Eulogy by John R. Kemp

Auseklis Ozols Eulogy – By John R. Kemp

Oct. 9, 2025, St. Charles Avenue Presbyterian Church 

Saskia, Aija and Indra and especially Auseklis’s sister Aija Tobiss. I must start by saying Auseklis was one of the most talented and interesting persons I’ve ever met. I always enjoyed his company.

I didn’t study at the Academy and, unlike many of you here, I wasn’t one of Auseklis’s legions of students. 

Yet in many ways, I was one of his students. Over the years, I interviewed him many times for various magazine articles that I was writing about him, as well as for several books, includingthe one we did together – Auseklis Ozols: The Romantic Realism of an Artist and Teacher. As I sat taking notes, I was struck by his depth of knowledge of art and art history and painting techniques. He would move easily from a precise description of the Golden Mean to DaVinci and Caravaggio to Thomas Eakens and Jackson Pollock. But what struck me more was his passion for art, his passion for the traditions that have evolved over the centuries, and most of all his passion for the Academy and his students.

Ozols developed his style of painting during an era when the contemporary art world was more interested in the various avant-garde art movements that came out of post-World War II 1950s and 1960s. In a 2011 interview I had with him, heclarified his thoughts about those art movements: quote “After many years of following contemporary innovation and agonizing over ‘style’ and ‘personal statement’ and ‘social consciousness,’ I realized what my true métier was, to look at God’s creation and record it to the best of my ability with my God given gifts and to share it with my fellow man. I studied with the most notable and well-known painters and aesthetic philosophers of the sixties, and was constantly aware of all new ‘isms’ to eventually realize that all ‘isms’ become ‘wasms.’ “

Despite his flirtation with the various post-war art movements, Auseklis’s “métier,” as he described it, was realism or, as he said, romantic realism. One has only to look at the soft warm light in his dreamlike landscapes painted along the Gulf Coast, North Shore or in Audubon and City parks, to fully understand what he meant by Romantic Realism. And as he emphasized time and time again, the transformation of that vision to canvas begins with good drawing techniques. He spoke of drawing as soulful experiences, subconscious revelations, or as inner secrets on canvas or paper. They say drawing with all its required transcendent abstraction is pure unadulterated expression and the foundation of all visual arts. And for Auseklis that was especially true.

To me, Auseklis ranks among the great artists in New Orleans’long and rich history in the visual arts. He was once in a century artist and teacher with an extraordinary career. All of you know his work. And equally important, and unlike many of those notable artists of the past, he has left an unending legacy in the hundreds of students he taught and others that he mentored –including his daughter Saskia who herself is an upcoming artist. Though Auseklis’s brush is now still, that legacy lives on in his work and in those who take their paints, canvases and easels and, as Auseklis said, head out “to look at God’s creation and record it to the best” of their abilities.