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From the Aegean -
2002
McIntyre Gallery, Regina
Jack Anderson writing
for the Regina Leader Post:
Like most other women of her generation who began practising
art in the late seventies and early eighties, Regina artist
Antoinette Hérivel's gentle paintings arid floor screens
were then and continue to be now a celebration of female experience
and female history.
Layering veil-like various female figures sourced from classical
mythology, art history and her own family history; green flora
fecundly entangling the cultivated backyard gardens it inhabits;
antique items of women's clothing; and small objects we generally
associate with women's domestic activities - Herivel has always
constructed poetic images that, while articulating specific
autobiographical events, people and places in her life, also
suggest an emotional and psychological interior world that most
women share.
Hérivel's latest work, exhibited under the title From
the Aegean, continues in this vein, although it finds her not
ruminating as she usually does on personal narratives sourced
from her own family's storybook. These 17 new paintings are
the result of a three-months "sabbatical" she took
recently where she enrolled in the Aegean Center for the Fine
Arts, a private art school with facilities in both Tuscany and
in Greece, that not only specializes in training its students
in classical methods and approaches to art, but which also gives
them an in-depth experience of the cultural life of these places.
Hérivel's journey, then, was to Renaissance Italy and
classical Greece, and indeed we find evidence throughout this
small show of these historical influences. In several of the
canvases from her month in Tuscany, Hérivel paints the
female figure as goddess costumed in shiny flowing satin.
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life with lace loom |
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