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Conversations » Louis Delsarte
Melissa Prunty Kemp

I first met Louis Delsarte bustling through the halls of Hammonds House on his way to attend an artist’s lecture. He was tall, quiet and unassuming at that time when I knew him to be one of my favorite African American artists, one of the most accomplished I’d ever seen. His works drew me to them immediately because of their strong resemblance to the French Impressionists, Monet and Manet, I so much adored. I had never seen an African American artist create such magnificient works, both in size and in exquisite compositions of lights dancing across vivid colors.

Over the course of the last five years, I have come to know Louis Delsarte as a committed professional artist whose murals are commissioned and installed all over the United States. Two recent murals, Transitions the Church Avenue Murals in Brooklyn’s Church Avenue Subway Station, and 4th Ward, Atlanta, mural commemorating the historic 4th ward neighborhood of Atlanta, Georgia, are two 21st Century examples of a skilled artist whose career spans more than thirty years.

Louis Delsarte is a Tenured Professor of Art & Humanities at Morris Brown College. A graduate of the University of Arizona at Tucson in 1977 who received a B.F.A. at New York's Pratt Institute, Delsarte's works are collected in some of America's most renowned public collections, including the Corcoran Gallery and Howard University in Washington DC, the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

A native of Brooklyn, NY, Delsarte is an artist and image maker; as such, he seeks to express what comes from within, the meaning of life, the challenge of reality, using color and design with a sense of movement that are often cubist, abstract or expressionistic in nature. Much of his work is based on the concept of jazz improvisation. He is a master printmaker and muralist who has contributed to the fabric of public arts works. He currently lives in Atlanta, GA and maintains studios less than one mile from Martin Luther King's national historic site.

Louis you are a lifelong artist and one of my very favorites. Can you tell me, since we’re sitting here against the backdrop of your latest mural, can you tell me what this mural is called?
This is the Fourth Ward Murals. Basically they are supposed to depict the images of the 4th Ward, where I live now, in the area of Auburn and Randolph in Atlanta GA. This neighborhood is historical district because of Martin Luther King. It’s considered an area of the birth of the Civil Rights Movement and one of the oldest black communities in Atlanta. The 4th ward comprises some streets from Ponce up to Randolph going to Glen Iris, Highland, all these various back streets, and Edgewood that are sort of parallel with Auburn Ave. I’m from New York, I’m not really from this community, but I’ve lived in Atlanta for ten years and there’s a parallel between this neighborhood and Bedford Stuyvesant in New York in Brooklyn.

Well, in that you mentioned your home in New York City, I wanted to ask you what kinds of events happened in your childhood, or around your neighborhood or with your family and friends that caused you to pursue art as a career?
My mother used to take me to the Brooklyn Museum a great deal when I was growing up. She encouraged me to become an artist when I was ten years old. I attended the Brooklyn Museum School, a major museum; I used to take Saturday Classes there; I was maybe 8 or 10. That was my introduction to art. I was drawing from life, from the masters. And then, all my teachers in school encouraged me to be an artist. They recognized that I liked to draw. I used to do murals in the backs of the classrooms growing up in Brooklyn. They used to put me in the back to paint, and I used to design the walls for the classroom, you know, the science room. They would always put me to work. I did all the posters and etc.

How would you characterize yourself as an artist. What kind of artist are you and why do you call yourself this?
I’m a figurative artist, and I’ve been painting the figure for the last thirty years. I was talking to someone about this the other day; I guess I never became non-figurative, I needed a challenge and I always wanted my works to be symbolic of some meaning in life and that’s why I use the figure as symbol. I use it in terms of movement and gesture so I’ve been working with the figure for thirty years. I’m a figurative expressionist painter because of the bright colors that I use and the distortions. So, I have been doing this for a long time and I don’t know what else to tell you.

