Ted Bertrand's new collection, Louisiana's Fragile Beauty, opens Saturday, October 3rd at 318 Art & Frame.
For years, Ted Bertrand has painted South Louisiana out loud. Cajun houses in colors those houses have never actually been. Farm landscapes under skies that lean toward turquoise. Local birds, flowers, prairie — all of it rendered in what he describes, plainly, as non-traditional colors. Expressionistic. Loosely painted. Unmistakably his.
This October, he is painting in colors you haven't seen from him.
A different palette, the same hand
Louisiana's Fragile Beauty is a new body of work — wetland landscapes, cypresses, bayou scenes, shrimp boats, birds. The subjects are Louisiana, the way they always are with Ted. The palette is not the one he is known for.
It is one thing to hear an artist describe a new direction. It is another to stand in a room of it.
It starts in a school library
Ted grew up in rural St. Landry Parish, near Opelousas. He traces the whole thing back to a second-floor school library, where as a third grader he would stand and look at old framed prints of what he later understood to be European landscapes — rural, pastoral, sometimes scenes of village life.
He wasn't planning to become an artist. In his words: "I felt something about what those paintings represented as an ideal life."
His first creative memory came a couple of years later, in the side yard of the family home — maybe ten years old, holding an old Kodak Instamatic, trying to get a close-up of a rose. It came out of focus, of course. It would be another decade before he got his hands on a Pentax 35mm SLR, and he read the Kodak Guide to 35mm Photography cover to cover while waiting for the camera to arrive from the mail-order supply. Years of prints and slides followed.
He was learning to see long before he learned to paint.
The Monday afternoon that changed it
The turn came in the middle of a teaching career. Ted was a junior high teacher when a friend on the faculty invited him to Monday afternoon watercolor classes with an accomplished watercolorist. Watercolor led to experimenting with acrylic on canvas. Acrylic led to showing in galleries in Lafayette.
Somewhere along the way he recognized what he had been drawn to since that library: the Impressionists and the Expressionists — and above all, Paul Cézanne.
How a Bertrand painting gets built
Watch his process and the photography makes sense. Something catches him first — a landscape, the shapes in a building, the plain beauty of a subject in nature. Then it becomes a question of composition, color and contrast, both of color and of light.
He sketches in loose strokes over an underpainting of color or additional layers of gesso, building the basic shapes. Then paint goes on and comes back off — brushes, palette knives, paper towels, his own fingers. Sometimes a canvas sits for days so he can come back and see it with what he calls "different eyes." Then he approaches a finish.
He works in acrylic on canvas and on wood, and he sells originals. One of each. That is the whole inventory.
Why a change of palette is worth showing up for
Twenty years into a style people recognize on sight, an artist has every reason to keep making the thing that works. Ted decided this subject asked for something else. Watching that happen — an established hand reaching for colors it doesn't usually reach for, because the subject demanded it — is the rare part of this show.
And it is hard to sit with a room of these and not hear the second half of the title. South Louisiana's marsh is not a permanent feature of the map. Ted paints it the way a person paints something they love and quietly understand they may not get to keep.
What he actually wants from a painting
Ask Ted what he hopes a piece does once it leaves the studio and he does not talk about walls. He talks about memory — bringing a viewer back to a particular, positive moment in their own life, and then being worth looking at again and again. Not, as he puts it, "just a piece with which to simply decorate or have match the couch."
There is one more line of his we keep coming back to:
"Everyone was created to be a creator."
Whether that shows up in the arts, or in medicine, or in law, or in a teacher building the kind of room where a student discovers what they are good at. Ted spent two decades doing that last one before he gave himself over to the first.
Save the date
Louisiana's Fragile Beauty opens Saturday, October 3rd at 318 Art & Frame, 855 Pierremont Road, Suite 100, Shreveport. This collection has not been shown anywhere. We will share more in the weeks ahead — a first look at the work, and the full details of the day.
In the meantime, Ted's current work is on our walls and online.
Explore Ted Bertrand's available paintings
Bring Louisiana home.
