Playhouse celebrates Cajun Cinderella homecoming
January 7, 2014Exhibits
January 7, 2014
It was disdain for painting that sparked Stacey Fabre’s foray into, well, painting. More specifically, she grew to loathe brushes, and she came to adore the possibilities of painting knives.
Repeating brush strokes to create the illusion – rather than the establishment – of dimension struck her as bogus, and besides, the process was rather dull. Let her intricate pencil drawings stand as proof that she has an appreciation for devoting time to minute and subtle details, but stroking a brush left and right, left and right, left and right during her first major piece struck her with the realization that traditional painting doesn’t suit her. A New Orleans church had commissioned Fabre to paint a 32-square-foot depiction of Jesus’ resurrection. With it came misery.
“I didn’t really do any art after that one,” she said and remembers thinking, “‘I’m never going to paint again. I hate painting.’ I didn’t like brushes. You’re taught to paint fat over lean or lean over fat, I always say it backwards. It’s thin layers of paint, you’re supposed to paint over and over and over to create a thickness. … I wanted bumps and ridges, and I didn’t like that it was flat. To me it just seemed it was fake.”
Fabre didn’t know it then, but the solution to her qualms about painting was in the method. She would go on to discover impasto – paint applied thickly atop underlying coats to create texture – and then teach herself how to master the technique of ascribing to it with the knives, in effect sculpting her paintings.
Enlightenment came from one of the region’s great influencers, New Orleans’ James Michalopoulos, when she saw his work at a gallery in the city. She was stuck by the vibrancy in color, and, of course, the thick paint.
So one weekend, five years ago, when her husband left town, Fabre purchased a canvas and made use of a plastic palette knife and paint leftover from her days in college. She copied the substance of the Michalopoulos piece “Moon over Miasma,” focusing all her attention on the act of applying the paint.
“That was it – hooked,” Fabre said. “I don’t have to listen to that whole principle of whatever it is: lean over fat, fat over lean. It always confused me anyway. I can kind of do what I want. I threw the rule book away and tried it on my own.
“All of a sudden, I was back doing art again, but on a way larger scale than I had envisioned. And I never foresaw painting in my future – ever.”
Her only instructor was Try N. See. She was a bit deflated when that first piece flattened over night, so she had to research how to tailor her oil paints to her newfound method so they would hold firm.
She couldn’t find many painters practicing impasto, and some artists are wary to share their tips with strangers, anyway. But she found the right formula and continued building her own techniques and style.
Michalopoulos’ work may have prompted the experiment, but Fabre has formed her own hallmarks. As in his work, structures lining her recreated streets are rooted in reality, but Fabre’s recreations are typically straight-lined and natural, abstract in subtle, specific ways rather than a reinterpretation of how realistic structures apply to their surroundings. Fabre classifies herself as something of a moderate impressionist, though she doesn’t seem concerned about labeling herself.
One of her signatures is the embellishment of streetlights’ auras, which fascinate her because people perceive the “starbursts” different from one another.
“I like the aura of the light. My vision is not great, and when I see a light, I see those starbursts everywhere.”
Fabre also delights in light and shadows, a product of her extensive drawing experience – she started when she was a child, spurred by a natural curiosity about life beyond her purview.
Fabre strikes elements of time from her settings, which gives viewers the freedom to picture the place in whatever period their minds gravitate toward.
She’s most known for her first commissioned piece in that style, “Fleur de Wine,” in which a transparent, seemingly oversized fleur-de-lis is actually a glass in the foreground of a New Orleans street, wine flowing into it from the painting’s right corner, swirling and bounding in the various curvatures of the common south Louisiana emblem.
“That’s one of my best conceptual paintings, because I’m not really known for conceptual (work),” she said.
The piece became a magnet via word of mouth. People were pleading to see it, then to see what else she was working on. Fabre’s impasto took off then, and it hasn’t slowed since.
Originally from Marrero, Fabre went to grade school in Algiers and moved to Houma after graduating in 1999 from Nicholls State University, where she studied to become a graphic artist and where she met her husband, James.
“I knew since I was little I wanted to go to school for art,” Fabre said. “If I couldn’t play outside, (because it was) raining or whatever, I would come inside and it was my own little land, my own escape to do and be whatever I wanted to be. Little girls play with dolls for the same reason, because the doll becomes them in some essence. … It’s the same thing with art, just in a different way. You can escape. You make a land where you want to be. … When I’m painting at night, I’m in that spot. I like that it’s my personal moment, just for me.”
Artistic endeavors were put off, however, after she graduated. During her college years, Fabre was badly injured in a car accident, which changed her priorities. Family became more important to her than career goals, so she was married and had children. Fabre designed advertisements for the Houma Courier, where she worked for 11 years before moving on to lead marketing efforts for Shoefits.
“By night, I’m a mom and a wife, and I do this late, late at night,” she said, pointing to a collection of paintings in her studio, tucked in the corner of the family’s living room.
Fabre has recently neglected her original artwork, but that’s to be expected with her workload – at home, work, the easel and under a tent. To exhibit and sell artwork at seven shows in 11 weeks, as she did in the fall, is to watch time disappear, even if it was beneficial to her artistic career.
So in mid-December, before Christmas, Fabre was a bit tired after that hectic but successful three-month stretch – including shows at Best of the Bayou and Voice of the Wetlands – that affirmed her talent: People like her work, and they will pay for giclée prints, including those without the post-print application of more paint to recreate the tangible 3rd dimension, which she does offer.
“I haven’t had time to paint,” Fabre said. “I have a year (of commissioned work on a) waiting list, which is growing, and I haven’t been able to touch it.”
Showing to festivals was her goal in 2013, and she met it. The next step, she said, is getting her artwork placed in stores.
“I like to exceed what I think I can do and push my limits,” Fabre said. “That’s my next thing. I want to get it out and see where it goes.”
Stacey Fabre, the impasto artist, is pictured along her most popular work “Fleur de Wine” and other ongoing projects. Fabre began crafting the vibrant depictions about five years ago after teaching herself how to sculpt with paint.
