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Jackson
I
was reared on the grounds of East Louisiana State Hospital in
Jackson, Louisiana. The “patients” were my companions
in this
secluded Felliniesque community.
Employees' concrete block homes strung along a single road on
Chapman Hill just above the hospital, surrounded by lush hill
and
ravine countryside, an hour north of Baton Rouge. Archetypal
characters cloaked in anecdotes, hyperbole and grand juxtaposition
reigned in Jackson's “shot gun”, Gothic Victorian
and Antebellum
homes, in the hospital's massive-pillared Greek-revival buildings
and on its stately fountain-punctuated garden grounds.
Alas, after some forty years of exile, inspiration for my work
still
emanates from Chapman Hill. Patients, wild boars, snakes, mossy
magnolias, toad frogs, purple-fringed passion flowers, celebratory
culinary delights, fire, heady mystical symbolism and mythic antics
of the Chapman Hill kids and their eccentric parents summon forth
on my paint-laden brush.
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