I have another question to ask you about a medium that you have used very extensively throughout your art career and that’s the use of muraling in various kinds. Why did you choose to be a muralist and what do murals offer you as an artist, it’s challenges or rewards?
When I was in my 20’s and a sophomore at Pratt in the 60’s, I traveled through Europe for three months, and it had a huge impact on my life, and I never got over it. I went to Florence in Italy and visited the churches and Michelangelo’s work, and I was really overwhelmed by it. But not the work that Michelangelo did, cause you know he did all these murals on ceilings in the Sistine Chapel and the churches, he did the Last Judgment, and when I saw that, he felt like he was on a mission from God. I was very much influenced by all that, seeing all these large scale paintings in churches. I’m not saying I’m Michelangelo; I can’t be Michelangelo in the year 2002 cause I’m all over the place, and I don’t work for the church. The church does not hire you to be an artist.

What is it that you think you offer your audiences through paintings that are 30 ft long and are on the side of buildings. What does the audience get from your work?
I always said I was going to stop doing that. I didn’t think I was going to continue doing big murals because you know there’s something about murals. I been doing murals for a long time and I always say, this will be my last mural because I don’t know how I get involved, get committed to something this big, and there’s a certain kinda madness about murals.

What do you mean?
Well because they are so big, so overwhelming and you gotta cover all this space, and it’s like it lacks the intimacy of a small painting. You gotta cover so much territory. It just makes you a little bit crazy sometime.

What do you think your audiences, like. . . .
This is a job, this is a commission, I mean I’m doing this for Fulton County and they hired me to do this. Not hired, but they asked me to do this and I’m doing it. Now it’s getting a point where it’s just getting to be a bit overwhelming, but of course I enjoy doing it. Depicting a sense of the community, the 4th Ward. . . . I’m depicting a period of time and hopefully it’s going to be there for a while hanging in this building as a reminder of something that I lived through. I actually lived in this neighborhood. . . .I’m trying to remember what it was like 30 or 40 years ago, you know, depicting the people of this community. This is a non-political mural.

Let’s talk about the difference in expressionist and impressionist art. I was saying that when I first saw your murals, I characterized them as impressionism, and you do use a lot of very bright colors, or brighter pastels, so talk about that.
Impressionism is like a dry brush technique where you’re getting an impression of life, parallel brush-strokes creating an illusion of color. It’s almost a pointess technique a dotting technique showing the texture of the brush strokes, which I do-a lot of my work shows texture of the brush strokes. I’m not totally an impressionist. I’m influenced by expressionist-they use bright colors. So I try to create movement with the texture of the paint. So I am also influenced by German expressionism, you know the German expressionist painters?

Tell me some.
Notably like Max Beckman who uses big scale figures to erect symbolism in their art, you know what I mean? That’s expressionist. It means that you are expressing yourself and distorting reality in a sense. I mean I’m not a total realist. I’m involved in the abstraction of shape and design and texture.

This past summer, I think it was, you did a study of Italian Expressionsm?
Oh yeah, right, that was Italian Expressionism. I did a study of a Renaissance painter, Pablo Veronese. I did an interpretation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art of the Italian artist. Basically it was a figurative painting in the tradition of Bob Thompson, an African American artist who interpreted Italian Renaissance artists. I mean I just like to study from the masters, or the so-called masters. When you look at the Renaissance paintings and the Renaissance artists, I mean that’s how they learned from each other. They created this master apprentice relationship. I never really had the opportunity to study from a master like that. I wish I could go back into New York and do that kinda thing again.

Can you tell me a little bit about your goals as an artist. You have a retrospective body of work now. What do you hope to leave as an influence as an artist on the rest of the world?
Um, to leave? You mean like when I leave this planet? Or when I leave the room?

What’s your goal as an artist? What are you trying to do with your art? Certainly it’s not. . . . well, I don’t know. . . . do we have this “art for art’s sake” versus social commentary issue to contend with in your art for instance?
Well I mean I like to say that I was a profound artist, I wasn’t a commercial artist and my work had some kinda of meaning outside of just pure decoration. I like to still grow and still learn, grow in terms of my work. I still have to do some more growing. When I finish this series, I’m gonna start doing some lino-printing and some water colors. I’ve learned from doing these large-scale paintings and I wanna go back to small scale paintings, and I appreciate the small scale paintings after doing something this large. But I like to believe that I’ve done a tremendous amount of work in my life. I think that before I leave, I’d like to put together a book of all my paintings. Tom Feelings told me, (you know he lives in South Carolina, now; he’s a well-known illustrator who has done many books, and we are friends and grew in New York together) he told me . . .

