direction.

Although she received training in the classical tradition – including from her late father, the highly sought-after New Orleans painter, portraitist, and printmaker Dell Weller – Howard expresses a unique narrative. She has moved beyond her background to forge an individual métier that beckons history, spirituality, and connection through visual means.

Her series of paintings currently on view at Gallery Orange (819 Royal Street) are filled with mystery; abstract elements such as water and air envelop natural forms. Suggestions of flowers, fish, wings, and birds hover in weightlessness through atmospheres of layered light.

Howard offers the opportunity for connection with ladders suspended in ethereal illumination, introducing the suggestion of climbing, descending or traveling between two worlds.

In Louisiana, an angelic form with wings and arms outstretched toward raindrops or tears floats in the sky above Louisiana fauna, floods, and fruit. There is an air of both hurt and healing as contrasting elements juxtapose one another in this luminescent piece. The contrasts in these paintings allow meditation on both the destructive and reconstructive elements we know so well in our city.

The broader symbolic function of Howard’s imagery allows intersection between visual metaphors. She infuses the New Orleans experience with more ancient artistic and spiritual ideographs. The connection between her work and her artistic lineage transcends place, time, and technique while offering an example of the generational artistry of New Orleans.

Similar to Howard in artistic lineage, Emilie Rhys briefly painted with her own late father, Noel Rockmore, also an artist who worked in the French Quarter. He’s perhaps best known for creating the murals of music and musicians at Preservation Hall.

Rhys’s paintings hang in her gallery, Scene by Rhys Fine Art, at 1036 Royal Street, just a block or so away from Gallery Orange where Howard exhibits. It is a walk well worth making. Rhys’ exhibition space is filled with her drawings, paintings, and studies; her space bubbles with visual conversation, and showcases her recently published book, New Orleans Music Observed: The Art of Noel Rockmore and Emilie Rhys.

Rhys’s paintings and drawings beckon entry to New Orleans culture. They record the making of music through painting and drawing, and contain the energy, line, and movement of life itself. She renders authentic experience that goes beyond simple documentary or illustration. Her work celebrates the interaction between artist and viewer as it happens only in New Orleans.

Rhys works in the always contemporary, yet classical dialect, of observation-based painting and sketching. Many of her paintings and drawings document the city’s music scene by drawing actively performing musicians on location directly in front of their performances.

This realist technique records the vision of the artist as it intersects with inspiration, elements of the unknown, and the changing circumstances of the environment. When working in this way, directly in front of one’s subject, the result will always be unique, reflective of the time in which the artist lived – the exact moment that they were painting – and include any surrounding or interior influences.

Her life-sized oil portraits, also from direct observation, are practically sculpted with paint. She explains that each sitter requires a different amount of time, and she works her way through multiple compositions and poses, all on the same painting structure en route to the final version.

Rhys’s understanding of form, volume, value, and color give uncanny depth. Some works include notes of both natural and neon light. In a portrait of Charlie Gabriel, she adds a glow of neon to suggest the outdoor signs encountered on the way inside for music.

By contrast her quick gesture sketches which she creates nightly in local clubs dance off the page. Gesture drawing, light, life energy of the subject co-exist with dynamic importance. They can all be seen at her gallery, a beautiful stop on Royal Street that allows interaction with New Orleans, its art, and its music through the simple act of observation.

And if art is a reflection of society, we look to it for an understanding of how culture has evolved and how it is affected by current events, trends, and social structures. The struggles and triumphs of any given generation can live for the benefit of future generations if we create the circumstances which allow it.

The paintings of both Gretchen Howard and Emilie Rhys demonstrate clear connection to the experience of being, living, or interacting with the mystery of New Orleans. Their work offers alternative entry to the complex relationship we have with our environment through art.