Colorful blue and yellow architectural painting by renowned New Orleans based artist James Michalopoulos. Signed in the front lower left corner. Signed, titled, and dated on the reverse. Currently hung in a light wood frame.
Dimensions Without Frame: H 28 in. x W 22 in.
Artist Biography: James Michalopoulos began his journey in 1951, the son of a prominent modernist architect father whose designs helped reshape downtown Pittsburgh. One of six children, he was raised in a home full of art, including paintings by his uncle, the influential Abstract Expressionist painter William Baziotes.
Despite the early artistic influences, Michalopoulos was drawn to science and economics and imagined a career in one of these fields. After graduation from Bowdoin College in 1974, he spent his postgraduate years consumed by work in the cooperative movement. He managed the Boston Food Coop and then founded and managed the Cambridge Cooperative, which became America’s largest storefront coop.
Upon leaving the coop movement, he began his winding route to New Orleans by way of Washington, DC. While on the road, he began to sketch to fill the free time. A flirtation with art became an affair. Then a marriage. A strictly plein air painter, Michalopoulos was challenged to find a winter locale to continue his work. In 1979, he was drawn to New Orleans as the last bastion of hippie bohemian culture in America. The city and its “Culture of Celebration” held an intense appeal. He began sketching artists and musicians, houses and street corners.
Fascinated with the duality of beauty and decay, the architecture of the city became his muse. His portraits of shotgun houses and Creole cottages, depicted in layer upon layer of thick impasto paint, brimmed with color and energy and captured the essence of his subject. This body of work established him as the most influential living artist in the region today.
James worked as the Art Director for the House of Blues Productions for six years. Additionally, he art directed NBC’s “In Concert” series and the Nice Jazz Festival. His sets for the House of Blues have been called some of the most influential stage sets ever designed for televised music.
During this time, he developed an abiding interest in musical imagery. His portraits represent all segments of the musical stratosphere and have been featured on the coveted New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival poster seven times, more than any other artist in the festival’s history. In the early years, his atelier printed the posters using a remarkable 36-screen hand-pulled process.
In the early 1990s he maintained a studio in Lausanne, Switzerland and exhibited both there and in Geneva, London, and Berlin. During a trip to France in 1990, he fell in love with Provence and the Burgundy region and bought a home near Cluny. Today he divides his time between New Orleans and Burgundy. The French countryside—with its Roman era stone buildings and verdant fields—has become a large focus of his work.
Not long after, he transformed a 150-year-old cotton gin into the first rum distillery in the continental US since prohibition, Celebration Distillation, which created the award-winning line of Old New Orleans Rum and Gingeroo. In Covington, Louisiana, he was an early force in the redevelopment of the historic downtown area, founding restaurant Etoile. After Katrina, Michalopoulos acquired the Old Union Brewery and converted it into the North Robertson Artist...
Category
1990s Realist Houston