Artist Stefanie Huguet comes home with her art

Stefanie Diez Huguet remembers the paint set she received for her twelfth birthday as the beginning of considering herself an artist. After using up the acrylic paints in the set, she turned to other media to create her images. She hasn’t stopped since then.

“Art isn’t a part of me; it is me,” she says.

Huguet grew up in the south Louisiana town of Dutchtown in Ascension Parish. Following her marriage, she moved with her husband’s job. She lived in Kansas City, MO and Moultrie, GA. Now she’s back in her native Louisiana, residing in Opelousas.

Through Colquitt County Arts Center in Moultrie, she learned oil painting and realized art was still her dream. As the oldest of her four children entered college, she realized her time had come and enrolled. She earned a BA from Valdosta State in 2006, completing the degree she began right out of high school but left unfinished to marry. After graduation, she created a studio in her home. For about five years, she worked as a graphic designer and put in about a year as the coordinator of a children’s museum.

When the economy crashed and outside jobs became scarce, Huguet began to focus on her own art from her home studio. Her work includes landscape oils en plein air, live painting, live sketches, and watercolor portraits of children, as well as oil portraits.

To her skills in watercolor and oils, Huguet added encaustic. The ancient art form employs colored wax to create an image and results in a more textured image that traditional paints. “It’s just so much fun,” she says of the medium, while acknowledging the high cost of getting started. She spent several years purchasing the materials before she began producing works.

Her website includes a blog of her journey and a link to her online gallery. One of the brick-and-mortar galleries hanging her works is Artists’ Galleries de Juneau in Olde Towne Slidell, LA where Huguet is honored as the Artist of the Month for December 2016.

Contact Huguet by email with commission inquiries.

© 2016  Mary Beth Magee

South LA artist Brian Schmidt shares favorite pasttimes in his work

When south Louisiana artist Brian Schmidt paints, he captures landscapes and scenes of the natural world around him in St. Tammany Parish. Water sports on the Bogue Chitto and Tangipahoa Rivers, cattle in lush pastures and idyllic scenes on the Gulf of Mexico come to life through his oil paintings. Whether painting indoors from a photo or en plein air as he views the scene, Schmidt focuses on sharing the things he loves with his viewers.

He sometimes feels like quitting painting but eventually chuckles about some of the problems he must overcome in his work, such as fighting to get the right amount of detail in the various layers of trees in a Smoky Mountains scene.

“I got the background mountains to look good…the haze, you know. Then I was trying to paint the middle foreground…with the trees… more distinct,” he says, but not as detailed as closer trees. He struggled for four hours before wiping the offending trees from the canvas. 

“I’m still going to try it,” he laughs, promising to go back to the project after a rest time.

Schmidt prefers oil paints because of the longer drying time. Since he works outdoors most often, the oils give him more flexibility to change his work before they dry.

His landscapes reflect the world he enjoys such as the south Louisiana rivers where he canoes. He believes his love for the sprawling art form stems from his early love of Western art with its sweeping scenes of mountains and prairies. As he learned more, the Impressionists drew him with their landscapes.

“I like larger things where you can gather in more for the picture,” he adds. On the rivers, he finds inspiration in the clay banks and the sandy beaches juxtaposed against the water, his favorite subject. Schmidt takes on challenges like a farm scene with cows scattered in the pasture. Working on those cows gave him pause, since the scale of the finished creatures was so small in relation to the original size of the animals.

A longtime lover of art, he began creating his own in the late 1990s. He began by copying some of his favorite artists to learn their techniques. His models included paintings by Remington, Van Gogh and Monet.

“After copying all these things, you think you’ve got the style down, but you don’t,” he notes. Once he went out into the world to paint his own subjects, he struggled with keeping the techniques as he moved on to his own original art. He acknowledges that some of his early attempts were disasters.

“Then I realized…there was something special about those guys. It was in their minds. So I try to paint what I see but not everything photo realistic.” His own style encompasses elements of Impressionism with the power of the western artists.

He’s lived on the North Shore of Lake Ponchartrain, between Covington and Folsom, LA, for more than twenty years and enjoys sharing the beauty of the area with those seeing his art.

“They represent things that I like, the rivers…canoes…the North Shore things,” he says and he shares his love with fortunate enough to see his paintings.

Several of his works hang in Slidell at Artists’ Galleries de Juneau in Olde Towne Slidell, LA. Many of his paintings are spoken for before reaching a gallery. He sometimes works on commission based on a photograph or a visit to a scene.

Originally appeared 08/01/2015 at http://www.examiner.com/article/south-la-artist-brian-schmidt-shares-favorite-pasttimes-his-work