Tom Feelings the fabulous children’s book illustrator?
Yeah, he’s older than me by about 15 years. But when I was a kid growing up in Brooklyn, I had my first art show with him. And he was like a role model to me. He told me once, he said “you’ve got so many paintings, it’s time for you to really get your life in order, take all the paintings that you’ve done over these last 30 years and make photographs of them and put them in a book. You don’t have to pose them, just put them in a book, and write a poem for each painting. Then, see if you can make some type of meaning out of all the things you’ve done.” And that made sense to me.

That would be a fabulous book idea..
My work has always been so abstract; people have always say well “what does this mean.” And sometimes I have a hard time telling them what it means, especially when I was young. Everytime I painted something, sometimes it didn’t have any real meaning to me, but it gained meaning later. I look at it. I mean it really does mean something, I think that somebody else said that my work is basically a celebration of life. Because I’ve done, if I keep looking at my work over the years, I do things that deal with the family, the dance, and celebrations of rituals, Marti Gras, and things that deal with peace and love. As much as I watch the news and as much as I’ve affected by the news, and all the tension of the world, I don’t paint about it. It’s very hard for me to paint ugliness or war or destruction or death. I can’t paint negative things, I can live with that, I can’t watch it. I couldn’t go to sleep around something like that.

I understand, I understand, I do.
I couldn’t, I’d wake up in the middle of the night if I painted something the evil, the face of Satan or something. (Laughter) I couldn’t live with it; I’d have nightmares.

You bring me to another question that is related to what you’re saying. I wonder if you think that, well artist in general and black artists in particular (cause I’m going to ask you about black art in a minute), but do you think that they have to have a social consciousness. You say you can’t paint anything ugly or negative. So does that mean that you don’t reflect social consciousness issues in your work, which I’m sure you do, you just reflect a different kind; what do you think it is?
Consciously, I just look at my work over the years and I’m conscious that my work reflects an African American vision. For some reason my people come out being African American. I don’t paint, as much as I try, I have a hard time painting so called just purely white people. I paint African Americans of all different colors and I think that becomes global anyway. African people of African descent. For some reason, maybe it’s because when I was younger, I didn’t . . . . I guess I can be honest about it right?

Yes, absolutely.
When I grew up, my mother was very fair-skinned, my father was a darker brown tone, and people would always question her ethnic background, whether she was white or black. She would always says she was black, an African American. There’s always that question. And she was always proud to be a black person, a part of black culture. But people would always question whether she was really black because she was so so fair. In our family there was always people who were dark skinned light skinned, and the issue of color always came up. So consciously I was always painting that cause people would always question my racial background. I always would paint the African American experience in my work. It just comes out.

What you’re saying leads into my next questions: what do you think black art is. Do you consider yourself a black artist? What is that?
Black art is, I don’t know what black art is. I think it’s like black expression. It’s a nebulous concept.

I agree. And it’s caused a lot of problems because if African American artists paint things, like yourself for instance, that don’t look like that thing that we thing black art is, sometime the art is less popular. And then from the white standpoint if the black artist doesn’t paint something that is characteristic of what they expect us to paint, they don’t understand it. If you turn around and paint some Pollock looking piece, they get confused.
Yeah. I don’t know, I have always been trying to fight that thing. Eventually, I think I’d like to go into landscape painting. I do paint them and I love to paint them because when you do totally abstract paintings that deal without the figure, how do you define black art. Is black art defined by the figurative expression of showing black people? Or is it black art which is any type of art painted by a black person.

