St. Martinville native has been producing art for more than 65 years
– Louise Guidry began using scraps of cloth discarded by her mother to make clothes for her dolls as a young child.
That blossomed into a lifelong pursuit of producing art that began seriously at the age of 33 while she was a mother and kindergarten teacher in St. Martinville.
Sixty-plus years later, Guidry has produced more than 10,000 paintings, most of which have been sold and some of which have been displayed in such places as the Louisiana Governor’s mansion and the New Orleans Museum of Art. She held a showing of some of her works in an art gallery in St. Martinville this past Saturday.
Guidry is remembered by many in the area as a teacher, including Gov. Jeff Landry.
“Everywhere I go, they say, ‘Oh, you taught me,’” Guidry said.
Guidry didn’t get her college degree in fine arts until 1988, enrolling at what was then the University of Southwestern Louisiana at age 50. She spent 30 years as a teacher in St. Martinville and took one class a semester during her teaching days.
“So I have partly teaching (credits) and a full degree in art,” she said.
Those memories of playing with scraps of cloth stick with her still. Guidry recalls an Olan Mills photographer, who was trying to sell her mother on taking photos of Guidry and her sister, praising her for the work she’d done with scraps to make clothes for her dolls.
“A few instances happened that made me remember what people said,” Guidry said. “I was about four. “She walked in and said, ‘She’s going to be an artist,’ because I was playing with scraps on the floor to change clothes for my dolls.”
She was largely selftaught until beginning college in the 1980s. Her artwork took a different path after getting her fine arts degree.
“At the beginning I really was a realistic artist,” she said.
Since college she’s done more abstract works.
“It’s so free, and you don’t have to worry that you follow a line,” she said. “You can just put water on the canvas and then paint on top of that and let it go. It’s very, very easy for me. It’s very freeing.”
Guidry used oil paints when she began but her work now is largely in acrylics, which dry much faster than oils.
Her favorite color is aqua, but she doesn’t paint much in that color because it doesn’t sell well. Red, on the other hand, does sell well, so she paints more with shades of red.
“It just catches peoples eye,” she said.
Beginning around age 70, she began working out of her New Orleans home/studio for half of the year and out of her St. Martinville home/studio for half the year, her son Neil Guidry said for a retrospective of her work in 2023.
Between the ages of 72 and 82 she traveled around the world and painted wherever she was, leading to her works being found around Europe now, and in India and Japan.
And she continues to paint, though she’s taken a little break while recuperating from a fall.
Guidry is a charter member of the Lafayette Art Association, joining in the 1960s, and is a founding member of The Art Group of Acadiana, where she is the longeststanding member of the group.
Many of her works sell through New Orleans Auction Galleries, which is preparing a retrospective of her work in April.
“I’m looking forward to that,” she said. “In fact, most of my paintings are in New Orleans.”
