Hélène Routhier
Painting and printmaking
Address :
Montréal et Gaspé
Email :
Phone number :
1-438-390-8940
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Biography
Hélène Routhier was born in the Saguenay, in a region of winter and space; with her family, she camped every summer on the shores of Lac-Saint-Jean, in contact with the open sea, the wind and the forest. The men in her family and in the neighborhood fished and hunted, and fascinated her; this is her heritage. At 18, she moved to Montreal, her city of heart, diversity and culture.
Since 2019, she has divided her life between the metropolis and the tip of the Gaspé Peninsula, Gespeg, which means "the end of the world" in Mi'gmaq. She spends winter and summer there, with a view of the horizon, in contact with the ice, the tides, the mountains and, of course, the salmon rivers.
At the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the Université de Montréal, she completed her studies in psychology and became a clinical psychologist, dedicated to better living and freedom of being.
In 1997, she discovered painting, first watercolor, then acrylic, and along the creative path, she became interested in printmaking in 2016 and became a member of Atelier Circulaire, where she has continued her practice ever since.
She is fundamentally self-taught. She feels she owes a great deal to the legacy of all the professional artists with whom she has built herself as an artist: Hélène Goulet, who gave her the tones of color; Marie-Ange Brassard, the taste for printing; Dominique Sarrazin, the rigor of composition; Seymour Segal, freedom; Jacques Clément, audacity; and Jacinthe Tétrault, reflection and the exercise of critical thinking; and to all the talented and inspiring artists she rubs shoulders with at Atelier Circulaire.
Artistic approach
Hélène Routhier is a multidisciplinary artist inspired by nature. Her painting and printmaking practices nourish each other, offering her a wide field of creativity.
She is interested in abstraction, research and experimentation, with all their surprises and mistakes. For her, creation is a dance with randomness, where the reactions of the material to her gesture surprise her and lead to expressive works in motion.
She loves paper, its ancient history, its touch and its light. In painting, the freedom offered by acrylics suits her personality. In printmaking, anything she comes across in her daily life can be the starting point for a project: spruce bark, lichen, a wine cork, a nibbled leaf, a torn piece of cardboard, fishnet, a piece of rope...she sees beauty everywhere.
Her works interpret nature and the current challenges of ecosystem sustainability, in both abstract and figurative representations.