Louisiana painter Linda Trappey Dautreuil was born in New Iberia, 1948, lived most of her life in the southwestern part of the state, and currently is based in Covington, Louisiana. She began making drawings and paintings in the 1970’s while simultaneously pursuing a master degree in creative writing. The daily process of drawing and the immediacy and directness of the paint medium caused a change in the creative direction of her life’s work. In 1984 she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from University of Louisiana, Lafayette.
Primarily a painter whose compositions are based on abstract forms and shapes, Dautreuil has included figurative references and non-linear narrative content in her work since 2001. The materials and processes she favors build surfaces slowly through layers of thin washes and mark making with graphic mediums such as oil crayon, wax pencil, and graphite. Occasionally she uses collage in the form of original drawings on raw canvas, cut and integrated into the paint surface. She also paints on hard surface panels such as Masonite in multiples, adhered to the rigid surfaces forming paintings in shallow relief.
In 1998, Dautreuil received a Visual Arts Fellowship from the Louisiana State Arts Council in recognition of her large-scale mixed media paintings. In subsequent years she was awarded project grants from St. Tammany Decentralized Art Funding through the Louisiana Division of the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. In 2005 she received the first St. Tammany Parish President’s Award for Visual Artist of the year, and her paintings were added to the roster of Louisiana artists nominated to appear on Southern Artistry, a program of the Southern Arts Federation. Her paintings have been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the South and in New York, California, Georgia, Texas, New Mexico, Belgium, and France. In 2012, a painting by Linda Trappey Dautreuil was added to the State of Louisiana Public Art Collection, and a second painting was acquired for the Permanent Collection at the Hilliard University Art Museum, Lafayette. Her paintings are also in the City of New Orleans Public Art Collection, St. Tammany Parish Public Art Collection, New Orleans Museum of Art, and numerous corporate and individual private collections.
To view Dautreuil's curriculum, click here.
commentary
"At first glance, these paintings appear as intricate passages of color and paint. One looks closely and discovers symbolic references to life – human figures and forms from the natural world emerge amidst swirling backgrounds. This multi-focus quality, from overall composition to smaller narrative details, forces one to spend time with each work. It feels as if Dautreuil leaves visual clues for her audience in these details that insist on interpretation. The juxtaposition of rendered forms against abstract fields produces an interesting push-pull effect for the viewer – asking for a narrative dialogue and then denying any real conclusive story.
Conceptually, these images work to question the space of painting. It becomes a journey through time and space with multiple layers of paint and experience. As the artist works in layered applications of paint, graphite, wax crayon, charcoal and pastels, the end result becomes a record of process. The viewer’s eye follows the artist’s hand in the movement from larger forms to smaller details and back again."
-Natalie Rinehart, The New Orleans Art Review
