Bayou Artist | The Gray Space

article by Starla Gatson
photography by Kelly Moore Clark

Gray Risinger always had a love for art, but his journey to being a full-time working artist has been one filled with happiness, failure, a hiatus and a resurgence.

Ask Gray Risinger to sum himself up, and he’ll do it in two sentences: “I love my family, and I love art.” Elaborating on the latter statement, he says that to him, creating is like breathing, it’s something he has to do, and he’s felt that way for years. The 1987 Neville High School graduate was among Monroe City Schools’ first Talented Art students. Before participating in the program, he was a pretty creative kid. But while in Talented Art and under the instruction of Linda Snider-Ward, Risinger’s inner artist awakened. He wanted to make art professionally, and he decided heading to art school was the best way to make that happen.

Considering Risinger is currently a full-time working artist, his intuition seems to have been correct. His work is often shown and sold in local venues, like Courtyard on Cotton and the Northeast Louisiana Art Council Gallery. He even participates in the bimonthly Downtown Gallery Crawl, noting to BayouLife that he’ll be set up at the Alley Park Gallery at the next Crawl in October. He’s successful now, but he explains that the journey wasn’t as simple as going to art school, graduating, and jumping right into a successful career.

After receiving his high school diploma, Risinger spent two years at the University of Louisiana Monroe – then, it was known as Northeast Louisiana University, NLU for short – before heading off to spend another two at an art school in Dallas, Texas. When he came back to Monroe, Risinger was determined to start creating. But he wasn’t naïve. Because he didn’t expect to achieve his dreams overnight, he picked up another job to support himself because “sometimes, you’ve got to have another job.”

Initially, he took on graphic design work, though he says he hadn’t enjoyed graphic design very much in college. “I didn’t like it at all,” he declares.

It wasn’t very long before Risinger realized his feelings toward graphic design hadn’t changed much since then. So, he left the design job and joined the team at his in-laws’ family business: Shipley Donut Shop. The donut shop became his primary means of income. All the while, though, Risinger was making art on the side. Shipley was stable, but he hadn’t given up on his dream.

“I thought eventually I could do this as a career,” he explains.

The part-time artist sold a few pieces here and there, and his surrealist, “Salvador Dali-ish” paintings caught the attention of local art icon Edmund Williamson. Williamson took Risinger under his wing, mentoring him and even giving him his first solo exhibition in 2000. He couldn’t deny things were going well.

Unfortunately, though, not well enough. Risinger’s art didn’t support him enough to justify pursuing it full-time, and that fact left him a bit disenchanted with the art world. He stuck with it as long as he could, but in 2007, he’d had enough. The lack of substantial progress was disheartening, he remembers, and he felt it was time to step away from painting.

So then, at age 39, Risinger put down the paintbrush and grabbed a guitar for the very first time. The more he strummed, the more inspired he felt.

“Learning my instrument and how to sing was really exciting,” he says. “It was learning a new art form and being around other musicians that really inspired me.”

By 2009, Risinger had evolved from a total music newbie to a full-fledged performer. He was playing gigs regularly and became heavily involved in the local music scene. It wasn’t like anything he’d been accustomed to, he shares, but it scratched his artistic itch and satisfied his inherent need to create.

Risinger says he split his time between his family, Shipley Donuts, and music for about four years. But around 2013, his interest in painting began slowly creeping back in. The life of a musician was getting tiring, he says before adding, “I started missing the part of painting where it was just me and the canvas instead of a bunch of people partying and stuff.”

It also didn’t hurt that, around that time, the Monroe native’s sister and brother-in-law opened the MAD Gallery. He had been to a few shows there, even performing at a few of them, and each time he went, he says he couldn’t help but think, “Wow, I want to do this again.”

Besides, he adds, “I knew I was never going to be a famous musician. [Painting is] more of a legacy I can leave for my kids and grandkids.” After all, the memories of his musical performances would eventually fade. But if properly taken care of, his art could last forever.

It was settled: Risinger was going to start painting again. He always assumed he’d come back to it anyway, and with the family selling the donut shop, there was no better time for him to try yet again to make art his full-time job.

Taking time away from painting did Risinger good. Upon restarting, he realized his painting style had changed – “I guess because I learned how to play music, I wanted to learn how to paint landscapes and abstracts because I’d never done that before,” he muses.

His approach to painting changed, too.

“I think [my hiatus] made me much more disciplined as an artist,” Risinger admits. “I don’t know if you’ve ever tried [playing guitar], but it’s painful at first. I had to go through all that, and I think the music made me much more disciplined, organized, and focused on the task at hand.”

That newfound discipline has come in handy for Risinger, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. He shares that focusing on painting daily during that time saved him, plus it left him with a body of work he felt comfortable sharing with the public. Post-pandemic, Risinger began showing art again. It wasn’t easy, he says, commenting, “It’s more nerve-wracking showing art than getting onstage and playing music. You’re more exposed [with art]. You can hide behind a guitar or mic stand, but when it’s your art, you’re laid bare.”

No matter how anxiety-inducing it may be, showing art, much like making it, is something Risinger feels he has to do. He’s been doing it since the end of the pandemic, and one of his most notable shows was a solo exhibition at the Northeast Louisiana Art Council Gallery in December 2023.

“That was a big, big moment for me,” says Risinger. “I said, ‘I think I got this now. I think I can do this.’ After a lot of years of doing it and finally being accepted, I thought I was finally getting the recognition I’d been working for.”

The momentum that show brought is still alive and well, and Risinger is still pursuing full-time artistry at full speed. He spends his time using oil paints to create Louisiana landscapes, working to capture the thick, humid air the region’s known for and capture a tumultuous, somewhat edgy feel in the clouds – “It’s like a storm’s coming or something. I like [those pieces] to always be hopeful with an edge of, ‘Maybe not,’” Risinger explains.

When he isn’t creating landscapes, Risinger is diving into abstract work, an artistic style he says he finds himself gravitating toward more than usual these days.

“I love [abstracts] because I can start with total chaos and try to bring order to it,” he notes. “I like that a lot.”

Switching back and forth between the two styles keeps him from becoming stagnant, and though abstract art primarily has Risinger’s heart currently, the jury’s still out on how long that will last. But whatever he does, whether continuing to go back and forth between the two styles, becoming more deeply enmeshed in the abstract world, or going back to landscapes or even surrealism, Risinger will no doubt keep creating.

When asked what local art lovers can look forward to seeing from him, he replies simply, “A lot of work. I’m working hard.” That’s not surprising, though. As he said earlier, he can’t help but create work. He has to. For him, running his brush back and forth across a blank canvas is as natural and essential as inhaling and exhaling.