Johanne Maheux
Artist Painter -
Figurative art
Address :
St-Georges (Québec), Canada
Phone number :
418-221-4470
Email :
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Biography
Johanne Maheux was born in 1964 in Saint-Joseph-de-Beauce, but has been living in St-Georges for 30 years. Passionate about art since her childhood, she first studied social work and worked for 35 years in the health care network. In parallel to her work, she studied art, first a certificate at the University of Chicoutimi and in 2018 and completed a short graduate program in Study of Artistic Practice at the University of Quebec in Rimouski.
She has presented a dozen solo exhibitions and participated in more than a hundred group exhibitions across Quebec. She has received several awards including the grand prize of the jury of the Chaudière-Appalaches en œuvres competition in 2019 and the Beauce-Sartigan MRC prize in 2020. She regularly sits on selection juries. For the past two years, she has devoted herself to her artistic practice and a year ago, with an artist friend, she founded the Atelier Joual Vert, a community art workshop open to all.
Through this project, she was able to marry her two passions for people and the arts, as her work as a social worker has always influenced her artistic work. Cultural mediation is an aspect of her practice that interests her greatly.
Artistic approach
The world is her laboratory.
In a figurative style close to social realism, an American artistic movement dating from the 1930s, Johanne Maheux expresses her vision of life through thematic series that are a pretext to paint the universe as she sees it. She is particularly interested in social realities and certain themes are recurrent in her works, especially the relationship that human beings have with time; the time that passes, the time that remains, the time that is lost, that we have too much of or that we no longer have... She is also interested in everything that touches on communication between humans, as evidenced by her series "Conversations".
Influenced by Edward Hopper, Jean-Paul Lemieux, Toulouse Lautrec, she first captures places and people through photography, she observes them and soaks up the atmosphere. Then, she draws the essence of what she wants to transmit as a message. The idea of leaving a trace of the present is also part of her approach. Her new series "Traces of Humanity" echoes the last two years where isolation and confinement have highlighted the need for man to exist and socialize. Through different places, she wishes to make the viewer feel the importance of human presence.
Johanne Maheux works in acrylic and oil pastel. Not being able to choose between the two, she works mainly in small format with oil pastel and acrylic for the rest of her production. She uses the medium for what it offers and is rather purist in her way of working, preferring sobriety to artifice. She likes to bring out a melancholic aspect in her works with the use of blue, her favorite color.