Chantal Lavoie

For the last fifteen years, I have enrolled in numerous drawing, painting, composition, mixed techniques and live model classes. For the last five years, I have worked mainly with live models; I love this new source of energy. Currently, I am doing the Fine Arts studio program at Bishop’s University (2005) and have discovered that the main source of my inspiration is the body, this fragile yet elastic membrane that stretches, frays and unravels.

I have decided to work with the body’s paradoxes: youth and old age, beauty and decrepitude, desire and fear, vitality and suffering, solidarity and solitude, all fascinate me. My creative approach ensures that life transcends death: the devastating finality of the body that rejoices, suffers, stagnates and transforms into dust spreading ultimately on an organic environment. I seek to create a visual space in which interact lines and matter and which is suggestive of the unity between body and earth. I capture the instantaneousness of emotions and I transpose it into an actual, sensible, distorted line, that hovers somewhere between the soul and the earth. I try to create a duality between the force of the earth and the fragility of the being, the ephemeral, timeless yet essential. Harmony that is at times engaged in a moment of grace and respites in a zone of neutrality, often white, eliminates the limits between the world and the universe…, life hereafter. The horizon line pacifies and relaxes the viewer and allows to stand back far enough to hope and perhaps, at last, to accept the whole life circle.

Chantal Lavoie, 2005