About
About our team…
Edward Dupuy received his doctorate in English from Louisiana State University, is published as a literary reviewer, critic, and sometimes poet, and is the author of Autobiography in Walker Percy: Repetition, Recovery, and Redemption, and Recollections on a Road Between: A Story of My Life. Edward has held various executive positions at several colleges, including two schools of art.
Gene Beyt has been a fine art photographer for over 50 years. His initial interest in photography and pen and ink drawing began as a child. Gene is particularly interested in using his camera as an instrument of discovery—as a traveler in a strange land searching for understanding and enlightenment in the banal everyday that is often overlooked or unseen. In this studio, he occasionally draws and paints.
Many thanks to Chris Beyt, guitarist, bassist, composer, educator, recording engineer, and our music consultant. Chris completed his Doctorate of Musical Arts in Jazz Performance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and is the Associate Professor of Jazz Guitar and the Recording Arts at Western Carolina University.
About our studio…
About 20 years ago, Gene and Edward began a project that was eventually published as The Quotidian. That project could be described a dialogue of poems and photographs, an attempt to recover in the everyday what is often overlooked or unseen.
Studio Aesculapius is a natural evolution and extension of the dialogue begun in The Quotidian. In the introduction of that earlier project, Jay Tolson, editor of The Hedgehog Review, writes:
"Such relationships between poem and picture establish themselves throughout this volume, sometimes obviously, sometimes cryptically. The reader/viewer may even forge connections that Dupuy and Beyt never saw or intended, or he may go away from some pairings completely baffled. The discoveries and the bafflements are equally provocative. And they are instrumental to Dupuy and Beyt’s larger goal of defamiliarizing the ordinary in order to make it visible and new—and indeed to bring it to life. This is what might properly be called sacramental art, and the collaborators’ mentor in its practice, Walker Percy (whose influence is directly acknowledged in many places throughout the volume), almost certainly would have approved. The poet and the photographer remind us, again and again, of all that we miss in our quotidian lives."
Introduction to The Quotidian. Jay Tolson, Editor of The Hedgehog Review, Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, and author of Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy
About our name…
Why Studio Aesculapius? It is quite simple.
The name Studio Aesculapius is curated from the concept of studio, the artist's place of work and study (derived from the Latin studium, to study), and from mythology the name Aesculapius (Greek Asklepius) representing the healing arts.
Aesculapius was a hero and god of medicine in ancient Greek and Roman mythology. He was known as a kind and gentle healer, relieving humans of their pain and suffering. The remains of his temple are visible today, as shown here.
His daughters were Hygieia, the goddess of cleanliness, Iaso, the goddess of recuperation from illness, Aceso, the goddess of the healing process, Aegle, the goddess of good health, and Panacea, the goddess of universal remedy.
The rod of Aesculapius, a snake-entwined staff, remains a symbol of medicine today.
