Born in the last year of the decade of the Beats, Lou Ann Bardash grew up in a small industrial farming town in the Midwest, Effingham, Illinois (located at the crossroads of Interstates 70 and 57). Gifted with a natural singing voice and musical talent, she appeared in musicals, plays and sang and played in choruses and in marching, concert and rock bands throughout high school.
After high school, she headed South to Carbondale, Illinois, and furthered her education by working her way through SIU (Southern Illinois University) from where she graduated with a Bachelors degree in music and with an uncredited minor in cashiering.
From there Bardash found her way down to Nashville, Tennessee, working different jobs in and out of the music business while combining classical work in operas and choirs with more contemporary gigs at women's prisons and nursing homes. Together with co-founder Tom Ovans, she formed the sub-independent rock label NSR Sound Recordings in 1991.
A superb harmony singer, she has also done many sessions and live gigs backing other singers. Proficient on piano, guitar and trumpet, over the years she has developed her own unique style and vision of music, directly influenced by her other artistic bent, painting.
She began painting on a completely organic level, once again, as with music, letting her natural talents and instincts give direction. At first painting on whatever mediums she found, from pieces of plywood, doors, fence posts, wood bowls, etc... she has since evolved to working with oils on canvas while still creating on the former. Working from the inspiration of the various mediums, her pieces have a creative immediacy about them.
Most of her studies are of faces. Faces of women. One only has to look at the portraits to feel an immediate emotional intimacy with them that grows with each viewing. She refuses to put a label or analyze what she does, but prefers to let her talent evolve naturally without intellectual constraints.
As Matisse once said "Painters must begin by cutting out their tongues."
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