Marcelle Ferron - Abstract Expressionism Painting

Marcelle Ferron (January 29, 1924 – November 19, 2001), a Québécoise painter and stained glass artist, was a major figure in the Quebec contemporary art scene, associated with the Automatistes.
Ferron was born in Louiseville, Quebec on January 29, 1924. Her brother Jacques Ferron and her sister Madeleine Ferron were both writers. She studied at the École des beaux-arts before dropping out, unsatisfied with the way the school's instructors addressed modern art.Ferron was an early member of Paul-Émile Borduas's Automatistes art movement. She signed the manifesto Refus global, a watershed event in the Quebec cultural scene, in 1948.
In 1953, she moved to Paris, where she worked for 13 years in drawing and painting and was introduced to the art of stained glass, for which she would become best known.
Stained-glass window by Marcelle Ferron, at Champ-de-Mars metro station in Montreal.Wikipedia
"The paintings of this dynamic artist became progressively more forceful. Vibrant colours and larger, fluid forms dominated the canvas. Like fellow automatistes Boudruas and Jean-Paul Riopelle, Ferron applied paint to the canvas thickly, with great intensity and straight from the tube, often using a palette knife rather than a brush. In “Lascive” (1959), for instance, bright white bars of paint push vertically into the foreground, streaking and blurring into horizontal bars of purple and blue. “Les barrens” (1961), on the other hand, has jagged, congested conflagrations of red, blue, purple and black against a spacious, open white ground. "(thecanadianencyclopedia.ca)

Les Automatistes Marcelle Ferron

Marcelle Ferron, (January 29, 1924 – November 19, 2001), a Québécoise painter and stained glass artist, was a major figure in the Quebec contemporary art scene, associated with the Automatistes.Ferron was born in Louiseville, Quebec on January 29, 1924. Her brother Jacques Ferron and her sister Madeleine Ferron were both writers. She studied at the École des beaux-arts before dropping out, unsatisfied with the way the school's instructors addressed modern art.
Ferron was an early member of Paul-Émile Borduas's Automatistes art movement. She signed the manifesto Refus global, a watershed event in the Quebec cultural scene, in 1948.

 In 1953, she moved to Paris, where she worked for 13 years in drawing and painting and was introduced to the art of stained glass, for which she would become best known.
Stained-glass window by Marcelle Ferron, at Champ-de-Mars metro station in Montreal
One of her stained-glass windows is at Champ-de-Mars metro station in Montreal. It was one of the first non-figurative works to be installed in the metro, in defiance of the didactic style present in other works of the period, and signalled a major shift in public art in Montreal between the policies of then art director Robert Lapalme and future art director and fellow automatiste Jean-Paul Mousseau. Other examples of her works can be seen at Vendôme metro station, Hôpital Sainte-Justine, and the ICAO headquarters, in Montreal; the Place du Portage in Gatineau, Quebec; and the Granby, Quebec courthouse.In 1983, she was awarded the Paul-Émile-Borduas medal for the visual arts by the government of Quebec. In 1985, she was made a Knight of the National Order of Quebec and was promoted to Grand Officer in 2000. She was a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.She died in Montreal.Wikipedia

Les Automatistes Marcelle Ferron

Marcelle Ferron, GOQ (January 29, 1924 – November 19, 2001), a Québécoise painter and stained glass artist, was a major figure in the Quebec contemporary art scene, associated with the Automatistes
Ferron was born in Louiseville, Quebec on January 29, 1924. Her brother Jacques Ferron and her sister Madeleine Ferron were both writers. She studied at the École des beaux-arts before dropping out, unsatisfied with the way the school's instructors addressed modern art.Ferron was an early member of Paul-Émile Borduas's Automatistes art movement. She signed the manifesto Refus global, a watershed event in the Quebec cultural scene, in 1948.
In 1953, she moved to Paris, where she worked for 13 years in drawing and painting and was introduced to the art of stained glass, for which she would become best known.She died in Montreal.Wikipedia

 Les Automatistes group

 Les Automatistes were a group of Québécois artistic dissidents from Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The movement was founded in the early 1940s by painter Paul-Émile Borduas. Les Automatistes were so called because they were influenced by Surrealism and its theory of automatism. Members included Marcel Barbeau, Roger Fauteux, Claude Gauvreau, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Pierre Gauvreau, Fernand Leduc, Jean-Paul Mousseau, and Marcelle Ferron and Françoise Sullivan.
In 1948 Borduas published a collective manifesto called the Refus global, an important document in the cultural history of Quebec and a declaration of artistic independence and the need for expressive freedoms. Its denunciation of the Catholic Church's authority was particularly scandalous and resulted in the group's public humiliation. This ultimately lead to a kind of martyrdom but was initially devastating. Although the group dispersed soon after the manifesto was published, the movement continues to have influence, and may be considered a forerunner of the Quiet Revolution.

 Automatistes favoured a fluid, painterly technique over the comparatively reserved, hard-edge abstraction so popular in the U.S. and Eastern Europe at the time. Much like a nonfigurative Group of Seven, they were looking to create a distinctively Canadian artistic identity. Heavily influenced by Surrealist manifestos and poetry, their work was largely stream-of-consciousness inspired, believing this to be a truer means of communicating subconscious emotions and sensory experiences; they wanted to be liberated from intention, reason, and any kind of structure, in order to communicate a universal human experience without bias. This resulted in increasingly crude or intuitive methods such as applying paint with palette knives and fingers and painting blindfolded, their efforts contradicting their claims of working without intention.Wikipedia