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Francie and John: A Marriage of Creativity

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First time-visitors walking into John Hodge and Francie Rich’s living room might be taken aback. What seems like hundreds of faces stare at them from the walls; an oddly large collection of whimsical skeletons and skulls, souvenirs of the Mexican Dia de los Muertos, occupies one side of the room; assorted vases and pots form a corner display; and baskets filled with many varieties of decorative ceramic pieces lurk throughout the room.

The faces staring down from the wall belong to the portraits that Francie paints. The vast number might be somewhat menacing, but she’s managed to capture the lighter side of her subjects; whatever good is in their lives shines through. Many paintings are of her students at St. Scholastica, some are of her and John’s pets and some are inspired from way beyond the bounds of the northshore. Most are done in an iconic style, with just the subject’s face floating on a gold-leaf background.

A John and Francie collaboration.

A John and Francie collaboration.

John’s ceramics range from plain-but-elegant glazed objects and vases that are embellished with natural elements—leaves, stems and flowers, for example—to decorative wall pieces and serving trays in different sizes.

When talking to the couple, one quickly finds that the depth of wit apparent both in their own works and in the objects they collect isn’t a fluke. A conversation with the duo quickly becomes part art history lesson, part travelogue, part modern media critique and part comedy routine—with no designated straight man and with each often finishing the other’s sentence.

Thirty Years on the Northshore

John and Francie come from completely different backgrounds that led both of them to New Orleans in the 1970s. John is originally from Baton Rouge and Francie is from Minneapolis. “But I like to think of myself as a Southerner,” Francie says. “I don’t have that accent anymore, I hope.”

She says, “I spent my junior year of college in Holland, finished my last year at the art school in Minneapolis and went to graduate school in Oakland. After that, I got an artist-in-residence grant in New Mexico, because that’s where I wanted to go next. Then I said I wanted to go to either Louisiana or Russia.” She came to Louisiana for a job at Nicholls State University.

Francie left Nicholls State for a job in Bellingham, Wash. It didn’t work out, so she came back, having been offered a position at Dominican College as soon as there was an opening there. She waited four years, and for a time even gave the French Quarter artist’s life a try, living there and showing at Jackson Square. “I saved up my money for the license, but if I sold a painting, I’d pack up and go home. People would say, ‘Why are they so expensive?’ I’d say, ‘Why shouldn’t they be?’” she says, laughing. “I was so mean.”

John recalls, “After we met, we realized we both were chasing the same jobs and dreams. I applied for a job at Nicholls State, and they said they would interview me, but technically, they said, they thought they were going to have to hire a woman. That’s the job Francie got. Then later, we both applied for an artist-in-residency with the National Endowment for the Arts. I got that; she didn’t. It kind of went like that. We were covering the same ground.”

“And everybody said, ‘Oh, you should meet him!’” laughs Francie.

Eventually, they were introduced by mutual friend Don Marshall. “Then,” John says, “we didn’t see each other again for four years, when another friend said, ‘Y’all should really meet.’ The second time we met, we went straight to being like an old married couple.” And they did marry, with fellow artist and future northshore raconteur John Preble standing as John’s best man.

John and Francie’s first home on the northshore was in Slidell, a rental on 13 acres. “We just assumed we couldn’t afford to live in Covington,” John says. “We had some friends in the real estate business who called us and said, ‘Come look at this house.’ So we looked at it and bought it …”

Francine jumps in, “It was Valentine’s Day …”

“It was a miracle,” continues John. “We hadn’t saved, we hadn’t planned. We were on a real limited budget.”

The house, on Vermont Street, would be their home for 26 years, but it always lacked studio space. Once shown the house they’re now in, John thought it was perfect. The former owner had built in space for a woodworking studio and a darkroom off the garage, which John could also close in for more studio and equipment space. There was one problem, he says. “Francie hated it.”

“It was so ugly on the outside,” she says. “I loved the foyer, everything else was just dark.”

They looked at other houses and almost bought a different one. “We had taken pictures of this one and recognized it as an interesting house—for somebody else. So we kept trying to talk other people into buying it, and I think we finally sold it to ourselves. We got used to it.”

“And Cathy Deano said, ‘Don’t crap this one up.’ And we did!” says Francie, with more than a slight bit of glee.

The home on Jackson Street has plenty of space for John’s pottery works, a studio area for Francie and a large back yard (actually another lot) that is Francie’s domain. The different little areas back there filled with statuary and different plantings certainly reflect her tastes and personality. “We call it Follywood,” she jokes. “A gated community, and soon to be a UNESCO World Heritage site.”

Their Art

Making art isn’t always the easiest way to make a living, but John and Francie have done pretty well. John’s decorative ceramics are sold in several local outlets, as well as through his website. Francie teaches part-time, art history classes at St. Scholastica Academy and in the spring at St. Joseph Abbey. “I like the girls. I like the crazy questions—and the seminarians and their comments, too,” she says. “I love it a lot.” She gets frequent commissions to do portraits, of both humans and pets.

John Hodge and Francie Rich

John Hodge and Francie Rich. Copyright 2011, Abby Sands Miller, abbyphoto.net.

John says, “She does portraits non-stop for people. Francie just wants to paint. If there’s a group of people standing still long enough for her to paint their pictures, she will. Her students are obvious …”

 

Again, Francie finishes John’s thought. “I take their pictures the first day of class because I’m really bad with names. So then, my seating chart is made up of their pictures. I decided that I’d do their paintings from those photographs.”

