Sean Friloux - Plein Air on Jackson Square
July 2025A rare plein air watercolorist finds endless subject matter by exploring shadows in the city of his ancestors.
-by Caroline Rowe
This Sketchbook column is underwritten in part by Betsy Fifield
Plein air painter Sean Friloux is one of the many artists selling their work in Jackson Square, a bustling center of art, performance, and informal commerce. But Sean has a special connection to the place: In the mid-1700s, ancestor Michel Eloi Friloux immigrated from France to Louisiana to help build the first St. Louis Cathedral.
After the completion of the cathedral (destroyed by the Great Fire of 1788), Michel Eloi Friloux eventually moved upriver to Destrehan, where centuries later, Sean was born. The artist’s practice has taken root in the same soil – both geographically and thematically.
Friloux’s primary stylistic goal is realism and his attentiveness to architecture shows in his renderings of New Orleans landscapes. He is not interested in romanticized, polished images of New Orleans architecture, because “nothing in this city is straight,” he says, smiling.
Instead, he’s concerned with rendering the non-straight lines of New Orleans structures – slumping balconies, bent road signs, uneven sidewalks. And his scenes reflect a more local attitude toward the French Quarter, giving a grounded, everyday perspective of someone who is there for more than just the sights.
Friloux began his career as a graphic designer, then worked for over a decade as a motorcycle mechanic before turning to painting as a profession, which he says is more challenging on several levels.
For instance, Friloux’s commitment to plein air painting in a city that dependably offers high humidity and temperatures and unexpected deluges remains strong. Creating realistic renderings of a city whose energy, weather, and density can be physically difficult to inhabit demonstrates Friloux’s tenacity as an artist.
These water-laden conditions also inform his choice in medium – watercolor – which Friloux teaches at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts. He is aware that his style of watercolor can almost masquerade as acrylic because of its opacity.
“[Acrylics] just have less water,” he says. Most importantly, watercolors are economical and portable. “And immediacy – with watercolor I can paint a layer and it dries.”
On Jackson Square with Sean Friloux, photo by Ellis Anderson
Friloux aspires to finish a painting every day that he ventures out to paint from life. His work moves quickly out of the square, but when he can hold onto a piece, he typically displays it in his family’s living room where his son – thirteen and an artist aspiring to attend NOCCA – gives valuable critique to his father’s works.
“And he’s usually right!” Friloux says, “I tell him that’s 90 percent, and the rest is just learning your craft, so you’re already ahead of the game.”
Self-portrait by Sean Friloux
A portrait of Friloux’s son by the artist
There is a grit to Friloux’s work, the cultivation of which has led to evolutions in his style. “It was at one time getting a little too dark,” he says. Eventually, Friloux retired night scenes and now opts to meticulously apply darkness to his compositions using long dark shadows.
But calling upon the power of shadow poses logistical difficulties for an artist working outdoors and on location as the shapes and positions of shadows can quickly expire. “I used to chase those shadows,” he says, but these days Friloux prefers to “invent a shadow.”
For this, he uses his “rolodex of shadows,” a collection of his own photographs that demonstrate for his reference how shadows move and break across New Orleans’ classic architectural features. In Friloux’s New Orleans, the streets are often free of their typical traffic, the effect of which is uncanny. “I like it empty,” he says.
Views in New Orleans often subvert their place in time with centuries-old facades and feats of craftsmanship tied firmly to the city’s past. This vision of the city lends itself to rather naïve caricatures of city stuck in time. Friloux’s work, however, stands out for its modern touches.
He is particularly fond of including bicycles. Evoking his architectural roots, he notes that circular wheels, combined with a building’s vertical lines, can do wonders for his compositions – a fact he first discovered while painting the bell of a tuba in one street scene. He jumps at the opportunity to depict layers of stickers on Frenchmen Street poles, graffiti, or an open car door.
Friloux’s work especially appeals to locals, whose options for art that pays homage to the city can seem limited to ones that flatten or exaggerate its aspects for the tourist eye. True to the spirit of the city, Friloux’s work is ripe with intermingling tensions. His works are detailed and sparse, modern and classic, strange and familiar.
Friloux is not opposed to painting other areas of the U.S – he mentions the Smokey Mountains and Maine for their high contrast black rocks and shadows – but he is comfortable with his home base of New Orleans, a city that his works seem to visually redefine in their consistent subversion of its typical tropes.
Friloux dreams of a future where he and his son paint together, joining the ranks of celebrated father-son artists like the Wyeths. He cites Andrew Wyeth as a primary influence, not only in mood and palette, but also as an artist who was continuously inspired by the area in which he lived.
“With Wyeth, it was all the farm, the neighborhood,” he says. “Some artists just stay in one place forever.”
The “like me” doesn’t need to be spoken.
See Sean Friloux’s work at Gallery Rinard on Royal Street, Degas Gallery, in Jackson Square, or catch a glimpse of the artist painting en plein air on the sidewalks of the French Quarter and around New Orleans.
