Cover Artist: Ashton Shaw Despot

Where the Water Leads

The Art of Ashton Shaw Despot

By: Erin Moore Cowser; Photos By: Margo Landen

They’d head out just as the sun cast its first glance over the waterways between Baton Rouge and Lafayette. Early mornings were spent on water skis, gliding across the still waters that “looked like glass” in Henderson, Louisiana.

Ashton Shaw Despot’s relationship with water is rooted in childhood memories.

Water flows through every part of her creative process. It’s a source of inspiration, threading its way through memory and meaning. It’s part of her medium, mixed

with paint to create a luminous effect. It’s a signature of her technique, with sprays, drips and dabs that give her compositions movement and thematic weight. That movement, she says, is essential to the sense of wandering her work often conveys.

“I love how light dances with water,” she says. “There’s a fluidity of movement that comes from the soft lines and dappling.”

To mimic that movement, Ashton rotates her pieces, letting gravity guide streams of water from spray bottles as they drip down the canvas. Pegs installed on her studio walls allow her to flip the canvases whenever inspired to do so. One burst of water might run in one direction, and with a quick turn of the canvas, another set of trails begins anew. Within a single upright piece, water may run top to bottom, bottom to top, left to right and back again, imbuing the work with a dexterous, subtle energy.

Her process begins with building block shapes, often traced from photographs, to reduce the scene to basic geometry and form a skeleton she calls “deconstructing the photograph to its simplest forms.” From there, she applies a bold wash of background color with heavy-bodied paint. Then, fluid acrylics with rich pigmentation and plenty of water take center stage, turning the paint almost translucent.

It’s a layering upon layering of colors, manipulated by water and gravity, until a landscape comes to life in the final art. Pallet knives add depth with each application. Each stroke and spray becomes part of the piece’s texture and vibrancy.

“I’m not good at calling them done,” she says with a laugh. “I usually keep layering and layering until someone says they like how it looks. That’s when I know it’s ready.”

“I keep photos and ideas in old-school plastic file bins,” she says, pulling out snippets, sketches, photos, and magazine tears. “It’s my analog version of Pinterest.”

Her first studio was on Magazine Street near Napoleon Avenue. “It was across the street from Buddha Belly, remember that place?” she says, laughing. “It was a cross between a laundromat and a bar.”

A class through the Arts Council of New Orleans, “Art as an Entrepreneur”, helped her focus on the business side of art. In 2014, she sold her first major piece and held her first solo show, Starting to Fly, at Kelli Kaufman’s studio in Lafayette.

In the decade since, her work has been exhibited in New Orleans, Atlanta and Charlotte, North Carolina. Her pieces hang at the Claire Elizabeth Gallery on Decatur Street, and later this summer, her art will be featured at the Mont Art House in Houston.

As her geographic reach has grown, so has her scope. Her latest work includes interiors and imagined homes. Ashton describes herself as an artist drawn to nostalgia, but with one foot in the dreamscape of the future.

“The homes and cottages I paint don’t actually exist,” she says. “I paint them as places I think would be lovely to live in.”

She smiles. “I’ve never had one, but I’ve always wanted a tabby cat. I guess that’s how a cat ended up curled on a chair in one of my recent pieces.”

Whether she’s painting a landscape, a living room or a gabled cottage, her scenes are filled with light, brought to life by her signature use of water and motion. Her newest fascination: the way light plays across windows and shadows.

“It’s been fun exploring beyond the landscapes,” she says. Still, water remains a constant, sometimes as a subject but always as a tool.

Ashton hopes her art encourages people to slow down and soak in the beauty around them. Whether it’s a bend in the river or a shaft of sunlight across a tufted chaise lounge, she believes there’s always something worth pausing for.

Don’t be surprised if you spot her on the side of the road, camera in hand. She sees Louisiana’s waterways and byways as a feast for the eyes, and says living in New Orleans is a gift for any artist.

“I’ve learned so much from so many people,” Ashton says. “New Orleans artists are so generous with their experience and expertise. Alexis Walter and Logan Ledford helped me so much when I started my solo artist journey.”

Creativity, she says, is never the challenge. Her studio is filled with worksin-progress, lining the walls and stacked in neat piles. “It’s not hard to do the painting,” she says. “But the website and QuickBooks can be daunting.”

Her advice for emerging artists or those unsure if they have what it takes? “It’s important to have blind optimism. Believe in yourself. Invest in yourself,” she says. “And remember that, like wildflowers, not everything blooms year-round.”

As someone with a lifelong love of water, it’s only fitting that Ashton, also an avid scuba diver, leaves us with one last piece of advice: “You have to ride the waves.”