My ‘Inspired By’ posts began as a way to explore what makes me tick as an artist, what I’m drawn to, what makes my heart sing, what I might want to try out in terms of marks or colour combinations or compositions. They are also a way for me to share the work of artists whose work I love. I don’t advocate copying other artists instead of making our own work, however inspiring they are to us, but I do believe that we can learn from each other on our solitary artist journeys. This website is dedicated to the philosophy that you have a significant and unique offering inside you, waiting to be released. I created a course to help you with this very thing, which you can find by clicking here. May you be inspired to bring forth what’s within you!

Dominique Fortin is a Montreal artist who creates a balance of figure, symbolism and abstraction that I really love. Some elements of her work also remind me of Sabrina Ward Harrison’s scratchy pencil marks and scrawled words.

She seems to mostly use mixed media on wood, with recurring themes of dancers, birds, animals and children. As it says on the website of one of the galleries that represent her, her paintings show “a dream-like representation of the human character.” If you’ve read previous ‘Love It’ posts I’ve done, you’ll know I tend to choose artists whose work often looks like dreams.

From her own website: “Dominique’s creative process involves a great variety of techniques : collagraphy, scratching, projection, running paint, gilding, stencilling and image transferring, all enhanced by fabrics and other materials assembled in pictorial layers. Each painting offers the viewer multiple interpretations and as one gets closer, a variety of textures and symbols that were as yet invisible are revealed.”

That final sentence sounds a lot like what is in my artist statement, and therefore what I do in my own work.

I really love the colours of this painting below and the enormous sweeping dress. {Enormous sweeping dresses are something I am embracing lately!}

Here she is in her studio. I LOVE to see artists in their natural habitat. 🙂

A fair amount of her paintings are monochromatic, but you know me, all about the vibrant colour.

The artists whose work I’m drawn to these days are all story tellers. I so long to be a story teller, but I think it’s something that needs time to grow.