Bayou Artist | Natalie Armstrong

article by STARLA GATSON
photography by KELLY MOORE CLARK

Natalie Armstrong loves juxtaposition – she is a collage artist, layering images on top of each other on wood panels.  Her current works blend burlesque with the bayou.  

Natalie Armstrong loves juxtaposition, the concept Merriam-Webster defines as “placing two or more things side by side often to compare or contrast or to create an interesting effect.” She shares this with BayouLife while she sits on the sage green couch in her living room. Like every other room in the house, its walls are adorned with a coat of bright paint, family photos, funky artwork, and fun patterns and prints. 

The outside of the Armstrong home is the opposite of the interior. Where fun patterns and prints reign supreme on the inside, the exterior has a more minimalist vibe with white paint and black accents. Whether these design choices were purposeful or merely a coincidence, it makes sense given the artist’s appreciation for uniting contrasting themes in her artwork. 

Armstrong is a collage artist, layering images on top of each other on wood panels and selling them through her business, ¡Fifi Gi! Storied Art Collages. Whether you see her art online at www.fifigicollageart.com or in person at a local festival or exhibition, you’ll likely notice the collision of two seemingly incompatible things right away. 

Take Armstrong’s current works in progress, for instance. It’s a series blending burlesque with the bayou where the Metairie-born artist finds painted images of burlesque performers, customizes them, and strategically places them in a nature scene. With her skillful eye, creative vision, the magic of PhotoShop, and careful cutting and gluing, a collection of dissimilar images comes together to create a new one that blends seamlessly and tells whatever story Armstrong wants it to. 

Women tend to be the subjects of Armstrong’s “retro-femme-maximalist” art characterized by contradictions for several reasons. The first, Armstrong says, is because, “I think [women] are amazing,” before going on to explain that the women in her life are proof of this statement. The second reason women are the primary focus of Armstrong’s collages is because of their complexity.

“We have the ability to occupy so many states in one period of time,” says Armstrong. “Both/and versus either/or. We can be everything. We are these beautiful, mystical creatures.” 

Armstrong is a full-time artist, wife, and mother, spending her days making art that celebrates women, tells stories, and shows her daughters just how many layers their mother has — “I like that my girls can see there is more to me than just ‘mom,’” she says.

She loves the life she’s created, sharing that she finally feels as if she’s doing what she’s always wanted to. However, if you had asked Armstrong’s younger self if she imagined herself doing what she does now, she probably would have said no. 

Thanks to her grandmother, Gladys Goyeneche, art was all around during Armstrong’s childhood in South Louisiana. Goyeneche, whom Armstrong affectionately called Gigi, was an artist, often using acrylics to paint fun, eccentric images on surfaces like roof shingles. 

“She was this magical woman, and I always wanted to be like her,” Armstrong says of her grandmother after explaining, “Her house was filled with Louis Icart paintings, Betty Boop — she loved to paint Betty Boop —, and Clementine Hunter. Looking back, I realized how much of that influences my stuff today. Imagine an Icart woman mixed with a Betty Boop. Sometimes, when you get the bayou scenes, there’s a little bit of Clementine in there.”

Though it’s clear now to Armstrong how much Gigi’s style and artistry influenced her art practice, it wasn’t always so obvious. In fact, Armstrong explains, for a while, she had no art practice to influence.

Despite being surrounded by visual art, Armstrong’s initial interest was in writing. After graduating high school, Armstrong began attending Louisiana State University to study creative writing and anthropology. Once she’d earned her degree in 2007, Armstrong headed to Costa Rica, where she planned to teach English.

“I ended up staying in Central America for, like, six months and backpacking with some of the people I met there, teaching a little bit along the way and living this vagabond life,” Armstrong recalls. 

