Shadow and life

It’s not so much oneness but something far more mysterious. Staring at Michael Crespo’s The Eye of Night, a kind of elusively inviting connection blooms, as if the still, knowing kindness in the eyes of a placid shorn sheep rendered graceful by the late painter somehow reflects the wild we feel in all of us when we only take the time to look for it.

“With all of Michael’s animals, the faces have so much character in them,” says Crespo’s widow, artist Libby Johnson. “You know them. They’re little friends in the room, just like her.”

Johnson motions to Peaches, the black lab mix she and her husband adopted years ago from a shelter in Ruston. Peaches shoots back a curious look not dissimilar to the one frozen on the sheep’s face in Crespo’s painting. She is benevolent, but wild still.

The Eye of Night hangs prominently in the rustic, French country-style common room of the College Town home Crespo and Johnson shared before his battle with cancer ended abruptly and devastatingly last year. Crespo’s death snatched a lifelong companion from Johnson, a father from their children Clare and Paul and an instructor from LSU who inspired 40 years of young artists through his painting and drawing classes. The Eye of Night is a favorite of Johnson’s from her husband’s hand. She wants to discuss her other favorites, too.

For her birthday in 1995, Crespo painted her present and called it The Unknown. In it, a delicate canary—the same canary Johnson inherited from her grandmother when she passed away—rests on a branch with a feather in its mouth. On the back of the painting Crespo penned a short story about this canary and ended the tale by writing, “And I have painted him for you, on your birthday, because I love you.”

Her other favorite features a feather, too. Her husband was always good at rendering those, she says. It is the last painting Crespo ever made.

When the artist died in November, Johnson stopped painting completely. She couldn’t bring herself to be creative or do much of anything all winter, she says. It had been barely a year since her husband was diagnosed with unknown primary cancer. He was 63. It was too soon.

“Through the whole illness we never lost hope, even though it was a very unusual cancer, and they couldn’t find the origin of it,” Johnson says. “He continued painting. He’d go to the studio and work and rest, work and rest.”

At work or at play, Crespo made a lasting impression on generations of artists at LSU. He gave impassioned readings of Pablo Neruda and Rainer Maria Rilke while they painted. He cooked hand-rolled lasagna from scratch and invited students to banquets at his home. He bested them at Scrabble without mercy. He often entered class beaming and proclaiming an evocative new title for the students. “Good morning my fragrant children of wonder,” was one such honorific, recalls Leslie Charleville, who studied under the late art instructor for five semesters and now works at the Louisiana Art & Science Museum. In return, she nicknamed him “El Crespo.”

Charleville was raised on a farm, and occasionally her teacher surprised her by asking for advice on depicting rabbits and lambs. “I felt completely inadequate to help him, but it felt nice that he asked,” Charleville says. “He was humble in that way.”

Crespo was born in New Orleans, but raised in Baton Rouge, where the Lee High School alum fostered an early fascination with local wildlife long before he became a rock musician and a painter at LSU.

“I wandered the lake banks catching turtles for a living,” Crespo once wrote of his youth. Animals would remain a consistent muse till his death.

“He was constantly searching,” says Shawn Foreman, a former student of Crespo’s who now employs his mentor’s techniques while teaching art classes at Northwestern Middle School in Zachary. “He was so approachable with ideas, and he listened and helped our ideas through to completeness, wholeness. It didn’t feel like he was an instructor. He was more like a guide.”

Crespo left behind a vast canon of work that juxtaposes birds, fish and beasts of the field with tranquil images of water, foliage, the night sky and even urban landscapes, like a collection of mysterious visual haikus.

One month before Crespo died, Johnson was walking the yard while he rested in bed. “I had this epiphany about death, how it is not scary at all but incredibly beautiful, like being in a painting space in total meditation in your work,” Johnson says. “I came in and told him, and we cried. He said, ‘I’m not as scared now.’”

Since her husband’s passing, Johnson says her paintings, once more literal, have more fully embraced the mysteries of nature. She is back teaching adult oil painting classes at her own Studio dei Leoni on Perkins Road next to Zeeland Street Market because she loves it, because it draws her closer to him.

Sitting in the rustic, French country common room, Johnson looks at photographs of the two of them together. A wedding reception. An Italian holiday. “God, it was a nice life,” Johnson says. “Just having someone with you who you knew wanted to do all the same things you wanted to do on vacation—which was look at paintings. We had so much fun.”

Behind her sits the last painting Crespo completed before his death. Johnson recently received it back from the LSU Museum of Art where it showed as Untitled, just like Crespo had left it. Like Johnson’s birthday painting, Untitled reveals a familiar bird and feather motif. It is in transit still, it seems, not yet blessed with a permanent place on the walls of their home. Maybe it will show publicly again some day—Johnson hopes to put on a career-spanning retrospective of his work—but for now, it leans against a chest, austere and large, but curiously upside down so the feather at the center, glimmering white against a deep night sky of foreboding blacks, is not falling, but boldly floating on.

libbyjohnson.com