This is a lovely 3-story gallery! James Michalopoulos is an extremely talented artist, and his…read moreworks are vibrant, engaging, and extremely tactile! We visited during his cow phase and many of his canvases were of cows. He is renowned for his paintings of regional architecture and famous musicians and for designing numerous NOLA Jazz Fest posters and artwork. Many of his architectural pieces seem to defy gravity, as he departs from traditional renderings by painting the structures in arches for example. He utilizes exaggerated viewpoints and skewed perspectives so beautifully! His approach is whimsical, fun, and very engaging! For his paintings, he uses palette knives primarily, and this method results in such a dense, tactile quality to the paint, it is almost as if the paint is ice cream-like, and the viewer could just take a spoon to get the paint off the canvas and take a bite! This is my favorite approach to painting, and it takes quite the commitment by the artist to achieve this result! This lovely, accurate description from his bio sums it up: "His portraits of shotgun houses and Creole cottages, captured in layer upon layer of thick impasto paint, brimmed with color and energy and captured the essence of his subject."
Quite the visionary and entrepreneur, Michalopoulos owns a house in the Burgundy region, started and stewards a foundation devoted to providing affordable spaces in NOLA in which artists can create, and live. In the 90s he opened a rum distillery, Celebration Distillation, the first craft rum distillery in the nation in over a century. Celebration features the "Old Orleans" label, and sadly, it suffered a fire, and is closed until further notice.
Amazingly, he is primarily self-taught artistically, although he took a couple of art classes in NOLA.
This gallery is spacious, it's 3 stories, and not pretentious at all. The staff are friendly, and you may engage with the art as long as you would like during their business hours.
