Tag: new orleans

Michael Pajon

The Collage Artwork of Michael Pajon

Michael Pajon, born in 1979 in Chicago, currently lives and works in New Orleans. He attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, graduating in 2003 with a focus in printmaking. Eventually gravitating to the graphic nature of the medium that closely resembled the comics he loved, Pajon worked closely as an assistant/studio manager to renowned artist Tony Fitzpatrick.

During this time, Pajon started making assemblages of the bits and pieces he had accumulated from alleys, junkshops, and thrift stores, slicing up old children’s book covers and rearranging their innards into disjointed tales of Americana. Pajon’s work has been exhibited in various venues worldwide, including the Illinois State Museum; Chicago Cultural Center; Adam Baumgold Gallery, New York; Nau-haus Art Space, Houston, and Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, New Orleans.

“These maps, postcards, children’s book illustrations, matchbooks, sheet music, and calling cards are the guts and gristle of common things people collected over a life, spared the fate of being buried in the rubble and shadows of once prosperous towns. This group of work contemplates the most humble of human remains: old matchbooks from junk shops, antique postcards and books, sheet music, cracker jack toys, and other objects once treasured, lost and resurrected. By collaging these elements amidst drawings and other media, I create small relationships to arrive at a whole image. Like delicate strands of DNA, these tiny pieces in combination hold the key to unique identity – the common as well as the fantastic.” – Michael Pajon

Douglas Bourgeois

Douglas Bourgeois, “Saint Anthony Appears to Tony”, Oil on Panel, 1989

Douglas Bourgeois is an American sculptor and figurative painter who was born in 1951 at Gonzales, Louisiana and grew up in St. Amant, Louisiana. He received a BFA from Louisiana State University in 1974.

Douglas Bourgeois’s transcendent, fantastical images of pop icons as religious icons, set against southern Louisiana scenery, are inspired by his rural life and his homages to what and who inspires him. The lush, but flattened foliage of Henri Rousseau and the detailed, surrealist portraits of Frida Kahlo are clear artistic influences in Bourgeois’s work.