Renee Bouchard

Artist Statement:: Renée
Bouchard

I use titles to constrain the viewer within the ambiguity of my abstract representational paintings. My work originates from doodling, and color functions to organize the compositional relationships. My work involves many dualities, which ultimately explore the puzzle that lies between birth and death. I suggest that sexuality is the unifying source of human evolution. I play with male and female archetypical forms to create tension and inter-connection. Mark making for me expresses the instinctual nature of sexuality, and acts as a courtship within the context of contrasts. Individual and/or piles of heads continue to show up in my paintings, because they best represent my interest in the complexity of the mind. Within this interest, I engage in the concept of isolation and multi-identities. I reference pendulums, tight ropes, hourglasses, ghosts, and gravity to investigate time. Baskets, tents, and vessels are symbols I use to contain certain moments in time. In my new paintings, I reserve much of the white of the canvas; use bundles of thick paint, and thin washes to represent presence and absence.

Biography:: Renée Bouchard graduated from the Maine College of Art in 1999. She has been an artist in residence at the Cooper Union, The Kate Millet Art Colony for Women, and at the Vermont Studio Center. She has given lectures about her work at Union College, the University of Southern Maine, and at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the Maine College of Art. She has exhibited her work in New England, Florida, and New York. She was recently awarded an individual artist grant from the Vermont Arts Council.

North Adams Open Studios -