Beverly Morris tried her hand at a wide range of artistic pursuits over the years, from photography to painting to textiles to film. When her hands tried clay, however, she felt an instant and intimate fit.

“A friend bought some ceramics classes for me from Kate Tonguis, so I found myself driving out to her place in Kenner,” says Morris. “It was less a studio, more like a garage, but that’s where I discovered this, and I fell in love
with it.” 


Today, that love reveals itself in a diverse portfolio of vessels, vases, boxes, panels and wall hangings, all united by her distinctive textural approach; a feminine motif of spiral and swirl shapes; mellow, earthen hues; and the interplay of found objects ranging from seashells to rusted nails.

Morris draws inspiration from traditional African and Japanese art, but her particular ceramics technique also has a big impact on the look and feel of her work. She uses the coil-building method, which means her work is composed from individual rolls of clay manipulated together rather than throwing on a potter’s wheel.

“Throwing looks like magic at the wheel, but coil building is rough and organic and not beautiful until it’s very close to being finished,” she says. “But I like to know that by the time it’s done, my hands have touched every part of a piece. I find the carving and the whole process very meditative.”

The process also creates minute imperfections and asymmetries in each piece, which Morris often accentuates with a wide range of nonceramic materials. A typical day at the studio might find her forming clay, banging divots into sheets of copper to use as the background for a wall hanging or poring through a collection of broken seashells to find the right nautilus shape to set off a ceramic swirl of metallic glaze dancing across her clay creation.

“Ceramics as a medium can be very frustrating because so many things can go wrong, but I look at it like a problem-solving process,” she says. “The technical challenges can lead to a lot of creative solutions.”

Morris is represented by d.o.c.s. Gallery, and in August her work will be part of the “40 Days and 40 Nights” exhibit at the Louisiana State Archives in Baton Rouge marking the third anniversary of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Examples of her work can be seen online at www.beverlymorrisart.com.

H. Eric Hartman credits a succession of important mentors for his growth as a painter, but another profound influence on his work is intimately tied up with his own unique perspective on the world and his hope for the future.

Hartman has a genetic vision disorder called choroideremia. Legally blind, his functional range of sight is now limited to a narrow cylinder, and it continues to degenerate. He believes that within five to seven years, his vision will be gone completely. All of that informs his impressionistic style of painting, both in his practical technique and as the impetus that keeps him working.

“For me, art is a way of sharing the beauty I see with people, sharing a moment of time I know won’t be available to me forever,” says Hartman. “Emotionally, that’s what gets to me, the beauty that’s there.”

Hartman grew up in the same Mid-City neighborhood near Bayou St. John where he lives today. Many of his paintings are of scenes along the bayou, of oaks in nearby City Park, of the Mardi Gras Indians who traditionally gather on the banks of the bayou and of other distinctively New Orleans scenes.

He received introductory art instruction as a child before his vision disorder was diagnosed, but it wasn’t until he had already built a banking career that he developed a serious interest in art. He began working with papier-mâché and sold his sculptures at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in the 1990s. One year, an angel he made was selected as an ornament for the White House Christmas tree.

He moved to New England in 1997, where he learned to paint under the tutelage of artists Arnold Demarais and Lois Griffel. Since returning to New Orleans in 2001, he has focused his efforts on painting his hometown.

“People who are going blind, we all talk about building in our minds a scrapbook of memories,” says Hartman. “The extraordinary thing art has given me is that it has intensified the quality of what I see. I’m looking at the world through an artistic lens, but I’m not taking anything for granted.

“I’ll always be able to imagine something in an impressionistic way, the feeling of it. It’s like when you see snow and it looks blue instead of white or when the sun shines on something and it’s yellow with warmth. I’ll be able to elicit the details like that from other people. Having become an artist will allow me to continue to see even when I can’t.”

Hartman’s work can be seen online at www.art-man.com.

Locals with an active New Orleans nightlife or a respectable grasp on jazz history may already feel like they’re on a first name basis with the subjects of painter Bedonna Magid-Wakeman’s recent work. There’s Kermit, Snooks and Fats, for instance, or, going further back, Louis, Billie and Miles.

When Bedonna –– as she is universally known –– arrived in town seven years ago, the allure of the local music scene immediately struck a chord and has been her motif ever since. But while her subject choices may seem straightforward, her minimalist and abstract approach moves beyond portraiture and delves into the interplay of detail and space, of flow and pattern.

