About

Manon Simard

Manon Simard is a Canadian artist born in Chicoutimi, she lives and works in Montreal. Since her childhood, she first expressed herself through dance and in elementary school with her talent used for various creative school work. Then she took different courses including painting, but she is above all a free visual artist. Her curiosity and innate sense of beauty naturally leads her to express herself creatively in various forms. She deeply loves nature, its contours and movements, its colors, its intensities, its sounds, its spirit, in short, everything about nature reaches her in its most remote parts. What she wants? To express (externalize) and share this wonderful inspiration.

Artist statement

Since 2015 my studio work, greatly inspired by nature, revolves around two axes: one figurative and the other abstract.

The first one is inspired by the discovery I made of horse therapy in the Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean and Eastern Townships and the second one, influenced by meetings with several artists and more recently by the discovery of important works from the lyrical abstraction period of painter Zao Woo Ki seen in Paris as well as those of Yahne Le Toumelin who worked with him in his early years.

When figurative art meets Horses

My encounter with horses through equitherapy has been decisive in my life and in my work as a painter. And it is the power of this encounter, of this connection between two individualities which is established between the animal and oneself, through the glances, that I try to recreate, at the same time to remember, to relive and to make the spectator live it. Each individualized portrait of this magnificent animal, both strong and sensitive, is an invitation to this beautiful journey.

When emotion plays with convention

As much as the representation of my horses is part of a structured approach, obeying the requirements of figurative painting, here my creative process is unbridled, freeing itself from any pictorial convention (informal art) to make room for a spontaneous, lively gesture, fed by emotions, without any preconceived ideas and expressing itself mainly through instantaneous inspiration, colors (lyrical abstraction), textures revealing themselves on wooden or other supports and mixed with various materials (glue, oil, varnish, etc.) to finally release an unpredictable or voluntary light by alterations of the matter.