At the end of the six months, when Armstrong returned stateside, she continued to rack up airline miles. First, she headed to New York, where she worked at a catering company until she’d saved enough for her next adventure: a trip to Thailand, where she would teach at an orphanage. Three months and a trek through Laos and Cambodia later, Armstrong made her way back to New Orleans before heading off again to teach at a university in Oaxaca, Mexico. 

“That was one of the coolest experiences of my life,” she says of her time there. “The people there were so loving and kind.” 

California was Armstrong’s next step, first to a teaching job in San Diego, then to a Masters program at Humboldt State University. With a graduate degree and teaching experience under her belt, she came back to the Big Easy and accepted a position teaching at Delgado Community College. Around this time, things began to shift for Armstrong.

“I had a problem with addiction that would come and go,” she says, thinking back to the time she spent moving around to teach. “There would be periods where it was kind of heavy. If I moved or did a new thing, it would get a little better. Then, it would find me again.”

It found her again while at Delgado. She recalls catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror one day while getting ready to teach her class and being taken aback by who was looking back at her. 

“I didn’t look like myself anymore,” she says. “So, I asked for help, and that’s what brought me to [North Louisiana], to a treatment center in Rayville for three months.” 

Being at the treatment center and then an all-women’s halfway house was a humbling experience, Armstrong notes, explaining that learning how to handle life sober was like “learning how to walk again.” Fortunately, the women she crossed paths with during that time offered her invaluable support, Armstrong explains, noting, “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for [those women],” and sharing that much of her adoration for and reverence of women stems from the encounters she had with those during treatment. 

Pursuing sobriety was the first step down a new path for Armstrong, one that led her to marriage, motherhood, and, eventually, the establishment of ¡Fifi Gi! While preparing for the birth of her first child — named Gigi, after Armstrong’s beloved grandmother — Armstrong fell in love with decorating. 

“[Designing her nursery] awoke something in me, I think, that I hadn’t been in touch with,” she recalls.

However, she didn’t respond to what had awakened within her until the birth of her second daughter, Phoebe. At that time, Armstrong was nearly finished with a respiratory therapy program. She’d chosen the field because it seemed like the “adult” decision, plus satisfied her desire to connect with and help people. 

But as the end of the program loomed, Armstrong was uncertain it was the right fit for her. She found herself going back to the decorating and designing she’d become passionate about during her first pregnancy. After a conversation with her husband — “He was really supportive, and I’m very grateful,” she recalls, — Armstrong decided to withdraw from the respiratory therapy program and launch a furniture flipping business. She would call it ¡Fifi Gi! after both of her daughters and would sell “cool, wacky” furniture she redesigned. 

“I loved flipping furniture,” Armstrong shares before adding with a laugh, “I still love it, [but] it’s backbreaking — literally, my back would hurt so bad.” 

Her flipped pieces were elaborate, often involving decoupage with fun patterned paper, fringe, sequins, and even painted murals. A fellow artist saw them and suggested Armstrong do exactly what she was doing but on wood panels instead, reasoning that art pieces might sell better than furniture. The thought of doing this, switching her focus from reimagining furniture to creating original pieces of art was intimidating at first, Armstrong says.

“When I think of artists, I think of my grandma and people like Frida Kahlo, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Clementine Hunter,” she says. “They are these amazing people. How can I be that?”

A bout of impostor syndrome didn’t stop Armstrong from moving forward with her friend’s suggestion, though it did prolong her self-declaration of being an artist — “For the longest time, I wouldn’t call myself an artist. I called myself an artisan,” she admits, laughing. Armstrong brought her decoupage collage abilities to wood panels and hasn’t looked back. 

“It’s [rewarding] to bring my ideas to life,” she says of embracing her identity as an artist and operating ¡Fifi Gi! Storied Collage Art full-time, as she’s done since 2022. “It’s the closest thing I’ve ever done to, ‘This is who I am.’ [My dad] loved his job and always said you should love what you do. I just didn’t know what I wanted to do. It was hard to find, but I feel like I finally found it.”