Examined up close, her colors appear unlikely selections, but from a slight remove, they resolve themselves as whole and vibrant representations. Like the performers they depict, these paintings can seem at their most animated in the dim light of clubs and night scenes, bold yet open to individual interpretation.

“I really can’t say how this style came about, but it’s been developing ever since I’ve been here,” she says. “You know your technique, you trust it, and then you just get magic from that.”

Born in Detroit to first-generation immigrants from Russia and Latvia, Bedonna hit the road young, traveling extensively around the West Coast during the early 1970s. She lived in the San Francisco area for years, where she was active in experimental theater and conceptual art. In 1979, she moved to Europe and continued her work in Spain, Germany, France and England for more than two decades. In 2001, she decided to move back to the U.S. and settled in New Orleans, the home of her daughter, Vida, one half of the bluegrass duo Jeff & Vida.

A prolific painter, she works in the kitchen of her Faubourg Marigny apartment during the day. On the weekends, she shows her paintings from the fence behind St. Louis Cathedral on Royal Street at Orleans Avenue in the French Quarter.

Bedonna is currently working on a series based on the history of jazz and is conducting a series of solo and group shows in Chattanooga, Tenn., and Washington, D.C., during May and June. Closer to home, she now organizes shows of her own and others’ work at Ray’s Neutral Ground VIP Art Lounge, an arts program at the Frenchmen Street club Ray’s Boom Boom Room.

Brent Barnidge’s introduction to sculpture was a post-college job in the 1990s at Kern Studios in Algiers, building Mardi Gras floats and other whimsical constructions meant to be appreciated by parade-goers in the brief moments as they rattled past. Today, he works from his own Mid-City studio on fine art sculpture in relief that mesmerizes with its complex interpretations of perspective, shadow and texture, telling stories and revealing powerful metaphors along the way.

His latest project is shaping up to be his most visible so far. As part of the comprehensive renovation of the French Market, Barnidge was commissioned to sculpt a 19th-century scene of vendors, shoppers and the market’s Creole cornucopia. It will be unveiled this spring at the entrance to the farmers market portion of the historic public bazaar.

Originally from Thibodaux, Barnidge earned master’s degrees in economics and business administration before an artistic impulse led him to the float-building business, which he credits as an invaluable crash course in technical skills he still draws on today.  After about a year, Barnidge decided to strike out on his own and developed a base of clients for his commercial sculpture that now includes film crews, museum fabrication companies, zoos and museums, casinos and theme parks.

At the same time, he kept cultivating his fine art work, branching out into different modes. That led him to sculpture in relief, which he first undertook after Hurricane Katrina. 

“Working in relief, you can expand from a snapshot to make an entire allegory in one piece,” he says. “It allows me to work out different thoughts, composition and figures and really expand the depth of what I’m trying to say.”

Indeed, entire stories and parables seem to come to life in Barnidge’s clay panels. In a piece titled Weapons of Mass Distraction, a coliseum audience seems transfixed on a single figure being controlled by a looming puppet master while an unnoticed bomber disgorges its deadly cargo high above. Another piece, titled The Seduction of Commerce, shows a beautiful female figure gently handling the lever on a network of wheels and gears leading to distant smokestacks. 

“I don’t have any regrets for studying business and economics but going down a different path,” says Barnidge. “A lot of that background gets into my work
in different ways.”

Barnidge continues his commercial work and public commissions while pursing his fine art projects.

He also teaches sculpture at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts. 

The spark of artistic inspiration can be an ephemeral thing, difficult to describe and sometimes impossible to pinpoint. But for photographer L.J. Goldstein, the experience was quite different and came heralded by thumping sousaphones; a chorus of trombones; and a whirlwind of color, style and verve coursing right beneath his bedroom window in the Tremé.

It was a second line parade, an example of the century-old African- American street tradition in New Orleans, and Goldstein was enthralled from his first encounter.
“I had no idea about it at first,” says Goldstein, who moved here from New York in 1993. “I had seen pictures, but I thought that was all something from the past.”
Soon, Goldstein began taking his own pictures. And as his knowledge grew about the social aid and pleasure clubs that host such parades and his own involvement with them deepened, he produced some of the most intimate and evocative photos of this culture in motion.

