The Accidental Artist-Activist

The Accidental Artist-Activist

Baret Boisson’s Vibrant Work
Paints a Love Letter to the Universe

By Roger Durling | August 8, 2024

“I never set out to be an artist, and I never studied art — ever,” exclaims the dazzling painter Baret Boisson, as she shows me around her home studio in Carpinteria. “I came upon it accidentally without any goals or expectations; I fell in love with the feeling of creating. When I paint, I’m in a meditative bliss, very present with my most innate gifts, no longer demoralized by what is happening in the world.”

It is an overcast day in late spring when I first head to Baret’s studio, and the news emanating from my radio makes it seem gloomier. My overburdened state of mind changes dramatically as I cross her threshold. The combination of Baret’s sunny disposition, being greeted by her quirky and adorable dog, Blueberry, and the bright and enticing colors radiating from her canvases all make a case for the healing power of art and how it facilitates us to navigate difficult times in a way that is profound. 

“Each of my pieces is a love letter to the universe,” Baret shares, as I admire what is on display. “I have to love the piece for it to be ‘finished.’ If I don’t love it, I keep working on it until I do, sometimes painting over it, sometimes putting the piece away and coming back to it at a later time.”

Baret, who didn’t start painting until she was 30, is widely known for her figurative work of civil rights icons in which she combines inspiring phrases from the subject with the aesthetics of folk art. The results are luminous portraits that are both inspiring and optimistic. Central to her artistry is her bold use of colors that induce strong emotions and a kinetic energy. 

In 2016, she had a solo show at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, titled Inspiring Greatness, which was attended by more than 100,000 visitors. The exhibit offered a novel way to tell stories about familiar figures, including Mahatma Gandhi, Rosa Parks, and Billie Jean King, among others, and featured paintings on canvas, and on ceramics, as well as painted cigar boxes.

Christine Minas, currently an art advisor in New York City, curated the show, and tells me: “Civil rights are at the core of Baret’s inspiration as both a person and as an artist, and I think her voice adds a unique point of view to that conversation. I had always admired the way Baret brings together images of important people, and their words in a poignant and accessible way, and it was terrific to share that with a larger audience.”

Baret’s portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. — adorned with the words from his “I Have a Dream” speech — was the centerpiece of the show, and it was subsequently accessioned by the museum for their permanent collection.  

“These are all the people who inspire me,” Baret says. “They’re inspiring for where they came from and what they represent. I try to capture their humanity. Part of what I love about my portraits is the audience investing the time with these men and women. Interacting with their lives. We stand on their shoulders, and they have to be celebrated.”

I inquire about the usage of words and phrases in the work. “I started putting text in my paintings from the beginning,” she says. “I love text. It invites people to come a little closer and learn. I want a hint of hopefulness and a touch of whimsy. I consider myself an activist. These are important people, and I share my points of view with the work.”

Baret frequently receives commissions to do portraits of people and families, including famous ones like Tom Cruise, Drew Barrymore, and Jimmy Fallon, among others. Most of the time, she gets hired to do a rendering to commemorate a milestone in someone’s life, like a wedding. She gets to know the subject well and gathers lots of images. In the portraits, she then surrounds the subject with people and elements representing important aspects of their life.  

“I try to understand the people,” she shares. “Their favorite music. Their favorite book. As much info about them as possible. It’s really dimensional.”

Besides her portraits of famous figures, Baret’s oeuvre includes abstract paintings on large canvases, with decorative style, intricate patterns, bold colors, and biomorphic forms reminding me of the work of Gustave Klimt. 

“She is, above all else, an intuitive artist,” says Minas, “and once Baret found her voice in abstraction, she approached it with the same feeling and enchantment she brings to her narrative art. In her abstract painting, you get a chance to really see her skills as a colorist. I think her abstract paintings are a way for her to use beauty to achieve a kind of spiritual transcendence.”

Artist Baret Boisson in her Carpinteria studio with Blueberry keeping watch in the background (right). | Photo: Ingrid Bostrom

I’ve rarely envied somebody’s living/working space until seeing how Baret has arranged her life. It’s a two-story duplex with big windows and high ceilings, with plenty of natural light. The downstairs contains her studio — with easels and works in progress on display. She’s been at this address for the past five years. Before that, she lived in Summerland and commuted to paint in a space in downtown Santa Barbara. During the mudslides, she was forced to sleep in her studio, which led her to consolidating her labor and living environments. 

“I work in the evenings,” she explains. “It’s almost chemical. I don’t like it to be a job. There are organizational things I do during the day, until the muses come calling. The painting part is in the afternoon and evening from around 4 p.m. until 2 a.m. It’s all visceral to me.”

Stairs lead to her apartment on the second floor — it is both minimalist and efficient. I notice some of her artwork done on cigar boxes casually lying around. I ask about the genesis of the cigar boxes.

“Everything happens organically,” she explains. “Mother liked collecting things. She had Amish boxes. They’re very utilitarian. I always treasured these boxes. The other thing about using the cigar boxes for this series of Inspiring Greatness portraits is that these simple utilitarian boxes themselves are a reflection of the subjects who were not born to wealth or greatness but rose to influence and changed the world. There’s a transformation — all while remaining accessible.”

Baret was born in 1963, and her mother, Judi Boisson Schweig, was an artist in Greenwich Village — a Bohemian — and the most pronounced influence in Baret’s life.

