Artist Spotlight Lorraine Gendron

Late Friday afternoon Lorraine Gendron's antique handset jangled to life in her home 30 miles west of New Orleans last week. She prefers to communicate by phone, but was cat-napping when it rang bridging worlds with a helix of curly cord.
A cheerily hopeful voice message I'd recorded had been all but reabsorbed by the wilting heat but, six minutes later, my own iPhone cut through the humidity and buzzed worlds away. In a sweet-tea southern twang, she repeated her name: Lorraine Gendron (Ʒǝn-dröhn) with a Cajun accent thick as honey, then slipped back into the late afternoon lilt of sleepy phone calls with pleasant strangers.
“It was back in the '80s and my husband was out of work because of the oil crunch,” Lorraine began her story. “They laid off a lot of men from the refineries. [A breath of a pause.] He could have gone out of state for work, but he stayed here to help me raise our grandchild.”
At first she started making Mississippi river mud dolls, “I sculpted little children out of clay from the river because it was free, but I stopped doing that because it was too hard to harvest: the clay being so heavy to haul out of the riverbed one 5 gallon bucket at time. I ended up with back surgery, and while I was getting better, I thought to myself: 'How can I express myself without using the clay?' I thought of wood and I bought a saw. My husband says: 'You’re not using the saw! You stitched your fingers together as a child, what could you do with a saw?' I had sewed the needle of my mother's sewing machine into my finger when I was a child and my finger was stuck in there... He said: 'Tell me what you want cut. You make a pattern, and I'll cut it.'”
It was almost 30 years ago that Louis and Lorraine began to create their beloved wooden sculptures together. “What I do is I look around me-- We live on the outskirts of New Orleans and I reflect what I see. It's not hard to find subject matter because lots of things go on around here,” Lorraine explained about her Crescent City characters that take the forms of walking bands, angels and watermelon babies.
 “He's a real big craftsman,” Lorraine said about her husband of nearly 61 years. “He's very particular and I'm glad he takes that part of it. He's so precise while I measure everything with a dishtowel,” she clucked at herself.
This duet keeps in perfect two-step, playing games to egg the other on, producing their art together two or three hours per day, week in and week out to keep up with the seemingly endless flood of orders they get for Mardi Gras-themed festivities throughout the year.
“It's like we have a race. And he's so happy when he catches up. But if I have a good day painting, then he has to go out in the workshop and do some more,” she said of the acrylic-painted pine poppets that she signs “L. Gendron for both of us.”
Naturally the conversation flowed to matters of the home, flowers in the front yard and the mounting number of “greats” her grandchildren now delineate. Mawmaw settled into her chair and happily chatted about the apples of her eyes.
 “I made little wooden and paper dolls and made little portrait dolls of my grandchildren. They loved them because I gave [a set of] them to each family [living in different states] to all the cousins so they could play together...” Lorraine said with a joyful laugh of her 17 month-old great-great granddaughter: “She's got plenty of expensive plastic toys, but she prefers the jazz band.”
Lorraine and Louis' lovingly-crafted pieces are just one element to the roux of Cajun art making its appearance at Jeanine Taylor Folk Art this month. This show, “Gumbo,” will highlight some of JT's favorite Big Easy locals like Lorraine and Louis, but also Andre and Pat Juneau and others; this collection will be celebrated with an open house during the Art Walk and gumbo will be served.
Lassesz les bons temps rouler Saturday from 6 to 9 p.m.

Jessica Pirani can be reached at JessieBerger@yahoo.com.