Born and Raised: My Roots as a New Orleans Painter from Gentilly
- Christina Pappion
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
People often ask me where my love of color and culture comes from. The honest answer is simple: it comes from home. I was born and raised in Gentilly, a neighborhood that shaped how I see this city long before I ever picked up a paintbrush.
A Neighborhood Built on Higher Ground
Gentilly sits on one of the highest ridges in New Orleans, a natural rise in the land that traces all the way back to an ancient course of the Mississippi River. The name itself is a corruption of "Chantilly," a nod to the French suburb the neighborhood's earliest colonial landowners came from. Over the centuries, Gentilly grew from farmland into a neighborhood of oak-lined streets, wide lawns, and a rich mix of architecture — Craftsman bungalows, English cottages, and raised Spanish and Mediterranean Revival homes, many of them built up on the very ridge that gives the neighborhood its character.
It's also home to Dillard University, and to Pontchartrain Park, one of the first suburban subdivisions built in the entire country specifically for middle-class Black families. Growing up surrounded by that kind of history — of a community built, block by block, by people determined to plant roots and stay — left an impression on me long before I understood what it meant.
Resilience Runs Through the Streets
Gentilly was one of the hardest-hit neighborhoods when the levees failed during Hurricane Katrina. Whole blocks were underwater, and the road back was long. But because so many families owned their homes rather than rented them, people came back and rebuilt, piece by piece, house by house, refusing to let the storm have the final word.
I think about that a lot as an artist. Building a creative career from nothing is its own kind of rebuilding — showing up again after setbacks, trusting that the work is worth putting back together even when it feels underwater. Gentilly taught me that lesson before I ever had the words for it.
Where My Color Palette Comes From
Every artist has a place their eye keeps returning to, even without meaning to. Mine is Gentilly — the deep greens of the oak canopies over Elysian Fields, the warm brick and pastel paint of a bungalow porch, the particular gold of late afternoon light hitting a wide, quiet lawn. Long before I painted a single second line or a French Quarter balcony, I was looking at this. It's in almost everything I make, whether people realize it or not.
Carrying It Forward
I've spent more than 15 years now building a career capturing the soul of this city — through weddings, through murals, through commissioned work for the New Orleans Saints and Pelicans, through festival posters that hang in homes across Louisiana and beyond. None of that happens without Gentilly. It's where I first learned to notice beauty in the everyday, and where I first understood what it means to belong somewhere completely.
"For everything comes from Him and exists by His power and is intended for His glory." — Romans 11:36
Every piece I paint is, in some way, still a picture of home. And home, for me, will always start in Gentilly.
Sources:
Gentilly Neighborhood: Through the Ages — Seven Three Distilling
