The ‘Lost Souls’ Series

Living in New Orleans can be a trauma. It’s laughing and dancing and music and food and enchantment and bliss and… trauma. It’s a unique experience, becoming less so more and more but, the spirit of the city soldiers on. Living here and bearing witness to the crime, and poverty, and drug abuse, and despair, and suicides, and illness, and pervasive carelessness, all that can be a form of trauma. A trauma that maims some and kills others but impacts us all. Over the years, I have sought to cope with, and bear tribute to, this trauma by creating these “Lost Souls” works.

They are tributes to friends and acquaintances not just in New Orleans but in the greater South Louisiana area. Folks who walked by and alongside us and for whatever reason, stopped doing so. Most lived out many or all of their days here. Some, their last. I either knew, or knew of, all the angels on these pieces. I will one day be one of them.

Th aesthetics and themes of these works were inspired by the ceiling of Presbyterian Church in Uptown New Orleans. I looked up and saw these wonderful scenes of cherubic and blissful angels ascending to heaven as my friend whose funeral I was attending hopefully was as well. Not sure she believed in all that but, non-believers need their depictions too. So I thought maybe I could do that.

I have always been secular. I will remain secular. Not a non believer. Not a denier. Just, secular. And I think many other secular people feel this way. Do they not deserve iconography? They sang, they danced, they died. Here among the trauma of New Orleans. And we should herald them for such.