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WORKSHOP VISIT
Biography
Isabelle Arn was born in Mâcon in 1960; she spent her childhood between Chamonix and Lyon. At the age of 13, as an idealistic adolescent, she became a self-proclaimed hermit and decided to spend the next three years of her life far from the madding crowd. She spent a good deal of time in the mountains, alone with the elements in a dreamlike world, observing the colors, light and movements of her natural environment. For Isabelle these years of solitude were a unique, privileged experience which, today still, continue to create a sort of space and time lag between herself and common reality.
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On completing her degree in history, Isabelle left Lyon for Geneva where, in 1992, she enrolled at the Institut Universitaire des Études du Développement de Genève (IUED). The years she spent at the IUED were highly politicized and focused on third world issues which she turned away from to dedicate herself to painting.
She prefers working with oil pastels on paper and oil paints on plywood which offer her the possibility to render reality in its three dimensions (with a particular emphasis on depth) transposing it into an explosive burst of emotion.
Isabelle’s excessive, emotional personality expresses itself in single one-off spurts of creativity – like live performances – to which she rarely returns once the work is completed. In one go she “throws” colors, forms and lines onto her canvas like a poet using the « écriture automatique » (freewriting) technique.
For Isabelle Arn, the act of pictural creation is the release of fragments of feelings experienced in her encounters with people, states of mind and heart, moods. An interior world of fantasy, freedom and feminity.
Doing dishes becomes a pretext for fleeing from the here and now to a dreamworld. Expressing a desire to not conform or the impossibility to take action. Alluding to the huge gulf that separates the roles we play from the lives we dream of leading. Expressing too an infinite interior freedom and the boundless energy released by it.
Between a naïve world of the fantastic and an expressionistic urgency, her work speaks of expectation or ennui, sensuality, stolen moments in time, movement, vital energy, the strength of the dream, joy, happiness, light, the beauty of colors which vibrate in harmony.
Isabelle is a painter inhabited by a type of exaltation and a primitive life form existing at the heart of each moment in time – even within the artifices of today’s ultra-sophisticated societies. When painting, she lets her hand take over. Like a shamanistic rite in which the spirit and the subconscious – rather than the intellect – lead the way, her painting pays tribute to « letting go », to freedom, to a kind of wandering in a semi-delirious state.
And yet, Isabelle Arn never for a moment turns her back on the beauty of the surrounding world, and she fully recognizes the importance of giving generous expression to feelings and emotions.
