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The creative is the place where no one else has ever been.
You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition.
What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover will be yourself.
Alan Alda, American actor, director and screenwriter
“New Old Masters” is a phrase used by Donald Kuspit, the distinguished New York art critic, to describe contemporary figurative painters who reinterpret or even expropriate the work of the Old Masters. If this can justifiably be called a movement, France Jodoin must surely be added to this roster for her atmospheric paintings are very reminiscent of the works of J.M.W. Turner, the English Romantic artist, whose oeuvre offered an English prelude to French Impressionism. Ms. Jodoin is a painter of moods and must, as such, labour from her intuition. Her show with us in 2008 offered us interpretations of the unpredictable and sometimes sombre seascapes of the North Atlantic coastline: tiny ships tossed about on vast turbulent seas; vessels threading their way homeward to their harbours through the fog; or boats bouncing on their moorings in the misty haze of morning.
The paintings in this exhibition, entitled Wanderers, are of her memories of Venice, that beloved and stately queen of the Adriatic. Hers is the Venice of the imagination where sea and sky come together on the shimmering subtropical lagoon: the warm first light of morning, palace turrets gleaming white through the mist, gondolas riding on the silver sea, church domes sparkling in the moonlight.
Ms. Jodoin has captured the atmosphere and character of “La Serenissima.” These new paintings are refinements – vestiges – of her experience and, because they are devoid of irrelevant anecdotal detail, they can become quite simply and delightfully our own.
Lucienne Lefebvre Glaubinger
Jacqueline Hébert Stoneberger
Beaux-arts des Amériques
Montréal, Canada
October 2010
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