NOLA Academy of Fine Arts founder Auseklis Ozols dies | News

Auseklis Ozols, a Latvian-born artist who taught hundreds of artists in an academy he founded in Uptown New Orleans, died at his New Orleans home on Wednesday, two days after his 84th birthday.

He died of complications of heart failure, his daughter Saskia Ozols said.

Ozols founded the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts in 1980 in a three-story building at 5218 Magazine St. given to him by Dorothy Coleman, a philanthropist and one of his students. She became the academy’s president, and he was its director.

“He laid a foundation of very classical training at the academy,” which has 500 students, said Dian Winingder, Coleman’s daughter and the chair of the academy’s board.

Ozols taught principles that have guided artists since the Renaissance, said Billy Solitario, a New Orleans patient and academy graduate.

“All that knowledge was in his head, and he was proud to share it with everybody,” Solitario said. “He was a very good orator, and he could keep you entertained while giving knowledge. It was incredible.”

He was a perfectionist, and he was very opinionated,” said Winingder, an artist who works in clay. “Figure drawing, basic drawing (and) landscape painting were really the core (of the curriculum). Now we do more abstract teaching, we do ceramics, we do printmaking.”

Ozols, whose family had survived imprisonment at the Dachau extermination camp, moved with his family after World War II to escape Soviet domination.

He grew up in Trenton, New Jersey, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He earned a master’s degree at Temple University.

Ozols came to New Orleans in 1970 to design exhibit spaces at the New Orleans Museum of Art. He married Gwendolyn Lana, a New Orleans woman; the two started an art school to fill a gap that, they felt, was lacking.

In an art world dominated by conceptualism, neo-expressionism and other modernist trends, Ozol’s mastery of highly disciplined realist technique was a rarity. He was considered a magician of painterly illusion, adept at capturing everything from the translucence of glass to the sheen of polished silver to the diaphanous quality of flower petals and clouds. For those who sought training in such age-old skills, he was a torchbearer.

The academy was his forum. “He became quite a mentor for many artists,” said Winingder, who said Ozols’ technique was based on the power of observation: “You have to look at things to reproduce, to paint, to capture.”

That became more of a challenge when he lost the sight in his right eye in 2012, but he continued to paint, Winingder said. “He was such a master.”

Ozols was honored by a host of organizations, including the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Arts Council of New Orleans.

His murals adorn such buildings as the Windsor Court Hotel in New Orleans and the Louisiana Governor’s Mansion in Baton Rouge. Among the subjects of his portraits are former Gov. Mike Foster and Pascal Calogero, former chief justice of the state Supreme Court.

Ozols also designed three proclamations for the Rex organization, including one for the first post-Katrina Carnival in 2006. That picture shows the king of Carnival spreading a vast robe over the city’s children to protect them as they frolicked along the parade route.

“Auseklis was a great friend, artist and teacher,” said Dr. Stephen Hales, the Rex organization’s former historian. “We will miss him.”

His daughter Saskia has been chosen to continue that tradition by designing Rex’s proclamation for the 2026 celebration.

That honor was “super-meaningful for us,” she said.

Gwendolyn Lana Ozols died in 1980.

Survivors include three daughters, Saskia and Indra Ozols, both of New Orleans, and Aija Ozols Gibson of Los Angeles; a sister, Aija Ozols Tobiss of Elizabeth, Colorado, and five grandchildren.

Funeral arrangements are incomplete.

Reporter Doug MacCash contributed to this story.