Generally, though, Francie says, “I’m very much influenced by anything in the media. First, it was the photos in the society column. But I realized I was offending the very people that would actually buy my work. People threatened to sue me because my work was more caricature.”

As time went on, her work evolved. “I decided I wouldn’t do backgrounds [in my portraits] anymore, and that’s when I went to the gold leaf. I also painted on vases. John would throw the vases and I’d paint on them.”

Francie’s subjects, for a time, came not from the society pages but from the “wanted” pages in the newspaper—pictures of men wanted by the police. John says, “She started painting with the gold background so they looked like icons—they became ‘Iconvicts.’”

John notes that Francie is voracious in going through her subject matter. Thirty-three of those faces looking down from the living room wall are portraits of the miners rescued from disaster in Chile in 2010 that she was compelled to paint. There’s a group of TV judges (Judge Judy, et al.) and the lawyers who advertise on their shows. (Yes, Morris Bart is included.) Inspired by Gary Busey’s recent appearance on Celebrity Apprentice, Francie says, “I’m thinking of doing a Gary Busey series.”

John replies, “Stuff she paints for her own amusement amuses only her. Like the TV judges.”

“They amuse you, too.”

“Alright, they amuse me,” John finally admits.

Although John works almost exclusively in ceramics, he started his life in art as a painter and assumed he was headed for academia. “I really thought I’d teach in a university or something, but I’ve never really done that except in brief stints. One day, I realized I was supporting myself out of the studio. I never really thought that would happen; I never considered it would even be a possibility.

“I majored in painting for my undergraduate and graduate degrees. But I took pottery as an undergraduate and taught pottery on a teaching fellowship when I was in graduate school. When I got out of school, I ended up getting a series of National Endowment grants, four years in a row, and had money to spend on studio equipment and supplies. At the end of four years, I had everything I thought I could want. I had a wheel, I had a kiln, 100-yard rolls of canvas, darkroom equipment, everything.

“I was able to have the space for multiple studios. But then I had to start cutting back. So one thing after another got chiseled away. I was appearing in galleries in the city, and the paintings I was doing—they were huge—weren’t selling well, but the pottery was selling out. The inevitable point came when I put dollar signs on what I was doing; it became clear that the pottery was the thing that would sustain me. Shortly after that, I met Francie. She was a painter, so I said, ‘Look, one painter in the family is enough.’ So we’ve just been sort of a team that complements each other ever since. I guess I’ve been doing pottery 40 years now.”

John and Francie keep busy with the business of art. John’s pieces sell in Mignon Faget’s stores, and, he says, at other stores in Uptown New Orleans. “The store in Madisonville [the Shoppes at Coquille Cottage] does just great,” he says. “They do such a good job selling. Karen Redd is just tenacious and talks it up. She can say things about me that I can’t say about myself …”

“Well, you do …,” says Francie.

“I do, but it’s just a little braggadocio when I do it. It’s charming when Karen does it. It’s amazing.”

Traveling

The couple has an interesting side business—putting together European tours, which they’ve done for 31 years now, both for student and adult groups. Their last tour, whimsically christened “I see London, I see France” tour in conjunction with the royal wedding, was a sell-out.

They had the idea because both had been to Europe before they met. “When we did meet, we were commiserating that we would probably never be able to afford to go again, so then we just said, ‘Let’s figure out a way to make that happen,’” recalls John. “Mostly, we decide where we want to go and see if we can’t find a bunch of people to go with us.”

While the trips are naturally art-oriented, Francie notes, “It’s not rammed down people’s throats. We don’t go to every museum; we don’t take binoculars to look at the details on the ceilings.”

“We like to shop. We like to eat,” adds John. Some years, they’ve done as many as three tours. This fall, they’re doing their first tour—to Italy—with Corks n Canvas/Painting with a Twist owners (and their good friends) Cathy Deano and Renee Maloney.

The couple, along with some other close friends, takes an annual trip to Mexico each summer for their own vacation in San Miguel Allende, which, they say, is the only time they can actually relax. Mexican themes are common in John’s work, and he says, “Francie and I were married on All Saints Day. Mexico has Day of the Dead, and the skeleton sort of became our wedding symbol.” Souvenirs of the Mexican holiday are scattered throughout their home.

Their travels have influenced their own art over the years, and John figured out a way to create a synergy between his travels and his pottery. “When we’re going to churches or in areas where there are beautiful fountains, I take a few drops of fountain water and drops of holy water back with me.” He adds the water to the many buckets of clay stored in his garage. “So the clay I use has the fountain water and the holy water and these exotic things I bring back from wherever I travel. It’s not like gallons of holy water—it’s drops. I mark the bottom of the pieces with these little cross marks to indicate there’s holy water and fountain water in the piece, and there’s a little romance card that goes along with it. In my mind, it has to do with bringing energy back, things that I respond to positively and feed back into the clay. It doesn’t make it better clay; it’s just a fun thing for me to do that integrates one activity into another. It gives me a mission when I’m traveling. When I’m not looking for things to make molds out of, I’m looking for things to put in my clay.”

John’s work is available on the northshore at the Shoppes of Coquille Cottage on Water St. in Madisonville and online at johnhodgepottery.com. Francie’s work can be seen in Covington at Shoefflé and online at francierich.com. She is available for commissions, and both she and John are available for private lessons at 892-5108.

The post Francie and John: A Marriage of Creativity appeared first on Inside Northside Magazine Online.


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