The art of the cinder

It was just a cinderblock cube on a busy highway in Gonzales. Just flat, gritty squares built in the 1950s. Probably could’ve been knocked down. Pushed aside for a Wendy’s or a Burger King or any other joint where you can get what you want right now.

But this was Craig Black’s dream house, and he knew it the minute he saw it.

Its beauty, he recalled during a recent visit, was in those cinderblocks. Others saw an old pile of bricks. Black saw a canvas.

“You could sculpt right on them,” he says.

Black spends his days working as the caretaker at Houmas House Plantation and Gardens, a sprawling, antebellum sugarcane estate on River Road with acre upon acre of sculpted gardens and waterways. By night, he abandons himself in a flow of images that he unleashes in concrete, paint, wood, glass and other materials.

The “House on 44,” as it’s come to be called, has a surreal, sculpted concrete facade that blends the fantastic and the earthy. Blue vines, trees and other natural elements arc upward to meet a stylized sun wearing shades and a knowing grin. A wizard with an owl on his shoulder presides over the scene, though he’s smaller in scale than the other elements covering the house.

Black has a passion for different tactile experiences. From the road—if you slow down enough—this sense jumps out at you. Take time to run your hands over the walls of the house-turned-sculpture, and its contours and shapes grab the imagination.

Black constructed his house mostly at night, after his work at the plantation was done. Perhaps this is reason the tactile experience of his creation stands out.

Black, 56, walks the grounds of Houmas House in Chuck Taylor basketball shoes, jeans, wire-rimmed glasses, a cowboy hat, a tamed mane of white hair and a longish beard that dances when he laughs. He points out one landscaping project after another. Scattered across the grounds are waterfalls with rocks Black sculpted by hand.

The artist prefers an intuitive approach to his work, no matter the scale.

“You can’t think,” Black says. “It looks staid if you think.”

His goal, along with Houmas House owner Kevin Kelly, is to bring back the glory days of the plantation, when artists and writers sheltered there in cooler months. The two of them have worked together to reinvent the space.

“He wakes up dreaming just like I do,” Black says. When Kelly bought the property five years ago, Black had already spent a generation tending it.

Black recalls wondering how much creativity Kelly would be willing to apply to the grounds of Houmas House—whether his vision would stack up to what Black thought could be possible. He remembers asking Kelly, “Are we going to play hardball here, or are we just going to keep rolling socks?”

For the answer, just take a look at the team’s latest work in progress, a real-life re-visioning of Monet’s “Water Lilies” series, complete with the steep, arched bridge.

Black’s painting studio is located at the back of the Houmas House property. His paintings are driven by the figures they depict, a wide variety of characters and moods that beg viewers to linger and follow the narrative.

There’s Buddy Guy grooving at the House of Blues in cobalt hues. There’s Eve at the center of a world of knowledge she’s unleashed in mostly blacks, whites and grays, but for the blood-red apple she’s dropped that appears at the bottom of the canvas.

Black doesn’t plan his paintings. Rather, he lets them tumble from his subconscious as he listens to the blues. When he’s not painting, he’s reading. Many of his paintings, including a series on Louisiana Native Americans, are inspired by research.

“Most of the time, I don’t get where I was going, but I’m always delighted with where I got to,” he says. “The story starts when you start working.”

Black, a graduate of Broadmoor High, married his wife Linda when they were 19 and 17, respectively. She recalls that he was always bent to make art. When the then-newlyweds moved into a house Linda’s father had saved for her on North Foster more than 35 years ago, Black immediately painted a mural of dragons and fairies on the exterior walls.

“I knew what I was getting into,” she says.

Now, every single day is an adventure.

“Every day, I’ve managed to do at least one thing nobody else has done,” Black says. That’s his definition of success.