Featured Artist Louise Laplante

Artist Louise Laplante creates strong imagery with chalk silhouette on vintage paper collage. To see more of her work, visit her website.

 

 

I have always been fascinated by the fragments of the past to be found on old paper and how these sheets record our ancestors’ attempts to leave a mark on their world. We think we’ve abandoned many of the ideas on these pages but they, the old letters, formal documents and even music sheets, remind us of how often we repeat our ancestor’s efforts with often only a slight change in method.

 

 

I collaged these old pieces of ephemera to create the background for my drawings. I can use pages from one book, a group of related correspondence, or a jumble of different, unrelated pieces of paper. Their words are often the source for the images I lay on top.

 

 

The images I use can be animals – creatures who dance through life with a grace that humans try so hard to do with practice. They can be figures “assembled” from hands, feet, or hats and the outlines of clothing. Each motif refers in its own way to the collaged pages.

 

 

I leave it to the viewer to see the text as simply a patterned background or read the individual pages to understand how I have related the motifs I have chosen for the specific work to its text. This relationship can be ironic, humorous, sad or thoughtful.

 

 

I rub the chalk heavily into the sheet to get a deep, rich tone and use the curved lines bursting from each image to signify movement making the motifs as active as the collaged sheets underneath them.

 

 

Equally central are the formal aspects of the image. Balance and pattern are important elements in each work.

 

 

I celebrate the beauty in the old, yellowed and foxed paper, in its stains and scribbles, along with the birds, animals, hats or other elements on the paper and seek to arrange them on the sheet to emphasize this beauty.

 

 

Some works use several sheets of collaged paper butted together to create a larger surface on which to draw.

 

 

These multi-sheet drawings are reflective of the pieced-together nature of our memories of the past, of the way we combine disparate memories or forget parts of our pasts.

 

 

Although my drawings spring from my interpretation of the text on the pages I have collaged together, the viewer is always free to determine his or her own relationship between the two.

 

Artist Louise Laplante invites you to view her work at Carrie Haddad Gallery.

 

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