225BatonRouge.com

They called it Unit 8, and not even the founders could have predicted it would still be going strong 42 years later.

A group of Baton Rouge artists came together in 1965 to create an innovative space that would embrace all disciplines of visual arts, literary arts, music, dance, theater and cinema.

But there it is, still going strong in 2007—the Baton Rouge Gallery.

The original artists behind Unit 8 envisioned an inner city gallery to showcase modern art while celebrating Baton Rouge’s general art scene. The original eight founders has grown to 53 artist members plus more than 100 general members, and today the Gallery is among the oldest nonprofit cooperative art galleries in America.

Today, only three of the founding members remain in Baton Rouge: Jim Jeansonne, Jim Burke and Ed Pramuk. The others, Russell Guirl, Don Thorton, Fred Packard, Bob Wiggs and John Goodheart, have gone on to pursue art elsewhere. The Gallery will honor its founders from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Nov. 7 with a special exhibition and auction called “Back to Our Roots.”

225 caught up with Pramuk, an artist and now retired LSU art professor, to find out what motivates and inspires him to put paint to canvas.

You’re originally from Akron, Ohio. How’d you get here?

I had my thesis show at Kent State, and my family and I were living in upstate New York. I had been teaching elementary school for three years while finishing up my master’s degree. The director of the art school at LSU, Bob Day, was visiting Kent State and saw my show. He called me up and offered me a job at LSU and I turned him down. It wasn’t very much money. This was 1963. So, he called back the next day and offered me some more money and I said OK. After I hung up the phone I had to get a map out to see where Baton Rouge was.

What work awoke the artist within you?

I discovered this painting in the Cleveland Museum of Art, The Holy House of Nazareth by Francisco de Zurbarán. That art really came alive for me. You see Jesus and Mary in the clothing of Zurbarán’s era, but I thought it was such a powerful visual statement that I based my graduate thesis on it and painted 20 or 30 original pieces. It wasn’t until the end of this period that I discovered that she had a tear in her eye. That answered the question for me that this painting always raised: When she conceived this child and raised this child, did she know that he was going to die before she did? And that he was going to be sacrificed as the Son of God—the whole bit? There is a lot of controversy about this painting. He’s playing with a crown of thorns in his hands and there are a lot of symbols that indicate that Zurbarán believed that she knew. It was a mother’s intuition.

Other than Zurbarán, who are some of the artists that have most affected your work?

Edvard Munch. I took a sabbatical and went to Oslo to work in the Munch Museum in 1992 and got to see a lot more of his work. I made a notebook of his unpublished drawings that they let me copy, so I got a feel for the way his mind worked. I created a painting based on a very famous Munch painting of an adolescent girl sitting on the edge of a bed called Puberty. I took it one step further and turned it into several images to signify the passing from one stage of life into the other.

When did you first fall in love with modern art?

Ed Pramuk has been using a lot of vibrant greens as seen here in his piece Spring Light.

The first time I went to the Museum of Modern Art I was an art student and I walked into the room with Picasso’s Guernica and I stood in front of that painting, and it was bigger than my father’s house. It was a total moment for me. I was seeing for the first time.

You were in New York during the huge abstract impressionism movement. What was that like?

Well, in 1968, I went back to grad school at Queens College and studied for a year. New York was on fire. I got to study and hang out with people who are my heroes. I studied with James Brooks. I went to the de Kooning retrospective at MoMA. I got to swim in the art world.

Your work seems to bounce between the figurative and the abstract. Is it all about your mood?

I don’t have a lot of pressure on me so I really enjoy the freedom to go wherever my mind leads me. And when I come out to work in my studio, I pay attention to whatever impulse strikes me.

Do you have any favorite pieces?

I created Woman of Mostar, based on the Bosnian war around 1992. I had learned about a particularly horrible rape and massacre of some Bosnian women by the Serbs and I saw a video of the women lined up against the wall staring straight ahead and I thought I could capture, with an image of one woman, that accusatory quality of this. I painted her in red as kind of a blood-drenched symbol and I used a real smearing technique that sort of smears the light to give it a kind of negative idea. This floral stuff done here are the hands of a child. I wanted something very innocent to be in the painting. On top of the canvas is an actual Mauser rifle. I’m probably the only guy who ever went into a gun shop to ask if they had any broken guns. I’ll never forget when I bought the gun he handed it to me and I said, ‘Well aren’t you going to wrap it?’ He said, ‘We don’t wrap guns.’ I was like, you mean I have to walk out into the street with this rifle? I had to figure out how to walk out of there with this gun and not appear menacing.

Books and music seem to play a big role in your creative process.

A visual artist can be a potentially fine writer if they really pay attention to what makes a powerful piece of visual art; the same rules apply to writing. I especially like Hemingway’s writing style, but I don’t like his books as much as I like those of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Learning how to write without adjectives and learning how to write in a very clear and hard-hitting fashion, and looking for just the right economical word to say what you wanted to say, and the more I dealt with my own work over time I’m not surprised that I gravitated toward minimal abstraction.

You’ve transformed your love of jazz into a mixed-media collection of pieces. Tell me about your Jazz Series.

I love to do collage because it’s very different from painting and I’ve always had a love for jazz. My first pieces were all Louisiana musicians like Bunk Johnson and Professor Longhair, and then I started incorporating some of my favorites like Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday and Sonny Rollins. Then Southeastern asked me if I would do a piece on Bill Evans. I remember the first time I saw him play. I used to go see Miles Davis all the time. One night Bill was up there playing piano, and I couldn’t figure out why Miles had this young white kid playing with him.

How did the November show come about?

It was Amelia Cox’s idea. She’s a graduate of our program and I’ve known her for years. I gave her a present, a poster of the Bill Evans piece and on a lark I told her that I was one of the original founders of the gallery. She loved the idea of doing a show with the two of us. She thought it was charming to have a place be in existence for so long with such a rich history. I’m really pleased to be showing there again. There really is nothing else quite like it in town. It’s a strong cultural contribution to the Baton Rouge arts scene. edwardpramuk.com