Laureen Marchand, Painter, Rewilding Imagination
I live in the southwest corner of Saskatchewan, in Val Marie, at the gateway to Grasslands National Park. Inspired by this region’s subtlety and remoteness, my paintings reflect on our ideas and perception of beauty. I hope these artworks invite you to see not just the painted object, but yourself in it.
Though my paintings are representational, they aren’t just about surface appearance. I believe that if I can paint someone or something so it looks the most like itself, I might help viewers see not just the painting’s subject, but themselves in it. I believe that without an essential understanding of our own beauty and the beauty of our experience, we can’t appreciate the value of what we encounter.
In my current project, Rewilding Imagination, I offer viewers the chance to change something about the way they see. Rewilding Imagination via artwork isn’t a project on the scale of the extraordinary 20-year environmental restoration endeavour of Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell in West Sussex, UK who transformed 3,500 acres of barren farmland into a thriving wilderness. Rewilding Imagination is more like what people do when they rewild their gardens. We understand that we need both domestic and wild elements in our lives and in doing so, look for ways that allow both to thrive.
As Isabella Tree said, “Rewilding – giving nature the space and opportunity to express itself – is largely a leap of faith.” I have faith that by visually integrating dailiness and wildness as well as the interruptive elements of pure abstraction, I can help a viewer see domestic beauty in harmonious relationship to both natural and human-made beauty, rather than merely accepting our society’s view that these elements must conflict.
I continue to explore the connection between our inner view and what’s around us. The birds I paint are my birds. They have visited my back garden, or they have graced my immediate environs. I live in an area of huge airscape panoramas, near one of Canada’s largest dark sky preserves, and the skies I paint the birds into are my skies. The common and household objects in my paintings are taken from my life. My studio is in my home and my home is an influence on every choice I make. I think it’s an influence on every choice that all of us make. And the abstract elements I use come from my history of studying in two formalist art schools in succession. Like everyone else, I’m incapable of deciding not to be influenced by my experience. This is important to me because I live and work in a society that argues for seeing the domestic, the natural, and the abstract as being in conflict. I am convinced, and have set out to convince others, that they aren’t.
Because I believe that the personal and the exterior can’t be separated without diminishing both, my paintings seek to remind us of the inescapable way these fit together.