Exactly. Does it have to have black subject matter?
If a black artist painted white people, is it still black art? I guess it’s still black art because it’s painted by a black person. But the definition of black art is very nebulous, it’s very abstract, and it’s more political than dealing with technique. It’s political because the whole reason for dealing with black art is because it was created in reaction to the fact that so many black artists were excluded from white museums. They weren’t called white museums; they were called major established museums, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or the Whitney or the Guggenheim, even museums here, like the High Museum here in Atlanta. Categorically, black artists have been excluded, except for the few token black artists who are part of the mainstream like Romare Bearden (19114 – 1988), Jacob Lawrence (1917 – 2000) these are the main artists who are part of the collections of every established museum throughout the United States.

I would say there are about eight black artists who are really accepted, but most of the black artists throughout the states and the world are not included in white established museums, which are considered mainstream. Therefore, black artists have to create their own situation, their own museums, galleries, textbooks, aesthetics, and call it black art. But it’s political because then you have to call yourself a black gallery, but there’s no such thing as a white gallery. You never hear anyone saying that this is white art or white history books. So it’s a very awkward term, but black art is a bonafide movement, and important movement that was created from the Harlem Renaissance from the 1920’s. The Harlem Renaissance was an important movement that is basically excluded from most mainstream art history books. They might include one or two pages about the Harlem Renaissance is most mainstream art history books. But the Harlem Renaissance created that sensibility that as a black artist, you should express black imagery.

Or Social consciousness.
Or social consciousness. But it’s like a very, to me, it lack individuality that is important in art. All black artists don’t work the same. There’s no unified black movement today; all black artists work differently.

I agree. No two artists are the same; no two artists have the same method or madness even.
Even my friends, I have a lot of friends in the Africobra movement and they all agreed from the 1970’s, like Nelson Stevens, Napolean Jones Henderson; I mean these artists all agreed that they would all use African symbols in their work.

But even so, they don’t all look the same.
They don’t all look the same. You notice a lot of the africobra paintings have that zigzag, geometric African symbols. And they sometimes break away from it though.

Let’s move on to a different area. Talk about the arts community in Atlanta, and what are its’ strengths and weaknesses?
I moved here eleven years ago from New York. I was drawn to Atlanta by the National Black Arts Festival that they had every two years. I was accepted and when I came down, actually before the festival, I participated in the Atlanta Life Insurance Show in 1982 – 1990, then I got involved with the Black Arts Festival. I used to come down here when I would become accepted in these shows, and I was really fascinated by the amount of support the black artists received down here in the community. There were so many collectors of black art who lived here; people had beautiful homes where they collect African American art, show it. It seems to be at that time a lot of festivals and a lot of support for black art.

How is it today?
Today, it’s still the same; I mean a lot of black artists have moved here in the last with the expansion of Atlanta in the last ten years. They came from all over the country. I don’t wanna seem to negative, but it’s highly competitive like anything else is. I think what’s happening in Atlanta is that it really needs to have a major African American museum. The Hammonds House is important but they need something, I wish the Hammonds House could expand and become a major African American museum which has a permanent collection.

Yes, I’d like to see that myself.
Clark has a permanent collection, right?

Yes, and Spelman does as well I think. Hammonds House has a permanent collection, but they all need to work on those, on acquisition, since they’re all right in the same location.
They need a major art museum. They have one major black gallery in Atlanta, Moderne Gallery in Buckhead, which focuses mainly on African sculpture. The thing about Atlanta is that everything is to spread out here. It lacks a central kind of meeting place. There are a lot of positive things though. There are a lot of black artists living here.

What kinds of issues might you face here in Atlanta as a professional artist? Since so many people are coming here, it would suggest that it’s a good place to be if you’re an artist. But what are the issues here?
What do you mean issues?

For instance, you talked about the lack of a major African American museum.
Am I right? Is Clark considered to be a major African American museum? It’s a college gallery. But they have a permanent collection. But it’s not a museum in the sense that of like the [url=http://www.ushistory.org/tour/tour_afro.htm.

