Earl "Boogi" Hebert finds inspiration, and the spirit of his late father, painting through the night on his back porch.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Written by Nathan Stubbs
Earl "Boogi" Hebert remembers the day he started painting: March 14, 2006, the day his father, Earl Sr., passed away. Without really knowing why, he took out the old brushes his dad had handed down to him and got to work.
Earl "Boogi" Hebert finds inspiration, and the spirit of his late father, painting through the night on his back porch.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Written by Nathan Stubbs
Photos by Nathan Stubbs
Earl "Boogi" Hebert remembers the day he started painting: March 14, 2006, the day his father, Earl Sr., passed away. Without really knowing why, he took out the old brushes his dad had handed down to him and got to work.
His first painting, titled "Souls," still hangs in his home's spare bedroom. "That just came out," Boogi says, looking up in wonder. "That was when he died. That was the day he died. I painted on a little cinder block, and it washed away so I started painting on this. We stopped at Hobby Lobby and picked up a canvas, and I just started painting. I never, ever, ever thought about painting [before]."
The spare bedroom is now overflowing with colorful eye-popping art. His work, and his dad's, covers the walls and is beginning to stack up in every corner. The full spectrum of the Heberts' styles is represented, from Earl's primitive Cajun scenes, to Boogi's wild folk art: roosters named "Black" and "Elvis," "Voo Dudes" in different New Orleans scenes, and his signature painted bead board ensembles of angular guitars and accordions.
"Souls" is unlike much of Hebert's later work. The paint applied liberally in wavy strokes, "Souls" depicts two black men dressed in stylish brightly colored suits sitting with a younger boy in a beret. "That little dude to the left, that's me," Hebert says. "That's the little young one, and then the middle one is my godfather, Preston Guidry, and then the dude to the right is my dad. It's two old men with a young one and the two old men talking. The young one's just gotta listen. Don't interrupt."
Boogi has a clear reverence for his father and godfather as elder statesmen in Lafayette, and the men who taught him about his own Cajun heritage. Guidry opened the original Pete's and was a partner in The Keg. Earl Hebert Sr. owned a grocery store on St. Antoine before opening Beef and Ale on Johnston Street and then later partnered with Charlie Goodsen and Ken Veron to open Judge Roy Bean's, which later became Café Vermilionville. He then moved to New Orleans, where he was known as "the Cajun," to paint full time.
Painting isn't the only art form Boogi inherited from his father. His day job has him flipping the renowned burgers at his restaurant, The Corner 
Bar, in Breaux Bridge. The restaurant's rustic walls also serve as his gallery; visitors often come for lunch and go home with a little lagniappe.
The junior Hebert has always danced to the beat of his own drum, at times quite literally. When he was still a baby, his relatives would always comment on how he often appeared to be trying to dance. The name Boogi stuck. To this day, Boogi has a propensity to never sit still - and rarely sleep.
He does his painting at night, out on the back porch, after his wife, Cheryl, has already gone to bed. "During the day I do some rough stuff," he says, "priming, getting stuff ready, but then at night when the restaurant's closed, I don't have to worry about bread, ground meat, who's not going to show up at work, if we had a busy day. At night I just put on my shorts with the paint all over, put my radio on, and just go at it."
Sometimes [Cheryl] wakes up and I've got four of 'em finished and that's when she's impressed. Because I can get into it for four or five hours without anybody interrupting me, that's what I like. But if somebody walks in and starts talking to me, I can't paint."
What he paints is rarely preconceived. His subject matter is often whatever jumps in his head. Cajun and zydeco scenes, and song lyrics ranging from Clifton Chenier ("I'm a hog for you baby") to Marcy Playground ("Disco Lemondade") often find their way onto the canvas. So do a lot of the colorful 1970s fashions he recalls from his childhood growing up in north Lafayette. "I grew up in a black community, all black," he says. "So when I was young I used to see a lot of the polyesters when these cats would dress up on Saturdays and Sundays. I didn't have clothes like the black folks. Their clothes were polyester, it was colorful, red suits, green suits with yellow stripes, that's what I saw. Partying, big parties, bands playing all the time."
Because of the stream-of-conscious nature of his work, Boogi can rarely do commissioned pieces. "I don't like when they want me to paint what they want me to paint though," he explains. "I'm not into that shit. They want me to go paint their back yard or their dog or that's not the kind of painter I am. I paint what I want to paint, and if you like it that's fine, if you just want to look at it and laugh, that's fine, if you want to buy it and bring it home, that's fine. I just can't paint your dog. It's gonna end up lookin like my dog. It's just whatever's in my mind; it won't let me paint what you want dude. Sorry."
That became an issue last year when the Breaux Bridge Crawfish Festival hired him to do their poster. Because it was the 150th anniversary of the town bridge, the festival also wanted him to paint a scenic image of the bridge - something Boogi wasn't accustomed to painting. "I was a little nervous," he says, "and I just, I was trying to do my best. And just one night, it started coming to me easy, and the stuff that was coming out on the canvas, I had never done that before, and when my wife woke up the next day she said, Wow, that looks like Earl's stuff right there.' And I was like, I don't know what it was last night,' I said, but I felt something. He helped me or something.'
"My stuff is kind of funny a lot of times because my dogs might look a little odd," he continues. "My conception of how things go is usually not too good, but then that night I don't know, he put that bridge up for me, and all the sides, my color's were blending. I went off, and that was the last time I felt that, but you know I took what I felt that night and I try to put that in my everyday painting now. But I'd like to feel that feeling again. That was nice."