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I was born in Port-Au-Prince and I also lived in Dar-Es-Salaam, Vancouver, Montréal, Paris, Chicago, Brighton, London, Las Palmas, Toronto and now I'm living in the family home in Brittany. I grew up moving a lot around the planet because of my parents' jobs. We lived within cosmopolitan environments and had friends of many ethnicities and cultures. I went to francophone private schools and state schools.
I think like most people who have access to paper and pencils I drew as a child from my early years and it was a favourite activity. I remember drawing lots of princesses around age 8. I attempted portraiture the following years and in my teenage years I drew nude figures from references in ads and magazines. Some of them were quite racy. One of my dad's friends who was an artist saw two that he had hung in the hallway of the apartment and he told me she had suggested I try sculpture as my drawings showed signs of a 3D understanding, but I never took the time to delve into sculpture although I admire sculptors a lot. One of the schools I went to in Paris was the Lycée Claude Monet. There, at the age of 15, an art teacher asked me if I wanted to be part of the art club. I was surprised to be selected and said yes without knowing anything about it. Every Wednesday afternoon the school was empty except for a handful of pupils making art in the attic (underroof) art studio. I was asked to finish a painting another pupil had started to draft on a very large frame, from a photograph of her legs and shoes in an unusual perspective. I hadn't painted in that scale before and from that moment I realised it would be my favourite format. The painting was hung in the school hallways. It was quite something for me, there was a real large scale Monet painting hanging in the school hall. I have no idea what happened to my painting since I left. But I have a few photos my mother took of me standing below it.
My visual canvas and inspirations comes from the art I was exposed to as a child such as Haitian art (Naive Art, folk and voodoo myths), East African Art (painting, batik and sculpture), Native Art (British Columbia Totems and sculptures), Canadian Art (Emily Carr), Western Art (especially Picasso, Gauguin and Dali up to age 15, then other ones). My father was a keen collector of Haitian and East African Art and paintings adorned the walls at home.
My mother was a photographer and had a photography studio at home which I found mystical. From the age of 16 I developed an affinity for the works of artists, writers and thinkers Jean-Michel Basquiat, Louise Bourgeois, Roy Lichtenstein, Jean-Paul Sartre, Marguerite Duras, René Depestre, Charles baudelaire and Faith Ringgold.
Today there are many contemporary artists whose works I admire such as Rothko, but to try to keep this concise, I will talk about my direct inspirations. Life experiences, mine and others. Songs, talks I listen to in conferences, podcasts or YouTube. Films, stories people tell me about, books, newspaper or magazine articles. Wikipedia and articles on the internet when I need to research specific subject. And last but not least, my public. I receive photographs from some of my followers on social media and I interpret the pictures into a drawing or painting of their soul. I tend to blur out or abstract the facial features to maintain their anonymity and to reinforce the universality of our bodies. It's been a beneficial experience so far from the feedback I get from the models and the viewers. I think it's a helpful experience as we live in an era of body shaming. To have your body seen and appreciated in an impartial way and to realise that others like it can be a way to and a facet of self-compassion, self-appreciation, self-acceptance and self-love. Sometimes it's really helpful to learn to love yourself by realising that others accept you as you are before you can do this for yourself and then it can become a self-sufficient love independent of others' opinion. You can have a look at most of them under the hashtag #nudesbytheartist and there was another interesting series I did #asktheartist where I answered followers' questions with a drawing, again anonymously. So we can explore taboos and life questions like this to destigmatise them.
Above everything and everyone I mentioned, my deepest inspiration is Jesus as related in the Bible. Whether people believe he existed or not, the person he is said to be is an example to me of true love full of compassion for everyone and who doesn't discriminate. He models how to treat everyone with dignity especially the marginalised of society. He is a feminist, a revolutionary and a peacemaker. I could say so much more about him, yet I think it is best to discover by yourself as you read The Gospels. For me catharsis / enlightenment / awakening / rebirth came when I read and understood at the age of 23 that there is no condemnation from God but only forgiveness, grace and love. Peace is with all of us.
I studied Art Education at Concordia University in Montréal. I wanted to study Art Therapy but the head of that department made the program sound so unappealing that I decided to continue in a specialisation in Art Education knowing that anyway artmaking is therapeutic in essence. My favourite courses were Painting (under the artist Guido Molinari), Printing and Dying on Fibers, Multimedia Art, Photography, Developmental Drama and Drawing. My drawing teacher hated my work as she thought it was too sexual and didn't like that I included wording. After this lukewarm experience with the drawing teacher, in my first lesson with Guido Molinari, he could tell I wasn’t expressing my true essence and told me to restart the painting and to be bold as I should, to just express my truth freely. It was liberating. He also encouraged me to get a night pass to paint at all hours, which I did as I had difficulty with the fumes of oil paintings of other students during the day. I paint with Acrylics, Inks and Watercolours. My photography teacher told me he would fail me (because I wasn’t complying with his expectations), which he did and I loved the look on his face when I retook his class the following year and still worked with high contrasts although he wanted greys. I think the teachers who appreciated my work the most were my Art Education teacher Linda Szabad-Smyth and my Multimedia/Video Art teacher Richard Lachapelle. I really enjoyed my teaching trainings with teenagers who were disadvantaged or victims/perpetrators of violence by teaching video art, street art and drama.