A picture is worth a thousand words, or in the case of artist Natalie Parbhoo, a thousand keystrokes.
She creates art with the assistance of computer software in a style of art known as “photomontage.”
Photomontage is the art of combining several different photograph negatives and manipulating the images to create a finished product that is beyond what any camera is capable of.
Parbhoo uses Photoshop computer software to create sinister images with reference to religion — something she describes as “sacred and secular coexisting.”
She is a graduate of LSU with a bachelor in fine arts and a focus on photography.
Her fiancé, Jamie Baldridge, is a graduate assistant and photography instructor at LSU and creates the same kind of surreal art as her.
“I was amazed at how quickly Natalie picked up the technology and how well she takes different images and puts them together,” Baldridge said.
Parbhoo is Catholic and grew up in the predominantly Islamic country of Kuwait, a paradox that inspires much of her work.
After moving to Baton Rouge before the Desert Storm operations of the early 90s, she attended Southeastern and then LSU for her degree.
In college, she learned photomontage and has been doing it ever since as a way to release her feelings from certain dreams and feelings she has.
“There’s no easy way to describe the strange and severely eerie and vivid nature of dreams, so I try to recreate them visually through art,” Parbhoo said.
Though her works are ominous, she takes influence from classic and modern surreal artists.
Her inspirations come from surrealist painter Salvador Dali and photographer Jerry Uelsman, who she calls the “pioneer of surreal photography.”
A personal inspiration is Reni Zeitz, an art instructor who taught Parbhoo in art classes at LSU.
“She stood out because she always was a hard worker, and had the guts to explore different avenues of thought,” Zeitz said. “She is fearless.”
Parbhoo’s favorite piece from her own collection is an untitled work that shows a picture of the church at The Myrtles haunted house in St. Francisville, manipulated with the roof torn off and an overcast sky with a “dark being” in the church wearing a wedding dress and black wings.
“I like it because I put something so religious and sacred against something evil and opposite in one image,” Parbhoo said.
Another interesting piece is called “The Séance.”
She took an old picture she found of a group of men sitting around a table, blacked out the rest of the image, and added a naked woman in the fetal position to the middle of the table.
For the finishing touch, she added a shaman mask, which is an African tribal mask used in ceremonies to call the supernatural, to one of the men that set him apart as the leader of the séance group.
“I want people to look at the art and form their own opinions and really let their imagination take them wherever they want,” she said.
Parbhoo’s art is not yet in galleries, but select pieces are displayed at the Spanish Moon in the third week of each month at an art show called “B-Sides,” which displays about six to eight artists each showcase.