The vagabond life had a hold on artist Shelley Hesse for decades. After college, she moved to Paris with $500 in her savings account and a job as a tutor. When not working, she roamed the museums and studied the Asian art collections at the Louvre.
Eventually, she moved back to New Orleans, her hometown, but still resisted the pull of permanent roots, traveling often to paint, meet friends and visit clients in Martha’s Vineyard, Greenwich, Conn., New York, Dallas, and other spots.
“I never wanted to own a house,” she said. “It seemed so grounding. I was a gypsy.”
Never say never.
As so often happens, a relationship changed everything. When Hesse got engaged to her husband, attorney Stephen Murray Jr., suddenly putting down roots seemed alluring not off-putting.
“Getting pregnant, that’s what really did it,” she said, “I instantly wanted them (son, Graham, and daughter, Louisa) to have all the good things I had when I grew up: a yard, freedom to run out in nature, grab a snack in the kitchen and head outside to play.”
So the couple launched into a construction project: building a new house with the soul of a 19th-century center hall on a leafy street in Old Metairie while Hesse was “hugely” pregnant with twins.
Managing the project, she jokes, was a lesson in stress management. “I watched comedies non-stop.”
The property had room for a garden and a separate painting studio for Hesse behind the house, where she could work on her lush animal and nature studies rendered in gouache, watercolor, pencil and pastel.
“We could put a gate around the whole yard so the kids can run around freely,” she said.
The family moved in right after Louisa and Graham’s first birthday.
Allure of laughter
Like a classic center hall, the couple’s new 3,200-square-foot home breathes. When the front windows and back doors are open, there’s a “great air flow,” Hesse said. “You can hear all the birds in the trees and the kids playing in the back. This is definitely our safe and happy house.”
Much like Hesse’s childhood, the couple’s now 2 1/2-year-old twins spend most of their time outdoors. On a sunny but chilly day in early January, they were bundled in jackets, playing on a swing set and running around the garden.
“When you spend a lot of time with your imagination running loose, it makes you a stronger person,” the mom said. “It forces you to be creative, and you never know where that will help you in life.”
When the kids are with her husband or a babysitter, Hesse sneaks away to work in the studio, a bright, one-room space filled with natural light from a series of French doors.
“I can hear (the twins) in the house,” Hesse said. “When they’re laughing, I want to run back inside to see what they’re doing. It can be distracting.”
The studio and home are elevated 5 feet off the ground, a necessity after the neighborhood flooded in Hurricane Katrina, but an architectural detail that fits the home’s classic design.
The front door opens to a short center hallway flanked by a small formal living room at left and a dining room on the right and a stairwell landing in the middle.
“There’s no wasted space,” Hesse said.
With 12-foot ceilings, (tall ceilings were one of Stephen’s few requests when they were designing house), the hallway creates a gallery for Hesse’s sensual paintings. Framed under Plexiglas, her animals and plants seem to have crawled out of a dream. Alligators, cheetahs and spoonbills sit poised and curious, looking out from snippets of landscapes or brief bits of greenery.
“I want the energy of the animal or the plant or the person to come through,” she said, “but only what’s essential — the art of simple reduction. I try to strip everything down to the bare essentials: the most meaningful colors, the most meaningful lines.
“The hardest thing is knowing when to stop painting.”
The daughter of interior designer and artist Peggy Hesse, Shelley Hesse grew up surrounded by beautiful design and “endless piles of gorgeous fabrics,” she said.
Returning to New Orleans after living in Paris for two years, she worked in the business office for Saks Fifth Avenue, before deciding to leave the fashion world to dedicate herself to a full-time artist’s life.
That decision, more than a decade ago, proved fruitful. Over the years, Hesse’s work has developed an international reputation. Collectors of her pieces include musician Art Garfunkel.
In 2010, she began collaborating with Anthropologie, the clothing and housewares retailer, to create decorative home accessories — from rugs to dinner plates — emblazoned with imagery from her paintings. Her fifth Anthropologie collection hits stores next month.
Toddlers under foot
In her own home, Hesse opted for a soft neutral design scheme (walls are mostly painted Ivory White and Linen White by Benjamin Moore), with bursts of vibrant color delivered by her paintings. Even with toddlers under foot, she contends the light fabrics and pale walls are kid friendly.
“My mom was an interior designer and antique dealer, so our house growing up was beautiful,” Hesse said. “As kids, we had to learn how to live with beautiful things without destroying them. And my kids will, too.”
In her own living room, Hesse keeps order by corralling toys and books in baskets. “Play Doh and coloring is done in their high chairs,” she added. “They can be as free as they want to be there.”‘
In the kitchen, one of Hesse’s large 6-foot-by-7-foot paintings of a cheetah hangs over the toddlers’ high chairs, as if guarding them.
“After I had my kids, I started painting huge paintings,” she said. “I can’t bring myself to paint anything that’s not gigantic now. I think everything I love is magnified.”