There’s African American Museum in Philadelphia, one in Dallas, there’s the Studio Museum in Harlem, Chicago, the Dusable, and there’s one in Detroit [Editor’s note: the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History specializes in African American history.]. But Atlanta, you’re right, Atlanta needs to expand or establish a museum.

There are so many black artists in Atlanta! And, there are so many collectors. They really need to try to create an African American museum here and to develop a permanent collection. Because the High Museum is not buying a lot of African American art. Their focus is on African art; they buy African art.

So many museums are that way.
For some reason, black art is not being collected by the major established museums as much as African art, and that’s a problem. Maybe because African art is relatively inexpensive.

And it has that exotic nature to it. It’s more palatable, if you think about it. One of my favorite artists is of course Kara Walker, and it’s because of the subject matter of her work. Now, you know, major established museums might be hard pressed to collect that work, which I’m thinking some of the most seminal, most important black art ever produced, it's just fabulous. And I put yours in that same arena; it’s skilled, it’s gifted.

Let me ask you a couple more questions. What’s your greatest challenge as a professional artist?
My challenge is to seek recognition; I don’t know if that’s a selfish desire. I have a family, a daughter, children, and I would love for my children to be proud that their father is a recognized artist. Most artists want recognition for what they do. It’s very rare that artists. . . . artists are not given the Nobel Peace Prize, for example. Artists are in a different category than other fields. It’s more than just recognition; what does that mean? Recognized by history, by society? I’m recognized. There are artists who are considered recognized now like Elizabeth Catlett, and Jacob Lawrence.

You and Hale Woodruff are in some major collections; what are some of the collections you’re in?
I’m in the Corcoran Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, but I’m beginning to become more and more in books; every time I go to Borders, I see I’m in another book. I noticed I’m in artist history books now without even being aware at it. It just pops up. I’m also in the permanent collection in Chicago. The older you get and the more you become recognized, if you stay in art this long, you’ll find your work all over the place. While you’re here, if you work enough, your work will become recognized. And when you die it might become more recognized. I don’t know; do you have to die to become recognized?

I should hope not.
It’s good to be recognized in your life, to feel that your life is not in vain, that you went through all these years creating all this work and that you’re not just totally out of your mind. I’m an image-maker, I’m creating images. Where do they come from; that’s another thing. Recognition is a really important thing; to reach some point in your life or some type of goal in your life, most people want that.

You’re a professor everyday for a number of years; 30 years you’ve been teaching young budding artists.
I started my first teaching job in Pima College in 1971. I can’t believe this is 2003, Atlanta, GA, Morris Brown College.

What advice do you have for young, budding artists?
I tell my students at Morris Brown--and I love my students and I love teaching. I teach at an HBCU and my students are mostly African American. I told them, even the talented ones, I said it’s important that you have a philosophy, that you have a vision, and find a direction of what your work means to you. You should try to teach or have some other job to fall back on. Don’t use your painting as a sole source of income, because then you’re putting yourself in a very stressful situation, where you have to paint to sell. You can paint to sell if your want to, or if you have to. But I think you have to be very strong to be able to face rejection, competition. . . .because that’s what the art world is all about. You’re constantly being hurt, or you can be hurt. A student has to work hard and try to exhibit as much as they can; try to get their name out there. They could create a website and a series of paintings, maybe 30 paintings, based on one theme. You’ve got to develop a good marketing skill. Some of my students go into computer graphics, or teaching in high school or college. Being an artist is a full-time job that can occur between other jobs.

That’s true; same for being a writer.
You can’t cause this is a hard field. In the beginning when you’re not recognized, it’s hard to sell work. You can sell work if you present it nicely, it’s framed, and you have openings, and you put your work in galleries and museums, but you got to be strong.

Melissa Kemp is a College English Instructor at Bauder College in Atlanta GA. She is a freelance writer and poet. Originally from Roanoke, VA, she has resided in Atlanta for the last five years.

Spring 2003: Dirtywoods Arts
Focus on Atlanta's arts community

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