Francis Pavy

"The way I would describe my art is that it's a primitive-inspired, colorful narrative work. It takes a lot from the Southern narrative, music, folklore, and folk life of this area."

"I wanted to be an artist since I was a child. I have always been interested in art. I used to bug my parents whenever there was art in Time or other magazines, and I would always check out books at the library about art and ask for art lessons."

"My earliest memory of making art was using crayons and pencils on lined paper. Eventually, I started painting. My mother did paintings. She had paint at home, and she bought me some paint-by-numbers. So that was a good introduction. I learned about painting and using brushes and stuff like that."

"The passion I get from making work comes from my love of narrating stories and ideas, especially the ones that come to me when people share their own stories. Sometimes, I get an image in my head that haunts me until I can get it out on paper or a canvas. I guess that's passion. Usually, I do a little drawing on paper first and then eventually refine it, and it becomes a work of art after that."

"I find my inspiration and ideas from stories that people tell me and things I read about – like Louisiana history, narratives about Louisiana, or the South. Sometimes, I'll just go someplace and there will be music or atmosphere that inspires me. For instance, my painting called Full Moon at the Blue Moon. It comes from me going to The Blue Moon Saloon and jamming at the Cajun jam. It was a really great night, so I decided to celebrate that by drawing it out and painting it."

"The reactions I get from people are various. Usually, people are positive about the work. They're too polite to offer any criticism. Few people come out and say, 'Well, I'd rather that be red' or 'I don't like that at all.' But I do have some critics that respond in a humorous way to give me criticism, so I'm always plumbing those depths. I have certain go-to critics. The kind of reaction I really love is when they really get what I'm trying to portray. You know, sometimes it's subtle, and they'll understand. They'll see past superficial things that they like – like the colors and the shapes – and get that I'm trying to say something, whether it's a narrative about Louisiana or the South or just Cajun culture. Some people actually pick up on that."

"You never know when something's going to be really great as a painting, a drawing, or another piece of artwork. I mean, I just keep striving, and things fall into place for me sometimes. Usually, it's unexpected, you know? I'll just keep working until it works. Usually, I do little drawings and develop them, and then they become a larger work. Sometimes, they become an even larger work. But sometimes the drawing or the smaller piece is even better than the bigger piece. So, my best work is not something I can plan on. It just happens."

"As far as having an artistic style, I think people achieve a certain level of expertise, and they become uniquely who they are. Titles and labels are things that people need to understand the work, especially in terms of regional art. A lot of times, curators use terms like 'Southern regional art,' but I think that at some point, the artist moves beyond labels and express themselves fully as who they are."

"I have a book coming out, Francis X. Pavy: 40 Years, and while reviewing it and reflecting on my work, I realized there are a lot of ideas and threads I left unexplored. I'm always getting new ideas, and the passion for what's next tends to overtake what I've already done. So now, I'm rediscovering and re-exploring things from the past that I never quite finished or fully developed. At the same time, I'm combining those with new ideas that are coming up, so the work becomes my latest expression."

"I've always been an artist, so I don't really know anything other than making art. I used to work other jobs, but I'm pretty grumpy if I can't express myself. I'm really joyous when I can paint and make things, so as far as increasing the quality of my life, it has increased manifold. I mean, that's what I do. I make art, so if I couldn't make that, I'd just be miserable. And of course, you know, I make a living too."

"Someone once told me that I contributed to the identity of our culture. We have our own unique music and food, our own way of living, and our own language. So, my idea is, why not have visuals that express that, too?"

"A lot of artists have inspired me throughout the years. Of course, in the very beginning, the Abstract Expressionists were very important to me as a child. I'd see them in Life and Time magazine. When I was in grammar school, the Pop artists were really popular; that's when they came out. When I was older, in college, the local artists had a lot to do with my identity and how I was incorporating everything into the 'ball of wax' that became my expression. What I realized is that experiencing art firsthand probably had the greatest impact on me. So, I have a lot of local heroes here."

"Well, as far as goals or what I want to achieve, I would like to be collected by the Museum of Modern Art. I haven't been collected by them yet. I'd like to be in major collections throughout the country. Of course, there are other allocation awards. I mean, who wouldn't want to be a MacArthur Fellow? That would be great. Nobel Peace Prize?"

