Michèle Drouin (RCA), Retrospective - Gardens Ablaze/Jardins de lumière
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Bugera Matheson Gallery (New Location) 1B-10110 124 Street, Edmonton, Alberta T5N 1P6
Michele Drouin, "La lumiere jaillit du puit," nd
Michèle Drouin (RCA) was born in the 1930’s and became highly regarded post-modern abstract painter by the late 1970’s. In the 1970’ and 1980’s, artists, critics and curators forged relationships that connected the artworld in Edmonton, London and New York. Those connections manifested in the Triangle Workshops in New York and the Emma Lake workshops in Saskatchewan This was fertile ground for collaboration and artistic expression, which was then honed and refined through expert critique and coaching. This was the environment in which Michèle developed the vibrant, expressive style that influenced the rest of her career.
MICHÈLE DROUIN - Connection to Edmonton and the West
Until the 1980s Michèle Drouin was an abstract painter after the fashion of Guido Molinari, Yves Gaucher, and Claude Tousignant her "hard edge" Montreal compatriots who sought clarity and structure in strict geometry and uninflected flat colour. They painted what Clement Greenberg called "post-painterly abstraction" - albeit with a French twist.
Michèle's painting of the mid-eighties departed from that manner. I suspect that her departure was prompted by her contact with Karen Wilkin (a friend of Michele's husband, Sam Abramovitch) who encouraged her in 1983 to attend Triangle Workshop near Mashomak, New York. Wilkin was visiting critic at Triangle that year. (She went on to become overall director of its program.) At the time Triangle was something of a New York/London/Edmonton affair, created in 1982 by the British sculptor Anthony Caro following his own experience at Saskatchewan's Emma Lake Artists Workshop in 1977. In its early years significant visitors to Triangle included several of Caro's artist friends, among them Kenneth Noland, Larry Poons and Helen Frankenthaler. Caro's great friend, the American critic Clement Greenberg, visited annually.
I met Michèle in the mid-1980s some time after her Montreal geometry had been shaken out. I suspect that the basic layout of her new paintings was carried forward from her earlier work, but the resulting paintings seemed relaxed and expanded. They were made up of squarish, boxed-in layouts: rectangles within rectangles. Bold overlapping bars along the canvas sides framed and flanked smaller ones in the centre: dark bars at the perimeter tended to surrounding light at the centre. The paintings were dramatic but never severe: colour expression engaged with a paint surface in a relaxed and expressive way. The paint surfaces seemed to breathe.
Curiously, her mature paintings were comparable in feeling to those of several Saskatoon and Edmonton painters. It might even be said that her manner of painting inclined to the West, if only a little, a very rare thing for a Montrealer. But in her particular case, it proved to be the proper thing.
Terry Fenton Victoria, BC, 2017