Goldstein has extensive archives of his work, hundreds and hundreds of negatives from the second line parades, jazz funerals and Mardi Gras Indian gatherings of the 1990s and first years of this century.

To most people, a worn-out brake shoe is an auto part destined for the scrap heap. But if Benjamin Bullins catches sight of the same part, it may well end up as a component in a sculpture of a dancer, a jazz musician or an abstract assemblage.

A trained photographer and a painter as well, Bullins’ main pursuit these days is constructing whimsical figures from found objects—the common detritus of modern living, broken machinery, musical instruments and vintage but discarded artifacts of the industrial age. Though he has tinkered and scavenged for years, his interest in making art from erstwhile castoffs blossomed after Hurricane Katrina as he toured the city on photo assignments.

“It was overwhelming, I wanted to take a picture of everything I saw and I wanted to pick up everything piled out there in the streets,” Bullins says.
Chance inspiration has guided many of Bullins’ creations since he doesn’t necessarily start out with a specific design in mind. Rather, he usually finds a piece that sparks his imagination and builds from there. A particular project might sit idle for months until Bullins happens upon the exact addition that completes it.

“What I like is the discovery of different pieces and how one can really transform a creation,” he says.

He harvests bucket loads of implements during walks by train tracks and on industrial safaris through abandoned warehouses. Bullins’ parents have his projects in mind as they scour yard sales, while a neighbor might leave some arcane implement at his doorstep. Gear salvaged from an old sheet metal fabrication shop, a rusted-out part from an 18-wheeler, driftwood found along the riverbank—all of it ends up as limbs and torsos and faces for his figures. A glass lampshade becomes the hoop skirt on an antebellum belle while the tip of a golf club head fits perfectly as a bassist’s jaunty chin caught in mid-bop.

“It’s the simple things that intrigue me,” says Bullins. [For example,] “When I see an old shoe, I think about the story behind it and the story I can make from it.”
Bullins hopes to win commissions for public sculpture projects in the future. Already, offers have been coming in from unexpected sources. For instance, organizers of a dry-cleaning industry conference meeting in New Orleans this spring have asked Bullins to create a centerpiece sculpture using parts from old dry cleaning machinery.

Bullins’ work is shown at Gallery Nu in Covington and examples are available online at www.thebenjamincollection.com.

Poetry, music, street culture, gardening, dogs and a myriad of other interests are just as important to the work of local ceramic artist Christopher Scott Brumfield as clay and the kiln. They’re all part of the collection of experiences and influences he mines and interprets in his sculpture installation pieces of ceramics and found objects.Multifaceted, layered in meaning and visually stunning, these pieces also speak to his fascination with collections, which he says help get to the heart of the creative impulse across mediums.“Constructing a garden, a sculpture or a poem, there’s a pattern in the thought process of doing that, a collection of ideas and how they’re arranged,” he says. “Themes emerge from those collections.”Brumfield was born and raised near Baton Rouge and describes his upbringing as an adventure as his parents exposed him to art, intellectual ideas and travel. His introduction to sculpture came almost by chance when college friends convinced him to take a course not long before graduation. He was instantly enthralled. “I never looked back, I just wanted to touch this every day,” Brumfield says.

Today, he lives in the Bywater and travels on a circuit of Recovery School District campuses teaching art courses for gifted students.

Beneath the eye-catching imagery of his work, Brumfield imbues many of his pieces with both cultural and personal subtexts. A piece called “Blue Ward” is a tabletop collection of clay buildings, people and animals that Brumfield says is a dream city made up partly of New Orleans, partly of Prague and partly of the other cities where he has lived.

Late last fall, he was developing a new piece based on a huge chessboard filled with an army of royalty and soldiers connected with metal chains. It is similar in style to an earlier work, called “Clifton’s Children,” which featured a collection of fearsome-looking Victorian dolls, each attached by chains to owls statues and all looming down from a very high, very steep attic ladder.

“They start to interact,” he says of his projects. “They start to have a dialogue with each other and sometimes I feel like I’m just along for the ride.”

To see examples of Brumfield’s work, go to www.christopherscottbrumfield.com or www.xtofu.blogspot.com. In February, he will also be part of NOLA Fired Up, www.nolafiredup.org, a citywide ceramics conference featuring the work of more than 20 artists.