Week #27, Seafood Industry I

Dusti Bongé, Seafood Factory, 1936-1939, pastel on paper, 11" x 13 ½”.

In contrast to last month’s highly abstract, black & white, minimalist works, this month we will look at some of Dusti Bongé's colorful early works. In particular, we will feature some of her depictions of Biloxi seafood industry scenes. 

These are often vibrant images capturing a particular slice of daily life in Biloxi. They roughly fit into the category called “genre painting,” which depicts quotidian scenes (in contrast to portraiture, landscape painting, still lifes, and religious or historic painting). However, Dusti’s Biloxi scenes are different  in some ways. Genre paintings often have ordinary people as a main subject matter, offering glimpses of folks going about their everyday life, working, playing, cleaning, or perhaps drinking merrily. Dusti’s works do not typically feature any human figures. Genre paintings also tend to be painted in a realistic style, whereas Dusti’s are in her unique cubist style emphasizing the planar aspect of her subject.

However Dusti’s works do exhibit the spirit of genre painting, with their decidedly straightforward depiction of the everyday, free of any idealization or imaginative/allegorical content or aggrandizement of the commonplace. Thus, her images of the seafood factories along the waterfront are straightforward, they express the chaotic quality of the bustling industrial sites with it mess of canneries, processing plants, steam pipes, boats and piers.

In the case of this work you can see the roof lines of the shed-like factory buildings in the background and various large cylindrical structures, suggesting the processing pipes for oyster steaming, at the center. There is a small boat in the water moored at a pier in the lower part of the composition, and random, leftover patches of grass and shrubs amidst the various industrial building components. The steam pipes at the center take on outsized proportions and their round form is contrasted against the angularity of the other industrial elements. Dusti seemed rather taken with those steam pipes which feature prominently in several of her seafood industry scenes and always at exaggerated scale.

Perhaps it is the scenic perspective from which Dusti worked, offering a kind of bird’s eye view of the whole, that precluded the inclusion of people in her work. Or perhaps the spatial cacophony was more visually arresting to her so she focused on capturing it.