Biography and approach of the artist
Already at the age of five, Richard Aubin was drawing with coloring pencils on scraps of paper that he found here and there. Throughout his primary, secondary and post-secondary studies, he sought every opportunity to indulge his passion, even visiting the Quebec Museum on his own on several occasions at the age of sixteen. After his studies in pedagogy destined for teaching, he devoted himself for more than thirty years to teaching visual arts to adolescents attending Beaurivage secondary school, (Saint-Agapit, Quebec).
At the beginning of the 1980s, alongside his career as a teacher, he began studying watercolor, discovering at the same time his fascination with the veil technique (flat superposition of several layers of colors). Fascinated by the lyricism of the works of Matisse, Miro, Kandisky, Klim, and the gestures of Georgia O'Keefe and Edward Munch, he devoted himself to the production of works favoring the automatist gesture as a starting point. Sometimes, he traces the main lines of his drawing in pencil, but most of the time, they are random gestures that he makes with a pencil or brush in the form of lines or spots of color. Stopping at the shapes then suggested, he continues the creation of his painting by superimposing several layers of transparent colors directing his light to the center of his painting a bit like Vermeer or Rembrandt, and developing it in an abstract or figurative. He likes to stop, observe his work, let it rest, even for several days, until a character appears, or a landscape, flowers, birds evoking dreamlike or poetic moments, lived or dreamed, in nature, in the mountains, in the forest, or by the sea. He loves beauty and poetry, those of nature and the beings around him, those he finds in novels and music , in lyrical, narrative and symbolic visual works.
The beginning of his career was marked by solo exhibitions in galleries in Cap-Rouge, Lévis and Montreal, and by Montreal Watercolor festivals (1984-1992). In the years 1994-2001, his production was concentrated in the creation of seven series of fifteen watercolors based on themes such as "the solitary messenger", "taking a child by the hand", "the impossible dream of Jacques Brel", "I planted an oak at the end of my field", etc...Participation in several painting symposiums, group exhibitions at the Tzara gallery (Quebec) (1999-2014), and in 2014, chosen in the cohort of 1000 winners among the 1690 applications presented, first stage of the first world watercolor competition.
His last solo exhibition dates back to November 2015 at the Maison de la Culture de l'Ancienne-Lorette (Québec) where 21 works were presented, including several mounted on canvas and with personalized framing.
His works can be found in the catalog of the 1st World Watercolor Competition (2014), in L'aquarelle au Québec, editions 1, 2 and 3, and in Éditions L'art vivant, Montréal (1985, 1986 and 1987). ).
