Artworks by Grâce Pégéron

I draw portraits in a single line and paint abstractions that follow no plan. Different methods, same instinct: get past what a face or a landscape is supposed to look like, straight to what it actually is.

I started in figurative art - years of rules, learned and honored. Useful, until it wasn't. Somewhere along the way it turned airtight, and intuition doesn't like a closed door.

The first portrait that mattered, I drew with my eyes closed. It showed me what I'd forgotten how to see. They've kept revealing something ever since - in the people I draw, in me.

Abstract came once I let myself step inside without asking permission first. What I found there: the whole lives in every part, and every part holds the whole.

I work in acrylic and oil stick, often both on the same canvas - one quick, one slow, pulling against each other until the piece decides what it needs.

I paint by a lagoon where the sea comes and goes, and it's started seeping into the work without asking permission either. Water, wind, the line between them that was never really there.