One of the things I was most looking forward to in New Orleans was seeing artwork. Finding art galleries in the French Quarter, seeing artists selling their work in Jackson Square and in the French Market.
Most of the time it's possible to find good artwork without even spending too much money. We have a small watercolor of the fountain in the Piazza Navona that I bought during my fam trip to Rome, a print of a watercolor of umbrellas in the rain that we bought from the artist's wife on the street in Manhattan, and also a print of the art installation The Gates that we bought from the photographer in New York.
Traveling: if I'm doing it right, I'm buying artwork. Preferably from the artists themselves, and hopefully inexpensively (I have nothing against a good quality print).
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Board Meeting by Jose Balli
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We saw this black and white painting -which is large in real life, maybe 3 feet across - from the street as we were walking past a jewelry store. We went in and it turned out to be a jewelry store/art gallery: Jose Balli. I slightly regret not buying a print, although for an unframed unmatted print it was kind of expensive.
Sherry Dooley, Outsider Artist we met in Jackson Square. I loved her work, which manages to be emotional, dark and yet pretty. I bought a tiny print on a painted board of this painting:
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| Lucy Walks At Midnight by Sherry Dooley |
I found an art gallery collective called RHINO (Right Here In New Orleans), and bought an original collage card made by an artist in her 90's. How cute is this card? She even glued a tiny pearl in the oyster.
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| Collage card by Bluma K |
We also met J Hurt in Jackson Square. He doesn't seem to have a website, but here is his
Facebook page. He had this one on display, he told us it was made with flyers from the House of Blues (I think it's funny that there's a Dave Attell one in the upper corner, he's a comedian, not a musician, but Greg and I are both big fans of his.)
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| not sure of the title, artist J Hurt |
But the one artist who really blew us away was
David Harouni. We just came across his gallery wandering around the French Quarter, and it kind of ruined us for other artwork for a while, we'd walk past other galleries and not want to go in because we were still too full of David Harouni's art. We bought nothing, because he only had original works for sale, and no prints or anything remotely affordable for us. Oh, if only we had a few thousand dollars to spend on artwork.
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| not sure of the title, artist David Harouni |
This is one of the paintings we saw that day in his gallery. It's also quite large and much more impressive in person rather than looking at a 100k jpg image. We spoke to him for a few minutes, he was nice but busy. He had his easel and paints set up and had one large painting in progress, next to two boxers sleeping curled up together on a doggie bed.
We bought some cool art, saw some cool art, met some cool artists, so I'll call that part of our trip a success.
