Quebec artists celebrate beauty and sunny sides of life

Our vacation trip to Gaspé and New Brunswick took us along the Saint Lawrence river. Halfway between Quebec and Gaspé is the Bas-Saint-Laurent’s regional capital and Quebec’s oceanographic capital: Rimouski, located on the east shore of the Rimouski River. Another beautiful small town Kamouraska also presents works by regional and Quebec artists at its Art Centre.

We happened to see a wonderful art show at the Centre D’art Marcel Gagnon in Sainte-Flavie which included large scale exhibition, workshops, demos and presentations of about 40 Quebec artists at the end of July.

The nature in this part of Canada is fantastic and breathtakingly beautiful, so was the art exhibited in this show. I was genuinely surprised seeing so much vibrancy, brightness, character, mood and variety.

We stopped at Marie Claude Tetreault’s exhibition space at first. Her paintings displayed small towns, village and street scenes in wonderfully warm colors. When I asked how she was able to capture so many attractive small town scenes in her paintings and if she was using reference photos, Marie told, that every image originated in her imagination, and she had this beutiful stuff in her memory. Too bad, I didn’t take any pictures of these paintings because the warmth, sunny feel and capture were very unique.

We had a nice conversation with the visual artist Elsa Boisjoly as we found her at a large outdoor exhibition hall.

It felt like entering a fantasy world which was in full bloom.

Colors were rich, brilliant, uplifting and vivid, and paintings very impressive. Such a wonderful way of showing the sunny side of things which make this life worth living!

More floral art by Elsa Boisjoly

I really loved the settings of this art show: all artists were painting at their location! It was so inspiring to watch these artists at work, especially because every work was very good in its execution and had a great concept.

We visited Denise Doiron’s art booth next.

Impressive floral and landscape art

The light, dramatic color, and presence of artist’s imagination was big part of every single painting.

Bright colors, sunny, uplifting feel, and great composition

We met 2 wonderful watercolor artists inside the exhibition hall: Sylvie Nadeau and Huguette Lefrancois. Watercolor is one of my most favorite mediums, so, I was very excited to watch a small demo given by Sylvie Nadeau.

Sylvie Nadeau and her wonderful watercolors

Nature watercolor art

Artist Sylvie Nadeau was very kind, she explained the techniques she was using and answered all our questions.

Thanks to Huguette Lefrancois for translation! Her work was also of great quality, unfortunately, pictures didn’t come out that well.

All in all, this was one of the most inspiring art shows which I have recently seen. Many high class artists with hundreds of extremely wonderful, color-rich paintings were present. The concept was often very original. This was something we don’t see often in Ontario. We mostly have either complete abstracts or re-production of reference photos. Quebec art was somehow bound to realism, but most artworks contained touch of imagination and implemented a unique personal view which was greatly enhanced by increadibly vivid and vibrant colors.