herb roe

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 long term historical mural projects in cities throughout the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys. In 2007 Roe began to pursue a career as a fine artist, specializing in fine art oil paintings depicting the history and culture of the American South, focusing on his adopted home in South Louisiana’s Acadiana region and his childhood home in rural Appalachian eastern Kentucky.

“My first real attempt at an original body of work was a collection of paintings and drawings in the mid 1990s. It was my first foray into "painting what I knew", and focused on my friends, family, and romantic partners going about our pursuits as late teens to early 20 something blue collar kids in decaying rust belt Appalachia. This eventually evolved into a series of intimate allegorical portrait costume dramas mismatching influences from sources as varied as baroque art, Greco Roman mythology, and Elizabethan tragedies. Which in turn led into a decade exploring the costuming and rituals of the 'courir de mardi gras' and 'boucherie' events in southern Louisiana.

For the last few years I've been working on a synthesis of these threads into works exploring my childhood home and roots in Appalachian eastern Kentucky and southern Ohio and my adult life traveling and working in the southern US, focusing on the swamps and prairies of my adopted home in south Louisiana. While technically a new body of work, in reality this is an extension of these previous bodies of work, and an elaboration of themes and subjects that I have explored since early in my career.

Unlike my previous work with the traditions of my adopted Acadiana home, these are more allegorical, metaphorical, and personal in nature. They are also what I like to describe as more "Pan-Southern" as I try elaborate on the commonalities I find between the Appalachian peoples of my youth and the Cajun community that I have become a part of as an adult. My work starts with ideas and images that strike me, and are then presented through an evolving set of personal symbols that I use as shorthand for universal concepts about the human condition in general and life in the American South in particular. The work explores themes as diverse as contemporary politics and social issues, specifically opiate addiction, suicide, racism, and environmental degradation filtered through the lens of memories from childhood, folk lore, pop songs, snippets of stoic philosophy, and anything else that happens to bubble up through my subconscious.” -Roe