Brushing with a backbone

Everything is in its right place in artist Natalie Clay’s sun room-turned studio at the front of the Mid City home she shares with her musician husband, Matthew “Hutch” Hutchinson. Jars of brushes, tubes of paint and canvases are all quaintly composed, but not for long. Dozens of appliances, decorative items and dishes are stacked high on the dining room table. The kitchen is cleared out, and the studio is next. Clay and her husband are renovating half the house and adding a garage and painting studio out back.

On this humid August afternoon, Clay is 22 weeks pregnant. Stella Grace is the size of a papaya, and both the artist and her daughter are going to need more room soon.

“Sorry, I haven’t had caffeine in a while because I’m pregnant,” says the Opelousas native. “I just drank coffee, so I’m kind of chatty.”

For more than a decade, Clay has served as the director of graphic design for the Louisiana Travel Promotion Association—“Every day I’m working on Louisiana, Louisiana, Louisiana”—but since graduating from LSU, she has spent much of her after-work hours creating vivid paintings.

Dozens of her works belong to a sacred heart-inspired series called Backbone Love. A few years ago, her husband was riding his motorcycle when an SUV swerved into his lane, throwing him across the asphalt to the side of the road. Hutch shattered his leg and nearly died. While he recuperated in a wheelchair, Clay completed a Backbone Love painting for him called Strength!. Today it hangs in their bedroom.

“You can love someone as much as you want, but when you’re going through something like that you have to be strong, too,” she says. “You need both to make it.”

From How High Do We Have to Build?, a provocative, life-questioning post-Katrina piece, to her vast Backbone Love series, Clay’s most powerful work stems from some vulnerability exposed through the crevice of an intense situation or emotion. Her exploration of these feelings often takes her work beyond pure pop and suggests that becoming a mother could have as large an effect on her work as it will on her personal life.

“Pop art has a certain connotation; not that it’s bad at all. I mean, look what Warhol did with it,” Clay says. Instead, she settles on the term pop expressionism, a lusty blend of the abstract expressionism she grew up appreciating in the form of Joan Miro with the icon-twisting work of favorites like Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

A few years out of a protracted jazz and blues phase, Clay has been listening to the Knife, the xx and other mellow electronic artists lately. With so much around her house in flux, her creativity is an escape, a placid playground, and she wants to be in a calm mood when she works.

“Electronic, but not ‘techno’ music,” she amends. “That’s a bad word. That’s worse than saying ‘Pop art,’ saying ‘techno.’”

Music flows through her paintings like lifeblood. Her unabashed color schemes leap off the canvas, but it is the collaged layers of vintage sheet music beneath those colors that really excite her.

“I like the backgrounds, because you can be messy, experiment and have lots of happy accidents,” she says. Yellowed by the decades, the sheet music is like wallpaper to be covered up by her prismatic palette or left in slices boldly peeking out from the canvas.

“I don’t know—I just think everyone can relate to music, so I love using it,” Clay says. “It’s always in there. Even when you don’t see it.”

Clay’s latest volley of work, the Drummer Boy series inspired by her friend and photographer Brian Baiamonte’s Marching Band Project, will be her last for a few months. While she is between muses and due to deliver her baby girl on Christmas Eve, her only current project is designing the nursery.

“That’s my focus,” she says. “Being an artist, there’s a lot of pressure on how cool it is going to be.”

The Mid City Merchants’ annual fall art hop White Light Night will be Friday, Nov. 18, from 6 to 10 p.m. Clay’s work will be on display at Kerry Beary’s Atomic Pop Shop on Government Street. Visit midcitymerchants.org for complete details and a list of participating artists, businesses and restaurants. natalielaneclay.com