Dutreix is taking classes at NOCCA, defining her career in art
Brigitte “Gigi” Dutreix has found her way to express her feelings.
Whether she feels happy, unhappy or indifferent, Dutreix sketches things to reflect her mood and she has a way of expressing every emotion on paper.
The Destrehan High School (DHS) graduate said she’s been that way for as long as she can remember. In third grade or so, she remembered the lights going out one night and becoming afraid. Her mom told her to draw a sun and that would make her happy.
It worked, and she credited this experience with making her an artist.
“I draw every moment that I can, even when I’m not supposed to,” Dutreix said.
Despite the inner push to draw, she considers herself more of a trained artist than a natural one. She said she never knew the mistakes she was making when she drew, so she had to learn and that makes her more trained.
She has taken art classes in school, but she is also a student at NOCCA or New Orleans Center of Creative Arts. A school, she said, that operates under a different than traditional artistic discipline.
‘I’ve met a lot of great instructors there,” Dutreix said. “Each class was different like 2-D drawing everything or 3-D where we went and worked with sculpture.
The program is very diverse and sometimes you can be a little uncomfortable, because you you’re not used to it. But the great thing is all you can learn, and how one medium affects another.”
She explains having diversity can root out whichever medium you’re most comfortable with.
“I used to have a friend who thought he was an oil painter,” she said. “But, in the end, he found out he was really a photographer. He built a darkroom in his house.”
Dutreix described her art form as sequential arts or one piece that follows another.
For example, comic book art tells a story frame by frame. But also Warhol tells the same type of story, albeit much larger and not as often.
Richard “Doc” Fisher said she is one of the brightest students it has ever been his privileged to have in his class. Apparently the students feel the same way, last year “Gigi,” as she prefers to be called was awarded the 2015 Talented Art Student Award… by her peers.
Fisher said the night he gave her the award he stated, she stood out among her peers since early childhood. Dutriex is leaving Destrehan High School and attending the Savannah College of Art and Design, or SCAD as it is commonly known. According to Fisher, SCAD is to art school, what Harvard is to law school.
“It’s incredibly difficult to get into,’ Fisher said. “ In fact in my teaching career I’ve only had one other student get accepted into SCAD. Yeah, she’s the best.”
Dutriex said she really wants to work on comic books sometime down the road or 3even better, work on a convention panel just talking about comic books and art.
“I think it would be so cool if people wanted to talk to me, “she said, adding, “they could talk to anyone and they’d pick me, I think I’d really like that.
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