herb roe
louisiana blues
ARTIST STATEMENT
“I'm a contemporary southern artist with roots in Appalachian eastern Kentucky, who now lives and works in Cajun south Louisiana. For the last few years I've been working on a pan-Southern series of oil and acrylic paintings exploring life in the south, my childhood home and roots in Appalachia, and my adulthood traveling and working in the southern US as an itinerant muralist before settling in Louisiana.
My paintings are presented through an evolving set of personal symbols that I use as shorthand for universal concepts about the human condition and life in the American South. These themes are filtered through the lens of folklore and folk songs, memories from childhood, my grandmother’s quilts, and anything else that happens to bubble up through my subconscious, set in mythic southern landscapes of foggy hills and hollers or moss-draped bayous. With this particular batch of work, I delved into my deep love of American Blues music imagery and mythology.
The works individually begin as quick notions doodled in my sketchbooks or as digital photoshop sketches, and then often ruminated on and expanded over several years time as I seek to define how best to portray the idea. Once I've decided on a composition, the idea is transferred to a canvas, in graphite or charcoal, and blocked in a grisaille tonal underpainting. In a technique based in western classical realist traditions I then build up layers of light and color in impasto and translucent oil glazes. This technique allows me to determine the subject and mood for a piece at its inception; and then to focus on achieving that effectively through use of light and color without the distractions of rearranging my compositions as the work progresses.” - Roe
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Herb Roe was born and spent his childhood in the Appalachian regions of Southern Ohio and Northeastern Kentucky. In 1992 he received a scholarship to the Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio and attended his freshman year there. In the summer of 1993 he met the Louisiana mural artist Robert Dafford. He subsequently apprenticed to and worked for Dafford for 15 years on mural projects throughout the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys. As a Dafford Muralist, Roe specialized in large scale historical mural projects, often connected with local Tourism Bureaus and Downtown Development Agencies. Many of these projects took between 5 and 10 years to complete, and ranged from 1 to 50 murals in each town. In 2007 Roe began to pursue a career as a fine artist, specializing in fine art oil paintings focusing on the life, culture, and history of the American South.
This exhibition is presented alongside the latest works from Eleanor Owen Kerr and Jacqueline Dee Parker. All works from these artists are on view, free of charge, during regular gallery hours (12 - 6 p.m., Tue - Sun) from February 27 - March 22, 2026.