Painting The Town

The Times Picayune
Saturday, February 21, 1998

RANDY FRECHETTE PUTS ACTION AND ENERGY ON CANVAS – AND HE FINDS PLENTY OF IT IN NEW ORLEANS

By CHRISTOPHER ROSE
Staff writer  

Randy Frechette has never been coy about his artistic talents. When he was a kid on the East Coast, his family moved so often that he wound up attending 11 different schools, so he found himself using his drawings as a way to lure friends. Years later, earning his keep as a waiter in Orlando , Fla. , Frechette continued his none-too-subtle approach to art by setting up his studio in the front window of a music club. There, he patented his own style of art, a mixture of musical energy and oil painting he likes to call eye candy.

It all began one night when a Boston band called the Heavy Metal Horns was booked at Eric's Downtown Blues and Jazz Cafe. Frechette had seen the band once before and was blown away by its wall-of-horns sound and the energy it kicked up in performance. He decided to try to capture that essence in a painting. "I was pretty illiterate to music at that point," he says. "I had no idea what I was doing, but I pulled it off. All these colors came out of me. I'd never used so much color before. I used the color to portray energy and sounds. It was great. I started experiencing these wonderful sensations . . . kind of hard to describe, really."

The result was a lively, impressionistic rendering of live action, sort of a rock 'n' roll version of the work of famed sports event painter Leroy Nieman.

"I hear the Leroy Neiman comparison all the time," Frechette says with a roll of the eyes. "I guess I could do worse." Frechette, 27, who signs his work "Frenchy," is, then, a performance artist in the most literal sense of the term. He paints performances. Standing on platforms amid swaying crowds, he dances with his palette and does band portraits. His easels inevitably draw crowds and he becomes part of the scene, part of the band; he says: "I'm a musician; I play brush."

At concert's end, he has completed another painting. Just another day at the office.

He got locked into this routine on the Orlando music scene and people who took notice of him all said the same thing: "You should go to New Orleans ."

He took their advice a year ago, arriving in town the day before the Super Bowl, in a Ryder truck full of paintings and clothes.

That weekend, he had the fortune to discover that hip hop blues artist G. Love was playing in town. Frechette had painted him in Florida and got his permission to do the same here. People took notice and he started meeting musicians and music club owners and in the past year has become a fixture at clubs like the House of Blues, Tipitina's, Mermaid Lounge, the Maple Leaf and the Howlin' Wolf, juking with his hips and shoulders about while mixing canvases full of images of musical performances.

He has painted dozens of local acts - the Neville Brothers, Anders Osborne, ReBirth Brass Band, to name a few - and a load of touring national acts, from REO Speedwagon to Emmylou Harris. Blues Traveler liked his work so much that the band invited him to accompany part of its tour. MCI hired him to paint the Eagles reunion show at the House of Blues last fall and made limited edition prints out of it. One thing leads to another. A shipping company executive saw his work and said, "It would be cool if you could do a picture of boats with that same kind of energy." So he painted some ships.

He did the commemorative poster for Jeff Fest this fall. There's talk of a gig in Vegas, and the Beach Boys were said to be interested in a piece.

During the year he has been in New Orleans , he has completed 70 to 80 canvases, selling well over half of them to the musicians themselves.

Frechette is no dilettante; these paintings are his sole means of income. It's his job, and a great revenge on the only art instructor he ever had, a guy back at a technical college in the East, who told him: "If you think you're going to make a living creating your own ideas on canvas, you're nuts. It's impossible. You need to do commercial work."

Bah.

Frechette would next like to branch into studio work, away from crowds, to see how the tranquillity would affect his work, but that luxury comes later. "I like working in the studio, it's intimate," he says. "I've done so many bands that I long to do that painting that is in my head, in my soul, instead of on stage, but, for now, I have to pay my bills. I want to buy a house here. I feel the pull of this city. It is a place to create."