Radiating Art

Radiating Art

Cover Artist Troy Dugas

BY MIMI GREENWOOD KNIGHT

If Troy Dugas never sold a single piece of artwork, he’d still be compelled to create. A quiet child growing up in Duson, La., he spent hours exploring colors and shapes and radial form on his Etch-a-Sketch, Light Brite and Spirograph. The hours he devoted to those toys back then still inform his work today. “I don’t think much differently than I did then,” he said. His current work bears that out.

On oversized canvases, Dugas employs simple materials such as vintage product labels, cigar bands, illustrated book pages and vintage textiles to create intricate radial forms, sometimes abstract and sometimes with recognizable shapes of portrait or still life. The work is meticulous and unimaginably detailed. Dugas spends hours (and he admits, often weeks and months) painstakingly cutting, shredding, arranging and reassembling these printed materials onto paper, canvas or wood, generating patterns that give the appearance of having been woven. Lately, he’s also designing and printing his own labels, adding even more steps and time to his creative process.

PHOTO COURTESY OF CHRIS WARD

Traditionally a painter, Dugas often layers his patterns with paint. The colors are vibrant, the vibe playful, the sensitivity primitive, and the overall work is as generous in nature as Dugas himself. The end result calls to mind many things— stained glass windows, mandalas, Persian rugs, collages, quilts, crochet and embroidered samplers—all achieved with such quotidian materials as soup or cereal labels.

Dugas’ latest work takes the woven effect one step further, actually weaving his pieces into tapestries to be hung on the wall. “My latest show at Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans I called ‘Rugged,’” Dugas said. “It featured recycled yarn from Brazil that’s course and rough. I fell in love with the material and wanted to explore what I could do with it.” So, he created the designs he wanted and used first a hand tool, then an industrial tufting gun to recreate the design on rugs no one would dare walk upon.

Growing up in Duson, Dugas dreamed of studying fashion. But when he enrolled in University of Louisiana at Lafayette, he found only fashion merchandising in the course list. He gave it his best but was derailed by the accounting portion. Frustrated, Dugas signed up for a drawing class. “I was like a puppy following the teacher around,” he said. “I couldn’t get enough. But when I decided to change my major to art, even he discouraged me.” He changed his major to painting anyway and took the next six years to graduate.

PHOTO COURTESY OF TROY DUGAS

Dugas realized his dream of working in fashion when a job with Macy’s Department Stores led to him designing children’s clothes, working with Macy’s designers on their in-house brand. “I was designing pajamas with dump trucks and dinosaurs and thinking, ‘What is happening here?’” he said with a laugh. “But if you follow your interests, you’ll often find your place.”

After graduate school at ULL, Dugas made his way to New York and a little bayou boy found success in the big city. There for seven years, he ended up working for Nickelodeon Studios, earning his way up to lead designer on the popular Blue’s Clues children’s program. “The work I was making at the time translated well into the show,” Dugas said. “I took the job very seriously, and New York was good to me.”

He was at the top of his game as lead designer for Blue’s Clues, illustrating a book for Simon & Schuster, had a show of his work at a museum in New Jersey, and felt ignited by all he was learning. “I was in my 30s and my brain was still malleable,” Dugas said. “I was just taking it all in.” Then, 9/11 happened and Dugas found himself in the middle of the turmoil.

“I could see the towers from my apartment, then they were just gone,” he said. “We all forced ourselves to get back to living but it was terrifying riding the trains and walking the streets, and I shut down creatively. One day, I was on the train, and it stopped. There was white dust everywhere and this was in the middle of the anthrax panic.

I told myself, ‘If I get out of here alive, I’m going home’.”

PHOTO CREDIT: MIKE SMITH COURTESY OF THE ARTHUR ROGER GALLERY

That’s exactly what he did. He and his partner, Ralph, a fellow artist specializing in ink wash, moved back to Lafayette and he continued to create his art while teaching at ULL. Ironically, he found they now have a fashion major, and he was able to teach a fashion class as well as various art classes for seven years. Since then, he’s worked for the Lafayette Parish school system teaching talented art to students from elementary through high school, although he admits his favorite is middle school. “Kids that age are communicating with you all the time, whether with words or through their art,” he said.

When he began with the talent art program, there were only three teachers. Now, there are 13 in visual art alone and a total of 25 including dance, theater and music. Dugas introduces his students to a variety of mediums. In a given week, he might be working with elementary kids on paper mache, middle schoolers on sculpture, and high school students on oil pastels. He admits he often poses problems to the kids he’s wrestling with himself. “I was researching radial form while I was teaching a design class at ULL, so that’s what we worked on. We explored the idea together,” he said.

“I like to include a lot of art history too, teaching the kids to appreciate and be influenced by different artists.” The walls of his own home are filled with the work of indigenous folk artists who inspire and influence him. “There’s a sweetness to folk art but also an underlying darkness,” he said. “That’s what really draws me.” Dugas has been teaching for 19 years now and has stayed in touch with a lot of his students, often through their parents. “I’m proud of what some of them are doing,” he said.

To date, Dugas has had seven solo shows and been included in group shows and art fairs. His work has been shown at Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans, Acadiana Center for the Arts in Lafayette, Art and Science Museum in Baton Rouge, Cooper Cole Gallery in Ontario, Canada, Islip Art Museum’s Carriage House in Long Island, NY, and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, in his historic home in Lafayette, Troy Dugas is not even close to finished exploring radial form, symmetry, pattern and the folk art aesthetic. He’s on the lookout for materials that speak to him. He has a room filled ceiling to floor with recycled yarn and a storage unit full of product labels. Just recently, the father of a former student found rolls of 1970s bread labels in a dumpster and brought them to him. They sit on a shelf waiting for inspiration to hit. His workroom walls are covered with sketches for work he hopes to create. He has collectors around the country awaiting those creations. And that little boy from Duson is still watching, listening, experimenting and wondering where his art will take him next.

PHOTO CREDIT: MIKE SMITH COURTSEY OF THE ARTHUR ROGER GALLERY