“Auseklis Ozols – The Romantic Realism of an Artist and Teacher By John R. Kemp

In his work, the artist should be like God in creation: invisible and all-powerful . . . felt everywhere and seen nowhere – Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)

Auseklis Ozols is a consummate painter who is drawn to the beauty found in simple flowers, in the nuances of the human figure, or in the warm watery afterglow of a sunset in a misty Louisiana cypress swamp. “The world around me is what fascinates me the most,” he once explained. “Nature is found not only in the depths of a swamp but in still lifes, portraits and figure paintings. They’re all part of nature and make up the world around us.” Ozols’ philosophical mind is absorbed by the world’s metaphysical shadows, and, at the same time, it is an analytical mind that continues in what Nobel Prize winning writer Saul Bellow once described as the endless search “to find in the universe . . . what is fundamental, enduring, essential.”

Ozols’s colorful story and journey began in Strenči, Latvia, where he was born in September 1941 during the early years of World War II. His father worked as an agronomist for the Latvian government and his mother was a ceramicist and pianist. The almost genocidal war in Eastern Europe between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union forever changed life for the Ozols family. In 1940 the Soviets annexed the Baltic republics and began banishing Latvian political officials, professionals and teachers to Siberia. The German army invaded the following year and occupied the country until the Soviets retook the Baltic states in 1944. With their return, Auseklis’s father, fearing deportation to Siberia, fled to Germany just ahead of the advancing Soviet army. Trying to reach the Americans and British, they got as far as Dachau in Bavaria where they were detained for a short time and then released. The family waited out the war behind Allied lines, all the while hoping to return to a liberated and independent Latvia. But that was not to be. The Iron Curtain fell across Central Europe. In 1949, after four years in Wurzburg in the American Zone of war-torn western Germany, the family moved to Trenton, New Jersey, where the young Ozols grew up during the 1950s and the heady years of post-war America. In later life, he recalled those early years in Trenton and his introduction to art:

“After a year or two of acclamation and language adjustment, and with the help of excellent public schools, my interest in the arts was born. It was well stoked by the teachers and artists of the Trenton area. The Bucks County and Delaware Valley School of American Painting in the Trenton area was to be my first general influence and guide in my artistic career. After high school, my choice of further education was urged by many to attend the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts [PAFA], the oldest art school in America and the alma matter of my mentors. My aesthetic sensibilities were awakened at PAFA along with the University of Pennsylvania and the Tyler School of Art at Temple University.”

In 1969 Ozols’ life changed once again when he met Dode Platou of New Orleans who was visiting Philadelphia. The New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) had just named her curator of the museum’s new Wisner Wing. The two hit it off and she invited him to New Orleans to design exhibitions for the museum. Ozols arrived in the city in 1970 and immediately immersed himself in the city’s art scene. He designed a show at NOMA that taught young people about the various forms of modern art. He also worked for the prestigious Koch and Wilson architectural firm, making presentation drawings. Other endeavors included establishing a Salon des Refuses at the gallery of the once prominent New Orleans art collector William Groves. What was to be a one- year stay in the city became permanent when he met and married Gwendolyn Laan in 1972. Soon after, the young couple set up a studio in New Orleans while Auseklis – a three-time winner at juried exhibitions sponsored by the National Academy of Design in New York City – continued to spend time in Philadelphia, painting designs and murals and doing commercial art.

By the late 1970s, however, Auseklis and Gwendolyn had decided New Orleans needed an art school that stressed the classical and traditional academic methods that he had learned at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. “We had art schools in the area,” he recalled, “but they didn’t emphasize certain things I thought were important: the classical disciplines, life drawing, anatomy, color theory, strong courses in design. We’ve had hundreds of years of great painters working and handing down information and sharing things they had learned. During the latter part of the twentieth century, and especially in the 1960s, most university art schools threw it all out. They started from scratch, and it’s very sad. That’s the purpose of the academy – to reinstate some of the wonderful gifts passed down to us. Basically, we teach students how to see from nature. Nature is the great teacher. Painting is the art of seeing.” Students at the academy are first taught that a successful painting must be technically good, aesthetically pleasing and emotional. “It’s a balance of those three,” he explained. “After they learn that, then we get down to the serious study of art.” You can teach technique, he contends, but not the spark.

In 1978 the Ozols opened New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts in an airy loft above an Italian restaurant on Magazine Street in uptown New Orleans. For two years all went well for the school and for the Ozols. Then tragedy struck twice: First, Gwendolyn was killed in a shooting accident on April 12, 1980, when a next-door neighbor loaded a pistol and accidently fired a shot out his second story window. The bullet went through the Ozols’ living room window, striking and killing Gwendolyn. “It was a great tragedy in my life and still is,” as he recalled those early years. Yet, he continued to paint and devote his time to the academy and three daughters, Saskia, Aija and Charlotte.

Excerpt from the the book, Kemp, John R. Auseklis Ozols, the Romantic Realism of An Artist and Teacher. New Orleans: Pelican Publishing Co. 2018. Print