Layered Explorations

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Anne Brochu Lambert, “Breaking Loose / Libération,” 2018

oils, cold wax, aluminum foil, pastels and graphite on birch panel, 36” x 48” (photo by A.B. Lambert)

Anne Brochu Lambert left a successful career as a French-language CBC journalist in Saskatchewan to follow her dream of being an artist. Her current show, Survey / Méandres, at Regina’s Nouveau Gallery, brings together work from the last two years, a time that saw her and five other regional artists mentored by Serge Murphy, an artist and independent curator in Montreal, a project supported by the Conseil culturel Fransaskois and the Canada Council for the Arts. The experience created a new impetus. “I gave myself more permission to go further, to push ideas,” she says.

Most of Brochu Lambert’s work is landscape based, albeit in an abstracted form, a shift from her earlier interest in the figure. Still, she retains a connection with the human by including things like a rowboat or simple house-like structures, representational elements that anchor the work for viewers. She typically works with encaustic – a technique in which pigment is mixed with hot wax – but takes an exploratory approach by incorporating other media.

Breaking Loose / Libération, from the series Rites of Passage, is an especially textured and layered piece that Brochu Lambert worked over several times before reaching a final composition. It shows an empty rowboat sitting atop the dividing line between a watery blue strip at the top of the painting and a wider expanse of broken white in the lower reaches. It’s easy to read the image as ice breaking up on a river. Indeed, she says the idea came during a springtime visit to Lévis, where she grew up, close to the St. Lawrence River across from Quebec City.

Parts of the work's surface are opaque, while others offer glimpses of vague objects, and there are also scratches and other marks. It reflects the  experiences she was going through at the time – her children growing up and the death of her father. “It’s a metaphor for what happens in our lives,” she says. “What’s visible and what’s invisible.” ■

Survey / Méandres is on view at Regina's Nouveau Gallery until June 23, 2018.

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Anne Brochu Lambert, “Meteor / Météore,” 2018

encaustic, Japanese paper, vintage paper, charcoal and gold leaf on birch panel, 30” x 24” (photo by A.B. Lambert)