About Hélène Lachapelle
Quebec painter

Hélène Lachapelle, born in 1954, in Montreal, residing in Saint-Eustache (Lower Laurentides) Quebec.

Second in a family of eight, rather modest and little encouraging of the arts or higher studies. In 1958, her family settled permanently in Laval-Ouest. At a very young age, curiously, her main interests and refuges were in her studies and her drawings. Two of her aunts noticed her talent. She completed a classical course and, encouraged by two teachers, pursued college studies in visual arts. She also completed an additional year in secretarial studies, which is how her officiel studies ended.

Life experiences brought her back to painting and, in her mid-twenties (1979), with a child to support and working in the legal field, she enrolled in drawing/oil painting classes. From 1984 to 1992, she learned the techniques of the great masters and made many successful reproductions. At the same time, she plays with ink and recognizes her need to create, to visit her imagination.

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In 1994, she saw works by Yolaine Lefebvre, a member of the Canadian Watercolor Society, and was fascinated by the movement, fluidity and singularity of the colorful subjects. Observational drawing, intuitive development, exploration of movement and accepting the unexpected! Until 2002, a sort of permission and a more in-depth and intoxicating research process took hold.

In 2005, after a few workshops at Saydie Bronfman and Seymour Segal (Montreal), she headed to the school of Francine Labelle, a renowned colorist painter in Montreal, with the intention of working with acrylic for more latitude and to learn more about color. Then she continued with Jeannine Teebhoo (2006-2011) in an approach focused on intuition and confidence. This period proved fruitful.

It was finally in 2013-2022, with Caroline Archambault, visual painter, from Saint-Sauveur, that she finds her creative self. . She learns about transformation, abstraction, movement, gesture, the importance of emptiness and the philosophy behind Chinese painting. Each workshop is new, fascinating and full of respect. She dives into it to her heart's content.

This is all that her signature brings together today. In the hollow of your ear, she will whisper to you that what has best influenced her creation is the search for her personal identity through her life experiences, her resilience, her authenticity and her courage. She wanted to meet and reveal this hidden part of her that didn't feel like she had the “right to exist” and to bring it out into the open. This now allows her to reach unsuspected heights that she has the joy of sharing, if only to enrich humanity. What seems to be for her a wonderful alchemy.