"Soft Footsteps" Painting

Jeanette Lafontine is an artist based in Norway with a MFA in medium- and material based art from the Oslo Academy of the Arts. After she graduated she was awarded a residency stay at Residency Unlimited in New York, and her work has been shown in exhibitions both at home and abroad, such as Court Tree Collective (New York), NOoSPHERE (New York), Galleri Ramfjord (Oslo), KÖSK (Oslo), and Galleri DUER (Oslo). Her work has been included in Saatchi Art - the world's leading online art gallery’s printed publications and catalogs, and her paintings are in several private collections around the world. RISE ART in London had her down as one of the «Artists to watch in 2022», and in 2023 she has been featured as ‘One to Watch’ artist by Saatchi Art.

Jeanette Lafontine uses the landscape motifs as a source for painterly invention, and present pictorial worlds through both intuitive and controlled gestures. She finds inspiration in the real world, but is not attempting to capture something about a particular place or time. Her paintings are rarely from a specific location, but a result of all the inputs, her sketches and the process itself. Even though her color palette is not limited to earthy tones, the Nordic landscape often makes itself known. Her work relates to both abstraction and representation, and she is trying to balance between the familiar versus the more incomprehensible. She is interested in the process of making a painting, and her method becomes a search for images.

‘My process often begins by making a series of drawings on paper. These drawings can be rough sketches of a location, a view, or they can be intuitive sketches – either way they are an approximation of a specific moment, or of something half remembered. Then I also make lots of paintings on paper where I randomly, and without any particular plan, are adding color and using different techniques to create these colorful landscapes. When moving over to the canvas these processes are usually merged together, where a drawing, shape, line etc are applied to the canvas, and paint becomes the material to make depth and texture to the work. I am interested in painting both as an object and an idea. How different elements and shapes are making a pictorial space that can trigger our imagination, but also the physical qualities of a painting.’