"When we talk about landscape, I think of the physical landscape and the cultural landscape. The cultural landscape is probably more of an informer of my work than the physical landscape. I was accepted into grad school, but I decided not to go because there was so much happening here, culturally, that I wanted to explore. I still feel that way. I'm always finding something interesting and different about our culture that could be explored and painted about. Yeah, there's a lot here still."

"Being an artist in Lafayette can be tough and can be really rewarding. I'm kind of out of the fray; I'm not in the big metropolitan city. I love my area, I love Louisiana, and I love what I do. Generally, people leave me alone in my studio to explore and to imagine. It's a good spot for me."

"I have other hobbies and interests. Everybody has a hobby, and painting isn't the only thing I do. I play music. I've always played music. I like to restore guitars, lap steels, furniture, and those types of things. I don't know what it is; I just kind of like to fix things."

"I get some inspiration from appropriating imagery. I go through 19th-, 17th-, even 15th-century illustrations, generally black and white, to use in my prints. Sometimes I appropriate them wholesale, but usually I modify them a bit using the computer. Then, I cut the block using my CNC router. Occasionally, I'll find something in an old dictionary. In fact, my parents had this huge dictionary and I ended up with it. I'm always flipping through it. I find these great little illustrations, often 19th-century woodblock prints or etchings. I'll scan those, manipulate them in Photoshop, and blow them up. They tend to degrade when enlarged, so I have to kind of rebuild them digitally. Then, I send them to the CNC router, which carves the design into a block for me."

"Typically, I arrive at the studio, unlock all the doors, put on my painting clothes, and start digging through the paintings I want to work on. Right now, I'm working on about six different canvases, so I'll choose the one I feel most inspired to work on and put it on the easel. As I paint, new ideas come to me for the other pieces — sometimes based on the colors I'm using, the brushes, or just a random thought that pops into my head, like, 'Oh, I should do this.' It's a very intuitive process."

"I don't generally know when something's done or not. Like I mentioned, it's an intuitive process. Once it's getting close, I know it's going to get close. I'll give you an example. I painted a painting one time, and it was really missing something. It just wasn't working, so I put it up and looked at it. I kept looking at it, studying it, and thinking about it. Eventually, I realized that if I just put a little line of gray across the back, that would make it all come together. So, sometimes it's just one stroke that'll make it all work. I think the longest piece I've ever had to work on was maybe two or three years, but I don't generally let work hang for that long. I want to finish the pieces off as soon as I can. Generally, they're done within two weeks to a month, at the most. Still, some works linger. I have pieces here that are two years in the making. If I don't get them done, I'll probably tear or cut them up and use them as collage work in another piece."

"I have a book coming out titled Francis X Pavy: 40 years, and it reviews four decades of my work, what I consider my mature phase. Before that, I was painting and exploring, but it was during this period that I had arrived at an expression that felt uniquely mine. The book doesn't cover everything, of course, but it touches on a lot of what I've done from 1984 to 2024. It's a book about looking back. I don't know exactly how much time I have left, so 40 years feels like a good milestone." 

"I work with a lot of iconography: imagery I've invented and evolved over time. One recurring element is this marsh grass motif, which has become a kind of visual signature. When I married my wife, she kept saying, 'You should really do something with that—maybe textiles or fabrics.' I'd always been interested in expanding my imagery beyond paintings. So about five years ago, we decided to take a stab at it. We started printing wallpaper and textiles using my iconography, and that's really where the idea for the store began. It was one of those things: if I didn't do it then, I might never have done it."

"My studio is located in Freetown, and I started renting it in 1981. At the time, I was doing glass work, stained glass and bubble glass, and needed a studio. A friend of mine had been using the space as a painting studio, but he was moving to Japan and suggested I take over the rental. I think it was around $50 a month. Back then, the building was also a used furniture store. Before that, it had been a house, then a curio shop, and over the years it's served many purposes: a co-op, a trophy store, and later, another used office furniture store, which was when I moved in.
At the time, the area was mostly home to older residents and transients. But like in many cities, artists started to move in and slowly transform the neighborhood. There was another artist already living here, and eventually, musicians followed. It grew into a little cultural hotspot in what became a bit of a chi-chi neighborhood."