“She was a brilliant artist,” Baret says. “She did interior design. Everything was art. It was all about delighting the senses. Everything had to be artistic. But more importantly, she understood what it meant to be an artist. How it’s not about how much we create or how much we sell, but how we see the world.” 

At 20 years of age and pregnant (Baret only recently met her biological father), Judi went to Europe and, on the boat trip, met Robert Testen. He was a young art student going to Florence to study art, and Baret was born there. The Testens returned to New York, where they had a daughter, and moved to Suriname in South America, where Baret’s grandfather had a fishing business and offered Robert a job.

They divorced when Baret was about 4 years old, and Judi met Phillipe Boisson, a French man with a lumber business in French Guyana. They married, and the family moved there. “I did think of Philippe as my father,” Beret says, “because my mom was married to him during very formative years. He was charming but cruel.”

Young Baret lived with her grandparents in New York City for a while; then, when she was 10, she went to boarding school in France, and at 14 attended the private bilingual school Lycée Français in New York.

“My parents were never around,” she recalls, “and they were living separate lives. I didn’t have parental supervision. I had to create my own boundaries.”

After the Lycée, she went to the Emma Willard School, a girls’ boarding school in upstate New York, and from there Barnard/Columbia University, where she majored in Political Science and minored in East Asian Studies and Women’s Studies. Her first job was at Random House as an editorial assistant. 

She decided to move to California in 1988. “I just needed to leave New York. It’s so clear in my mind, but obviously hard to express,” she says. “There was such a disparity between my internal and external life, the contrast between my friends’ extravagantly fun and superficial lives (my boyfriend was a Ford model and very social) with the despair in the streets and subways that I was seeing in New York City during that time.”

For a while, she tried her hand at story editing and covering scripts for Hollywood production houses while also working with her mother’s company, writing her catalogs, helping with shoots, and doing trade shows across the country with her collection of home furnishings. She opened a shop on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica selling her mom’s beautiful quilts. 

Baret recalls this period in her life as a dark and difficult time, and yet a turning point. When she moved to L.A., she started to date women and was afraid to divulge this to her mother. “My mom had made so many norm-defying decisions in her lifetime but disliked the idea of homosexuality all together and lesbians even more,” she tells me. 

She was eventually introduced to “a super cool woman” and just a couple of months into their relationship, they were shaken awake by the Northridge earthquake. “It was the most terrifying moment of my life thus far,” she recalls, “and I was certain that although I hadn’t died right then, that death could happen at any minute. Life felt perilous and fragile, and I resolved that I had to live as authentically as I could.”

When her mother offered to fly out to L.A. and help her, Baret came out to her. “As expected, it was pretty brutal,” she states, “and my mom didn’t speak to me for a couple of years following that phone call.” Baret went on to date men afterward and doesn’t consider herself any labels. “Just as I don’t consider myself ‘white,’ although that’s what I have to check on ID forms,” she asserts. “I’m just human.”

“I started painting that year,” she says. She went to a friend’s house who had laid out materials for her. “There was a photo of two boys, and I started painting them,” she remembers. “I was 30 years old. The second painting was of my dog Lucky. I quickly started to get my own materials. I hadn’t picked up a brush prior to that. I was so fortunate to come upon it. What struck me was the way it made me feel. For the first time, I felt like a fish to water.”

She eventually reconciled with her mother. “My mom passed away this last December,” she tells me. “More than anyone else, she championed my work. She hung my pieces all over her beautiful home in Southampton, NY.”

In 2016, Baret was ready to leave Los Angeles in search of a stronger sense of community. She was considering moving to France with a French man who’d just bought a vineyard in the Beaujolais, when she received a phone call from a longtime friend whom she’d first met in boarding school in New York City. The friend had just lost her husband, and Baret came up to Santa Barbara to see her right away. “I found her surrounded by a group of incredibly supportive, intelligent, well-traveled women,” she shares. “I decided that I would give living in Santa Barbara a try.”

Here, Baret has built a powerful and artistic community around herself and her art. She leads and facilitates popular “creative sessions” — art-making experiences where a small group of people spend about three hours tapping into their creativity.

“The purpose of the sessions is to expose people to the freedom to express themselves,” she clarifies. “I’m not a teacher. I give people the opportunity, the space. I don’t like telling people what they should be doing. People start to see the possibilities. It’s just a way for adult people to leave their kids behind and be present in the space, and have access to their inventiveness.” 

Baret provides all the materials needed, as well as wine and pizza from Bettina in Montecito. She emphasizes that the participants don’t have to arrive at a specific point, but to be present and play and experience joy, for adults tend to forget how to access the imagination. 

One recent participant in the sessions, Dinah Calderon, told me about the experience. “Baret uses her warmth and humor to weave a common ground among the attendees so we are able to release our self-conscious defenses and relax into creativity. She offers a prompt to give us a place to start using our imaginations to fill our blank canvas. She was careful not to offer specific advice, rather to encourage us to follow our instincts.”

Our three conversations for this article took place during the summer, and a lot has changed in the world by the time we meet for the last time. As I leave her studio, Baret gets reflective: “People are losing the opportunity to connect. I don’t like engaging in conflict. My work is very positive.”

I ask her if she will do a portrait of Kamala Harris. “I am starting a painting of her tomorrow,” she says. And what text will she include on the canvas? “NOT GOING BACK!” she exclaims. 

An appropriate sentiment for both women, it seems.

For more of Baret Boisson’s work, see baretboisson.com.