Circus Love: Rebecca Rebouché Nation
by: Jessica Kinnison | posted: Feb 12, 2009
How can a person say with certainty that this—this here and now—is living? And how can one know that this—this here and now—is art?
New Orleans painter Rebecca Rebouché, 26, lives in a space as fresh as wet paint piled on a blank, wooden board. Rebouché is illuminated from all directions—from the patio, across the glossy brick kitchen floor straight through the wide studio space, into her bedroom and spilling into the sunroom where she stores her canvases and paints.
This is her life. It is real. She is cradling a white coffee cup depicting the face of a small bird with big eyes, a black-winged handle and a yellow inside. But gypsy Rebouché’s insides are far from yellow.
The Metairie native gave up a cushy graphic design job in Austin to return home five months after Hurricane Katrina. “Everything seemed wrong thereafter. It seemed fake. Going to the grocery seemed fake. Painting there seemed fake. I just wasn’t in a good place for some reason and it felt like the right thing to do was to come back to home and replant some roots.”
Rebouché’s roots: cornbread, sewing, New Orleans rainstorms and light, family, bird cups, stoops, swings… After four years of working as a graphic designer in Austin and New Orleans Rebouché decided to switch from office to open road. “I realized there was never going to be this good day where I could figure it all out and make the switch. So I made the switch probably on the worst day in a way. I didn’t have any cushion and I didn’t have a real plan,” says Rebouché.
In what she calls a “happy accident,” Rebouché was assigned jury duty in Orleans Parish. Every Tuesday and Thursday of January 2008, Rebouché sat in one of the chairs lining two rooms, one room quiet and the other with blasting midday soap operas. “You can’t get out of it,” she says. “You just have to wait.” Rebouché sat in the quiet room with her book, The Six-Week Start-Up, and a notepad and made her first business plan.
The result: Rebouché left her job as a graphic designer at Peter A. Mayer, Inc. to take to the road with her boyfriend, photographer Frank Relle. They went to fine art markets all over the country from April to October 2008 putting up her world in a hand-sewn circus tent.
“I had this plan to do what I call 'the circus life.' There are all these open-air art festivals all over the country. People now often think of them as craft fairs. But they’re not craft fairs … They are fine art festivals. They are juried. You have to apply to get in. Thousands of people apply and they only take 100 or 200 [people],” she says.
“And then it’s like the circus because you have to bring your own tent, you go to the place, set up your art and sit out there all day. You talk to hundreds of people—it's like being in artist boot camp because it forces you to defend your work to all walks of life and it’s hard work … You can’t just make something and then make someone else deal with it. Whatever you make, you have to deal with it. You have to figure out how to transport it, what you can use to make it, and how you can streamline and do it again,” Rebouché says.
Rebouché’s America: ice cream cones, striped shorts, powdered donuts, laundry lines, corn fields, birds, BBQ, lists, tee shirts, quilts, textiles in all brands and patterns...
“I wasn’t prepared to quit my job and I wasn’t prepared to go on the road. But I did it anyway,” she says, as the light from her studio window films her in the role of French actress—strong cheek bones, blue eyes, all lips and teeth and angles.
“I’ve always been very interested in the immediacy of an experience. I’ve always been quick to get excited about something like swinging or when I was a kid, me and this girl across the street, whenever it would start raining, like really pouring, we would go running outside in the rain. We lived by this park and we would try to make it all the way to the slide before it stopped raining. So I’ve always been that way—a little bit unreasonable,” says Rebouché.
But Rebouché wasn’t always painting striped shorts and ice cream cones as she does now. She started out at Louisiana Tech and later in Paris with a darker, more heavy-handed vision in a sketchy, “mark-making” aesthetic with abstractly searching lines and landscapes. She used to think she was going to be “great.” She says she was sure she would move to New York and become a famous fashion designer. She was positive she would be an acclaimed actress. She had all the dreams of a creative person pushing out of herself in the South.
But she says it was only upon returning home after Katrina and meeting Frank that she began to surrender to her true self as an artist and a fully alive person.
“I felt like I wanted to say, ‘It’s OK to be optimistic. It’s OK to have hope. We don’t all have to be downtrodden and a product of some series of disasters and unfortunate events.’ I was tired of what I felt was a pretentious darkness. So I wanted to give importance to this, call it Southern or feminine, the ability to mend and make do and have respect for family and domesticity and not need to be so successful or so important or rich. It was almost in a flash that it changed.”
Rebouché’s language: bananas curved toward each other like parentheses turned outward, red and white striped shorts on a clothesline over choppy water, a hot-air balloon over an underwater staircase, a green sucker and gold crown, a red popsicle dripping, a prison-striped apple and a button sewn in with red thread…
“Even though the outcome is different [from her earlier work], there is always an inherent theme within the work. You know, these sort-of little root concepts of tension and harmony and duality, togetherness and individuality. I think those root concepts have always been the same in my work and in my life even. I just used different languages to communicate that,” she says.
From Austin to New Orleans, from Des Moines to Paxton, Nebraska to Denver and back to the St. Claude Arts District, Rebouché has given up on her art hundreds of times. Each time, she believes that the surrender is permanent. However, she says, “If you rest long enough, it all comes back.”
Rebouché has recently been included in several group shows on and near St. Claude, a residency show at Low Key Arts in Hot Springs, AR, and fine art markets all over the country. She and her circus of symbols will be at Jazz Fest in May and living the gypsy/ circus life via virtual shows this year.
Rebouché’s language is as real as the handle of her bird cup and as unreasonable as the feeling of rain splashing on cold swings but it is uniquely hers. She is alive. And, this—this here—is art. Somehow through finding herself and dispelling her own darkness, Rebouché is making art that informs our own living.
