Marie Rioux
Land scape
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
the beginning of our correspondence after I was selected for this special edition of LandEscape Art Review.
Yes, from a very early age I attended the École des Beaux Arts for children on Saturday mornings. I then took every visual arts course I could at high school. Later I studied for two years in the visual arts department of a junior college( the Sainte-Foy CEGEP). From there I spent nearly a year in the visual arts department of Université Laval, but I stopped before obtaining my degree. The courses didn’ t meet my needs at the time. There followed various courses, workshops, drawing from observation, an introduction to engraving at the Atelier de Réalisations graphiques, courses on the basics of ceramics at the Atelier de Céramique, on metalworking at the École des métiers d’ art, an introduction to photography at Centre VU and to Photoshop at Engramme. All these institutions or artist-run centres are in Quebec City. Currently, since September 2016, I’ ve begun a short program in graduate studies at the Université de Rimouski’ s Lévis campus, across the river from Quebec City, in studies of artistic practices.
When I was in junior college, the dominant artistic current was Hard Edge painting. This movement left deep and significant traces on the way I conceive the space of a painting. Moreover, I’ d say that it enabled and helped me to demystify abstract art. For me the interest of Hard Edge painting, with its clearly marked and well-defined structures, without figurative resonance, lies in its judicious choice of colours which