by Wesley Harris
Loretta Shadow Owens was sitting in a comfortable armchair when I found a few minutes to visit with her, her art studio buzzing with the warmth of old friends and family.
I had waited my turn, astonished at what had to be 1,000 paintings, most in a style I’ve labeled “abstract folk art.”
The crowd had thinned some, though people were still drifting in and out, stopping to hug her, to talk a while, to laugh over old memories, and in many cases, to carry home a piece of her art.
Around us, paintings covered nearly every inch of wall space, display panel, and tabletop— years and years of Loretta’s imagination, memory, and unmistakable style gathered in one place.
She called the gathering her “living wake.”
A traditional wake, of course, comes after someone has died. Friends and family gather, stories are told, memories are shared, and the person being remembered is present only in those hearts and voices.
Loretta decided she would rather be there for the stories.
Getting older, as we all do, she knew the time had come to begin parting with the extensive collection of artwork she had created over many years. Around three to four thousand pieces, according to her daughter Megan. Rather than leave that burden to her children as they settled her estate someday, she chose to do something both practical and deeply personal. With help from her friends and family, she organized her studio, displayed her paintings, and invited people to come by while she could still greet them herself.
On the first evening of the wake planned for three days, scores of people came through — old friends, family members, some from out of state — to spend time with Loretta and, if they wished, take home a piece of her art.
But it was more than an art sale.
It was a reunion, a remembrance. It was Loretta’s life painted in color and conversation.
For me, visiting with Loretta was not a proper interview. It was talking with an old friend.
When my wife and I first married, we lived next to Loretta’s parents, Hale and Margaret Shadow, on Bonner Street. You could not have asked for better neighbors. Loretta’s children visited their grandparents often, and we watched them grow up in that casual, front-yard way neighbors once enjoyed. Sometimes they wandered over, becoming part of those early married years when the neighborhood felt like an extended family.
My connection to the Shadows went back even further. My father had worked for Hale Shadow and his brother Glen for a time at the Ruston Coca-Cola Bottling Company. Each brother had a beautiful farm where I spent many Saturdays exploring while my dad picked up extra income mowing and repairing things. Before we moved next door to Hale and Margaret, I already felt connected to the family.
That kind of connection is hard to explain unless you grew up in a place like Ruston, where families, businesses, churches, schools, and neighborhoods overlap through the years until local history begins to feel like family history.
Loretta understands that feeling well.
As we talked, we reminisced about her parents, her family, and the Ruston we both remembered. Then the conversation turned to my work preserving local history, and Loretta’s eyes began to sparkle.
She told me about places from Ruston’s past she had long wanted to paint but had never been able to find photographs of places like Hood’s Drive-In, the Post Office Café, and Greasy Bill’s Barbecue.
Hopefully her family will forgive me for what happened next, since they are trying to reduce her massive inventory of artwork. But I told Loretta I had photographs of all the places she mentioned.
Images I pulled up on my cell phone animated her. There we sat, surrounded by decades of her completed paintings, talking about the ones still waiting to be born.
“Please send them to me,” she said, urging me to text photos of the Ruston she grew up in.
So, in the middle of a living wake meant partly to help dispose of a lifetime of art, I may have planted the seeds for a whole new collection.
For Loretta, Ruston has always had that kind of pull. She grew up with that sense of place, and though life offered her chances to leave, Ruston kept calling her back.
“There was a college in Georgia I fell in love with,” she recalled during our conversation. “But Ruston kept pulling me back.”
After graduating from Louisiana Tech, she had opportunities for jobs out of state.
“I just couldn’t leave Ruston,” she said.
That attachment shows in her work and in her life.
Loretta’s art ranges widely. Some pieces are pure abstract. Others capture Ruston personalities, local landmarks, animals, people, memories, and scenes that feel familiar even when they are filtered through her own distinctive imagination.
She does not claim to paint things exactly as they are.
“I don’t do anything real,” she said. “If the assignment is to do it real, mine is semi-real.”
“I tell people I’m a wild life artist,” she said, “and of course they immediately think of feathers and fur. And then I go, ‘I don’t paint animals, I paint life wild.’”
Loretta’s style fails to fit neatly into one category — part semi-abstract, part folk art, part expressionist memory painting. Her work is less concerned with strict realism than with relationships — between shapes, colors, people, places, and memories.
“Abstract art is one of the hardest things to do,” she said. “You draw the shape and then you draw the shape next to it and you draw shape relationships.”
Then, as Loretta often does, she turned the thought into something larger.
“I realize that’s a very spiritual thing,” she said, “relationships and making relationships, because that’s the only thing we can take with us to heaven are the relationships we build.”
That idea seemed especially fitting in a room full of her paintings and people who had come not just to buy art, but mostly to be with her.
The art has taken her beyond canvas and drawing paper. Over the years, she has written a children’s book, compiled a cookbook, and used her artwork on T-shirts, kitchen magnets, and other items.
And she has ideas for new projects.
That may be the most remarkable thing about Loretta’s living wake. It would have been easy to view the gathering as an ending — a graceful sorting through the past, a way to help her family find new homes for her work.
But Loretta did not talk like someone finished.
She’s not through by a long shot.
She talked about paintings left to paint. She talked about places she still wants to remember in color. She talked about ideas, projects, books, and images not yet created.
All around us, her children and grandchildren helped people sort through years of work, and the make difficult decisions. The collection was so vast that many who came to buy a painting found themselves struggling to narrow down their choices. There were simply too many stories on the walls.
Some visitors purchased paintings. Most came just for Loretta — to sit for a moment, to squeeze her hand, to remind her of some shared memory, to make sure she knew what she meant to them.
That is the beauty of a living wake. The stories do not have to be saved for later. The guest of honor gets to hear them.
And Loretta, in turn, gave stories back.
She spoke of Ruston, family, and friends with affection, not as a place frozen in the past, but as a place still alive in her mind and in her art. She remembered businesses that are gone now, names that still mean something to those who were there, and buildings that live mostly in memory and old photographs.
Those are the things Loretta paints best — memories of those relationships.
As I left the studio, I marveled at Loretta’s decision to choose a living wake. Artists spend their lives leaving pieces of themselves behind. In her case, those pieces had filled a studio to overflowing. But on that evening, the most important thing in the room was not the paintings.
It was Loretta herself.
Still painting. Still remembering. Still planning the next piece.
And still very much alive in the colors of Ruston.
