West End artist works with natural materials
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This article was published 16/11/2020 (931 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Geneviève Levasseur’s pop art style portrait of Donald Trump hangs on one wall of her Sargent Avenue studio, next to a portrait of young superstar environmentalist Greta Thunberg.
In real life, the two abhor each other. Trump once infamously advised Thunberg to work on her “anger management problem” and frequently asserted that climate change was a hoax, even going on to say that it had been invented by scientists.
Levasseur painted the portrait of Trump in 2017, using pig’s blood, from the Lucky Market, mixed with a gel medium. It wasn’t easy to work with and she had to use a squeeze bottle to apply it to the canvas in many places.
Who paints a portrait using pig’s blood? Art is a form of expressing oneself and Levasseur has never kept her feelings separate from her art practice. She says had been feeling more and more unease after Trump announced his presidential bid in 2015, and during the months of surreal and bizarre campaigning that followed. A short while after he was sworn in as U.S. president on Jan. 20, 2017, she painted the canvas over the course of a weekend — both as a spiritual exorcism for her anguish and as a meditation process to help her tolerate the coming four years which she feared would cause pain to many Americans.
The painting is called C’est Cochon; a common French phrase that loosely translates to “it’s dirty.” Cochon means pig in English and in the French language it is part of many innuendoes often been applied to Trump.
When Levasseur paints with natural materials, she is making a statement about her care for the environment, and she also really enjoys working with them. She painted Thunberg’s portrait using mud from Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota. David Suzuki’s portrait was painted with mud from Churchill, where she had been on an artist retreat funded by the Manitoba Arts Council at Churchill Northern Studies Centre in 2017.
Not all her work is in monochromatic earth tones. You can view Along the Way, a new series of vibrantly coloured acrylics in her characteristic, photo-realistic style while picking up one of the yummy wraps at the Good Land Café, a plant-based eatery at 679 Sargent Ave.
Anne Hawe is a community correspondent for the West End. She can be reached at annie_hawe@hotmail.com
Anne Hawe
West End community correspondent
Anne Hawe is a community correspondent for the West End. She can be reached at annie_hawe@hotmail.com