Featured in Garden and Gun Magazine August/September 2010 -
New Orleans artist Shelley Hesse is known for her delicate renderings of Louisiana’s flora and fauna, some of it influenced by twentieth-century Gulf Coast artist and naturalist Walter Inglis Anderson. Egrets, white oleander, and all manner of fish are favorite subjects. “Studying a flower, watching the way a bird moves, combing the coast for anything that washes up—all of it makes me feel unbreakable and alive,” she says.
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Apparently Hesse has fans well beyond her usual client base. In 2009, the designers at the art-centric home and design brand Anthropologie came calling, commissioning a partnership with the artist to create a line of embroidered pillows, organic cotton bedding, tabletop ceramics, and rugs based on her paintings. “Of all that we created together, the lobster rug might be my favorite, simply because of its sheer transformation in size,” she says. “To see a twenty-two-by-thirty-inch watercolor blown up to a five-by-seven- foot rug was something I hadn’t imagined.”