Sylvain, Renée

My inspiration comes from my surroundings. I also rely on lots of photographs depicting daily life, my friends, family and even fashion photos.

I am an artist and a self-taught painter originally from Drummondville. For as long as I can remember, I always wanted to create and I experimented with many different mediums. I started to draw at a very young age eventually turning to acrylic painting as an adult. This allowed me to explore lots of different techniques, collages, varnishes and glazes. I taught for ten years or so but since 2018, I have devoted my time uniquely to my creations.

Since 2007, I have owned my boutique workshop which is open by appointment and I work as an artist full time. I create my own paintings and also fulfill many personal orders for cups and coupes painted by hand for wedding gifts, anniversaries, retirement, corporations etc.

My inspiration comes from my surroundings. I also rely on lots of photographs depicting daily life, my friends, family and even fashion photos. In my most recent collection which I started in 2019, I have abandoned animals a bit in favor of seeking inspiration from current events which I find in newspaper articles. This has brought me a lot of personalized orders because my clients find it very original that the canvas that they have ordered represents their passion, their profession or their business using the newspaper articles that I have chosen. Newspapers are an infinite source of inspiration for me and I love that. Written works are another one of my passions which I have not had the time to explore thoroughly enough. It is from writing and literature that the idea to incorporate newspapers into my art came to mind because I can then imagine a story depicted by my painting. My characters are always hidden behind a newspaper so that the observer of the painting can identify the subject. I am often jokingly asked at symposiums if I hide my characters behind a newspaper because I can’t paint a face and the answer is NO! For my future projects, I very much want to continu my series with the newspapers and to integrate animals in with my human characters. Real paper  newspapers and books are very important to me because the computer versions will never replace the satisfaction of feeling that paper between our hands. A book or a newspaper in itself is a story to explore with my paint brushes.