Lou Courtney
Art creating the artist
By Sharla Gorder Photos by Kate Treick Photography
Artist Lou Courtney welcomes me into her home in Old East Hill with a smile and a hug, and I am immediately transported into a fascinating gallery of original art. Every surface in every cozy room is adorned with Courtney’s life’s work, and I am enchanted.
Shelves are arrayed with intricate (and delightfully bizarre) clay sculptures. The fireplace is surrounded by a colorful clay mural. Walls are adorned with original paintings, photographs and playful sculpted animal heads (a flamingo and a rabbit). Ledges and sills are lined with small bronze figures and vases.
It’s hard to believe that all of this started with intuition and kittens.
“The approach to my work is intuitive,” Courtney said. “Each series evolves from ideas that tumble around in my head like unruly kittens.”
Courtney and her kittens have been creating almost since before she can remember. She still has a piece her mother saved — a blue-green swath of color — that was tacked to her bedroom wall, where it hung for seven years. Courtney was eighteen months old when she painted it.
And she has been an artist ever since.
Dance, however, was her first love.
“Dance is art moving through us, which I find beautiful,” she said.
Courtney is still involved in dance and other forms of physical movement, taking a variety of ballet and yoga classes and swimming at the downtown YMCA. Her visual art career began in earnest during those angsty teenage years.
“I started having all those typical adolescent problems and was on restriction most of the time.”
She was cloistered in her room alone (pre-internet) with little more than books and pencils and pens. So Courtney drew and drew and drew, eventually moving from pencil, to pen and ink — those old-fashioned nib pens that you had to dip into an inkwell.
At 14, the young artist was admitted to the highly acclaimed School of the Arts in Winston Salem, for dance.
“But then, for the high school program, I went into the visual arts, studying drafting for theater, set design and costuming,” she said.
From there, various college programs and jobs further expanded her artistic and professional repertoire.
“For seven years, I freelanced for furniture companies, designing and creating prototypes for sculptural furniture,” Courtney said. “In 2002, I began sculpting custom tile installations and sinks, sold all over the Southeast for a decade.”
She has also designed two local public art sculptures and won several awards at the prestigious Greater Gulf Coast Arts Festival and Art in the Park.
Accolades and astonishing talent notwithstanding, Courtney maintains a genuinely warm and humble demeanor and philosophy, crediting her art with making her who she is. And who she is, continually evolves.
“Life is about creating ourselves — we are in a liquid state. Creating art has enabled me to process traumas and relieve self-judgment and move me toward joy, courage, compassion and hope.”
Even when hope is hard to find. Especially then.
Years ago, after having a hysterectomy, Courtney found herself grieving the loss of her womb. She had not had children.
Alone in her studio, she began sculpting. Within a few weeks, a new collection had begun, her Body Part series.
It began with a small pink uterus — complete with ovaries and fallopian tubes that were hollow and could hold water for small plants or flowers to root.
“I wanted to grow something in my uterus,” she said with a smile.
Courtney’s other collections are no less inspirational.
Perhaps best known is her “Cannonball” series, displayed and sold at Blue Morning Galleries, in downtown Pensacola, for years.
These joyful sculptures were inspired by the photographer Phillipe Halsman’s “Jump” series — a collection of photographs of famous people jumping into the air.
“He observed that their expressions reveal a truer, freer self,” she noted.
Courtney’s Cannonballers are stout sculpted likenesses of ordinary folks in various airborne cannonball poses (before they splash into a pool). They are carefree and charming, Courtney’s counterpoint to the economic and emotional strife of the 2008 recession.
Her “Little Monsters” series, a.k.a. “Familiar Strangers,” came next — a truly fascinating study of our innate human incongruity. These pieces run the gamut from adorable to grotesque, often within the same sculpture.
“This series became about empathy” she says. “People may be beautiful on the outside, but not so beautiful of the inside — or vice versa. It’s about looking beyond the surface of people, to have empathy for others — and for our own inner child.”
And Courtney’s inner child likes to play in the dirt these days.
She begins most days with a cup of coffee and a tour around the big courtyard between her house and studio. She tends to her flowers and fishpond and sets her attitude for the day before she begins her creative work/play.
Her muse du jour, who she has named the Many Faces of Beauty, has Courtney returning to the canvas, where she has begun a bright and lively series of paintings inspired by the flowers in her garden.
What’s next? Courtney said she’s moving toward possible abstractions of the natural beauty she finds in her yard, or if clay calls her back, perhaps she’ll create more of the 7-foot-tall, sculpted totem poles that adorn her courtyard.
But mostly, Courtney is not concerning herself much with what might be next. She is enjoying “being here now,” because here and now is where the art is. It is where the love is.
A favorite quote by artist Mark Chagall inspires Courtney in her work and in her personal life.
“I look only for love,” Chagall said in an interview.
Courtney looks for love too, and she finds it everywhere. She incorporates that love — of nature, of humanity, of her own inner child — into everything she creates.
And she creates everything — or so it seems. Her work is as prolific and multifarious as it is beautiful.
Her kittens are always up to something.
