NFS. The 16" x 20" acrylic was composed solely to satisfy a local literary festival poster criteria, that is, “celebrat[ing] the art of Southern storytelling and the beauty of the Teche region.” 40 hours to complete. Like the Bayou Teche painting, the images flowing from the bookshelves reflect the area's connections to classical literature, history, myth, music, mystery, and culinary invention, specifically:

1.  The Chitimacha origin story of the Bayou Teche, of battling a winding venomous tence (teche/snake), carving out the of the bayou’s course.

2.  From chefs Leah Chase and John Folse to the area’s Cajun Cooking (1990) and early Cajuns creating sustenance delicacies with an onion, celery, and bell pepper “trinity,” the kitchen is a pivotal setting to the area’s storytelling.

3. The earliest storytelling, of course, is musical. Blues, jazz, and zydeco are the talking drums of South Louisiana. Thus, the musical notes on the painting are drawn from New Iberia resident Bunk Johnson’s composition Careless Love.

4.  Of fiction and filmmaking, the Teche area’s “electric mist” has been captured as a Hallmark Christmas feature and is ripe with fictional plot lines, including James Lee Burke’s character, Son Holland, who escapes from a Louisiana chain gang.

5.  Along with the origins of the bayou, South Louisiana, too, has its own Sasquatch folklore. The wolfman, Rougarou, prowls Louisiana swamps. While the Rougarou fest hails from Houma, listening to and watching the Teche after midnight reveals the legendary creature often prowls here, too.

6.  From Lord Byron’s The Corsair (1814) to Lee Falks children’s trilogy Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (1984), the central character, a pirate, privateer and slave trader, Jean Lafitte (c. 1780 – c. 1823), makes his mark, too, within New Iberian tales as noted on the New Iberia’s newest historical marker.

7.   And a nod to classic poetry, St. Martinville’s historical marker of the 1755 Acadian exile from Nova Scotia, celebrates Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem Evangeline (1847). Represented in the painting, Evangeline (Emmeline Labiche) leans against the live oak in her search for Gabriel (Louis Arceneaux).

8.     Finally, historic dates on the volumes on the bottom right shelf in the painting represent related aesthetic milestones: a. 1779, the first settlement of “Nueva Iberia” by Spanish colonists led by Lt. Col. Francisco Bouligny; b. 1814, following the Louisiana Purchase, the French “Nouvelle Iberie “ (then, incorporated in 1839 as New Iberia); and c. 2016, donated to 10th Annual Books Along the Teche Literary Festival)