Nathalie

In 1988, after receiving my College degree in Visual Fine Arts, I left the academic art world and chose to experience the rich underground art scene of the the street life in Montreal. Safe from the quotidian concerns that had beset my family's distaff line, i soon was on the search for an environment that would encourage artistic lifestyle in a nature setting. My quest took me to Tofino, a village on the west coast of Vancouver Island, in Clayoquot Sound. I lived in an abandoned draft dodger's cabin, deep in the old-growth forest, possessed by the spirit of Emily Carr, who wrote, "There is something bigger than fact: the underlying spirit, all it stands for, the mood, the vastness, the wildness. ‘’ This same spirit incubated my work’s mysticism and the desire to sense and interpret its reality.


I began to explore landscape paintings, Influenced by Josephine Fletcher, and a handful of other important painters living in Clayoquot at that time . The forest is a living cathedral and i found relief within her wild beauty.

I soon lost any desire to work in a studio, and consecrated my soul to the Church of Plein Air. Often I had to carry my gear through miles of forest and across beaches to find the perfect spot; but passion gives boundless energy. 

Ironically, it was while immersed in the natural vistas of Clayoquot that my inner landscape began to unfold. Nature was my school, where an expression of my own personal unconscious in light and shadow, stillness and movement, smells and sensations and the emotional responses they trigger began to unfold, as I had always dreamed they would.

I hung out with legendary figurative forest-dwelling artists Godfrey Stephens, Andrew Struthers, Michael Henri Wright, and Kal Kan.

In 1995 I flew to Hawaii, where my Plein Air work matured and also where my ‘’innerscapes’’ emerged, delving more and more in the abstract language for the next 16 years on the slopes of a volcano. It was an important piece of my personal puzzle, affected by the strong emotional expressive Hawaiien presence..

But Hawaii was not home. 14 years ago I returned to Quebec, partly to nurse my aging parents and partly because i was ready to become visible in the cultural landscapes of Quebec and Canada.

While Plein Air painting is, to me, akin to a reverent pilgrim through cathedrals , my abstract expressionism takes me on a profound venture where the landscapes coalesce with the innerscapes of my psyche.

From Montreal street life, to the old growth forest of the West Coast, the Hawaiian jungle, my more internalized life in a small village of the Laurentides Quebec and my return to the West Coast, the ’’ Love of my Life’’, i feel a strenghtening in comprehending and integrating the Nature of my Soul and her expression through painting.