New Orleans artist Sarah Griffin Thibodeaux has been a painter of the human figure for thirty years. Her new collection, “The Color of Love,” represents the artist’s love for painting alla prima (painting in a single session) to express the essence of the visual experience of the subject in an interior moment. As a group, these paintings represent the feeling of love as it is
expressed in the interior world, the intimate interior, the gentle pinks of the nude in light, and the burst of color in a floral. This collection expresses the sublime of painting—the feeling one cannot approach but almost, with painting—the sublime experience of observing the energy between artist and subject, of the creative act of painting itself.
For Griffin Thibodeaux, painting is a practice done from observation. It is the distillation of a moment in time in an economy of strokes to express the gesture, light, and overall feeling of the scene. Often, there is an emotion in the gesture itself. Sometimes it is plaintive, or spent, or weary. Sometimes exuberant. Sometimes glowing. In many of these pieces, it is the glow that resonates, that stays with the viewer, long after the eye passes by. The painting is not about a particular setting--sofa or
chair or building, but rather about the assembled pieces--be it a figure and a setting or a still life--arranged in a flow from here to there. In some cases, it is left to right, or top to bottom, or right to left. It is a buildup of a dramatic moment to a crescendo of
emphasis, and then a denouement where the eye leaves the painting.
It is this effort that keeps Griffin Thibodeaux going, day after day, seeing each scene as a possibility of that sublime moment of poetry available to us all, should we stop and linger and feel. To this end, Griffin Thibodeaux has, in some cases, simplified the background into a dark field, or in many cases, painted the foreground objects and figures against a ground toned with a swirly
circular motion. This flat background in a single color has become a signature expression of the simplicity of alla prima--paint only what is needed and then stop. For those who practice this craft of painting, one often pushes the background into rendering the figure--a process called "carving in"-- to render the background and then restate the foreground to create the effect of form receding in space. In flattening the background, Griffin Thibodeaux leaves the foreground figures painted simply with strength and clarity and then stops. Not an easy feat. Her confident strokes make it look quick and easy. She notes that the process of
creating form with paint is "simple but not easy" and has taken her a lifetime to achieve.
Griffin Thibodeaux is hugely influenced by the work of John Singer Sargent, whose grace as a painter is without measure. Marks laid just so, expressing a complicated assembly of planes, values, and edges expressed in his works, are a pinnacle of technique and expressed feeling. More recently she is indebted to the painter Richard Schmid, whose excellence in drawing
while painting is equally sublime, and his instructional volume "Alla Prima," considered by many to be the bible of representational painting, remained at her bedside for at least a decade. Many contemporary painters carry on this tradition, though they are spotted here and there across the contemporary landscape. Griffin Thibodeaux is equally indebted to New Orleans artist Auseklis Ozols as one of her earliest teachers and a lifelong mentor, whose classical realist academy was unmatched in its excellence year after year for forty years.
In addition to her personal works, Griffin Thibodeaux paints commissioned portraits for families through her businessYourBestDay.Art. As of 2024, she added live events to her repertoire of services--to provide the bride and groom with a live painting of their best day, as well as watercolors and head and shoulders portraits of their moment of great love. She also paints family memory paintings from snapshots of gatherings or everyday moments--from a father and son fishing in a stream to middle school baseball players swinging for the fences up at bat. She teaches in New Orleans at her school North Light Fine Art, which offers in-person instruction, fun art outings, and travel workshops (Alscace, France, anyone?) She lives in the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood of New Orleans with her husband and twin sons, who love baseball, Star Wars, and mythology. Griffin Thibodeaux is constantly amazed by life and its riches that continue to unfold in spite of everything in the news. On any given day, you may find her meditating, jogging slowly, or air drumming in the car to her favorite musical.
