Zulu Hut Why They Are Built That Way

A journey and a style atypical
December 2003

by Denise Pelletier

(DP) - The painter Thérèse Fortin returned to live in his hometown after several years in Quebec. Just before leaving Quebec, she has completed a project of exceptional scale, an enormous triptych painted with the participation of 1500 people, mark the fifth anniversary of the Commission scolaire de la Capitale.
This was done last August, under a huge tent, eight people have helped Therese Fortin blends of colors and spatulas on tables and distribute them to members, officers and employees of the school board to they can put spots on the large canvas, 15 feet by six feet at their disposal.
Therese Fortin then worked for six days to identify, among these spots, patterns, themes, characters. From her observations, she reworked the canvas in order to identify three topics: a saxophonist, a student in carpentry and a soccer player, themes that illustrate well the diversity of student activities. She then removed her canvas into three separate tables, and the triptych is now on display at the registered office of the school board of the Capital.

Therese Fortin became a specialist in the creation of collective works by the same method. She conducted a Chicoutimi a year ago and a half, with a group of women invited by AFEAS Our Lady of Grace, and another at the Chateau Frontenac with 400 participants. In its creation
personal, it shall follow the same technique she called emergy, which is to paint spots first spontaneously, then in its subsequent emergence of a figurative subject, adding features, highlighting some forms and reducing others. She works with oil and spoon in shades of yellow, orange, red, brown, projecting drops of color on certain sections of the canvas to create a motion effect.
Therese Fortin continues to produce in the studio located just in front of the house she now lives in River Eternity. After a career in the communications field, she returned to painting, an art she loves since childhood, there fifteen years and devoted himself full time.

U.S.
Curiously, the United States, more than in Quebec, his works found buyers. In particular, the Joy Gallery Key West, Florida, who has represented his participation in 1997, Art Festival of the place. Therese Fortin had his best year in 2001, selling more than forty paintings. Among others, one of his works, entitled "Champagne" where one sees a young woman sitting near a table on which is placed a glass of champagne ("my best canvas," says the artist) has been bought by a New York lawyer to (it is among others the Counsel for the Metropolitan Opera) who installed it in his office. Subsequently, the latter, who did not know her, sent her an email asking "where one could find in New York" and learning that she was not there, told him that it absolutely had to visit the Big Apple.
Besides, she will, and will travel to Chicago and New York to meet with collectors and potential agents, after which she will return to Key West for the opening of a new exhibition in March 2004. It will also exhibit at the Galerie Horizon Sorel Tracy, from February 8 to 28, an offer which was received by Internet.
However, a consequence of the attacks of September 11, 2001 in New York, the art market has become very difficult: Americans and tourists from abroad have virtually stopped traveling, and suddenly Key West does was more a desired destination, "says Therese Fortin, who has suffered for two years from the effects of this situation, which slowly begins to recover. In Quebec, she sells quite a few paintings, "My art is unusual, it may be too out of the box," she says.