NEW
ORLEANS TABLE
Melissa
Blackburn Sarat's
Allegorical Paintings
A CELEBRATORY GUMBO FOR THE SENSES
A
sumptuous baroque feast of earthly and celestial delights
 crawfish cake |
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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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