There are many different kinds of mothers in the world. Spiritual mothers, earth mothers, flesh and blood mothers, mothers of creation.
Multimedia artist Elizabeth Rathbone happens to be all of the above.
Driving out to her barn studio in Clinton is like being born into a new Louisiana you forgot existed, one with dramatically rolling hills and cabins hidden among the trees. Rathbone grew up out here on 90 acres of family property populated with a pair of plantation-style homes and a barn where Rathbone lives and works..
The barn’s front doors are wide open to clear air, and New York photographer Paul Brickman, wearing a turban and a pair of round sunglasses, sits in a living room that’s decorated with a menagerie of cushions and candles. He’s one of many creative friends Rathbone made during a five-year stint in New York, where she built her career with acclaim and commissions from clients like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie-Pitt and the prince of Monaco.
“It’s just such a hustle up there,” Rathbone says of New York City living as she digs into a slice of avocado toast with fresh cilantro plucked from a glass on the kitchen table. “Down here, you have room to breathe.”
Down here, Rathbone grew up alongside her childhood neighbor, children’s book author Ben Shirley. After their “paths aligned” again over a holiday visit in 2014, the two reconnected. Not long after, Rathbone left the Big Apple behind to focus on a slower pace of life and Apoline, their sweet-tempered, newborn daughter.
Now, Rathbone paints while Apoline sways in a bright pink swing hanging from the rafters, and the sounds of birds filter into her studio.
The studio is as eclectic as the rest of her home, filled with colorful canvases full of movement in her signature textured, flowing, impressionistic painting style. Many are half-finished, and as she leads the tour, it’s easy to imagine her floating fairy-like from one project to the next, following the breeze of inspiration. The openness here is a definite shift from her cramped workspaces in the city.
Out on the acreage, she describes her concept for the property as the tour approaches vegetable patches and a wide, tree-lined pond: an artists’ residency, where artists from as close as Baton Rouge or as far as overseas can come to escape into nature and focus on their creativity.
“[The artists’ residency] is the ability to create from a free space of pure creativity instead of necessity or rush,” Rathbone says. “The inspiration is so different. In some places there’s a style to obtain or a look to have. Here, inspiration comes from yourself.”
Last fall, she had a bus of a dozen New York artists come down for a creative retreat; Brickman, currently kicked back on the porch, is here on his third solo retreat to refocus his artistic vision.
Though she lives in the Shirley family’s barn now, Rathbone is working toward buying her neighboring childhood home for artists to live and work from.
Already, the grounds feature sprawling forest trails where resident artists will collaborate on an immersive nature installation and an old church converted into a yoga and meditation space. There’s also an ancient oak Rathbone calls the Mother Tree, where one visiting artist has left an angel statue in memory of his own mother.
Rathbone has begun planting vegetable gardens and plans to bring in beehives and chickens to create a fully sustainable environment where visiting creatives can live off the land.
It’s easy to feel Rathbone’s maternal instinct to cultivate and nurture out here where she brings her own art to life, where the grounds themselves bloom with her creation. On a tour of the forest, she scoops up a handful of mud from the forest floor to praise its rejuvenative powers for the skin. She points out a deep well near an abandoned cabin where she sometimes deposits crystals. The artists who come here absorb it, and the cycle of creativity continues.
“Over there, there are some trees that were struck by lightning, and their trunks are on the ground …
I just picture people going out there with a chainsaw and making furniture out of their natural shape. I want to turn that shed into a woodshed and get a ceramics wheel out there,” Rathbone says. “I feel like here, I can become more of the artist that I am.”
Though work continues on setting up the residency, Rathbone has already hosted many more visitors and is planning an art festival for early next year to generate funds for the project. Once residents move in, portions of the profits from the pieces they create at the compound will be funneled back toward keeping it running.
“I am most excited about having people who I met from all over come here and create with me,” Rathbone says. “It’s a healing place for artists to come and get away from the noise, get away from the stress, get away from that and just be here, in nature, in silence, and see what speaks to them, and create from that space.”
This article was originally published in the August 2016 issue of 225 Magazine.
