Chars à Voile Painting by Sylviane Dubois

Sylviane Dubois – The artist’s statement

It was in the studio of James D. Robertson MBE, senior lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art, that Sylviane Dubois experienced the intensity of color and the vibrancy of paint unrelated to drawing or pattern. Ever since, she has treasured that emotion which is at the root of her work. A subsequent encounter with Willie Rodger RSA RGI was the catalyst to her painting. In his studio she drew and painted her first works and he has remained her mentor.

In France, her home country, she has joined the studio of another great artist, Bruno Lebel, Grand Prix de Rome and Honorary Professor at the Beaux-Arts School in Paris. Painting is sharing an experience, a range of emotions through color and marks carefully distributed or lavishly and wildly thrown onto linen canvas.

Two visual vocabularies coexist in her creations. The first is a sensitive and poetic rendering of fruit, flowers and foliage that she paints from nature or in her studio, either in oil or in acrylic. The subject matter and treatment may be reminiscent of mediaeval frescoes. Her work is also indebted to the mural paintings she saw in Pompei, Herculaneum and Oplontis. At times, her realistic objective painting turns to shades of grey that appease the vibrancy of powerfully colorful backgrounds.
Her second visual vocabulary emerges from the unconscious and matches a series she has entitled ‘Couples’. Color and matter are splashed onto the canvas. Her hand races with the syncopated rhythm of her brushes and palette knives as they discharge acrylic and pure pigments, then crush and stretch them into thin layers or thick patches. No intention, no will. She pauses. A longer and slower gesture punctuated with a stick of chalk suddenly generates ‘the couple’.

Strength, sensitivity, a poetic vision, her inner joy, the pleasure of playing with the transparency and the fluidity of the medium, the solidity of the beautiful linen canvas, all combine in her artwork.

Sylviane Dubois has exhibited in France and in Scotland. Her paintings have entered private collections in England, Scotland, Belgium, France and China.

• Nationality: FRANCE
• Date of birth : unknown date
• Artistic domains:
• Groups: Contemporary French Artists