"Winter Birch III" Painting

Evoking a sense of place and imbued with intense raw emotion and quiet tranquillity, my paintings are visual poems, an allusion to landscape, a suggestion of time or personal life experience based on colour and sensory details. Technically, the work is non-representational, but to say this would be a disservice to the countless natural inspirations in my daily life. Each painting is created in a spontaneous, gestural, expressionistic style, yet references the highly influential Canadian landscapes around me. I enjoy observing seasonal changes, allowing different textures, colours and shapes of trees and leaves influence my work.

Intuitively, I begin with improvised layers of colour and marks. Then the slow painting process begins. It can take weeks, months or even years of building and breaking down the surface of a piece until I am completely satisfied. I rarely use brushes, preferring the physical act of moving, scraping and removing oil paint with palette knives and handmade tools. Working on several paintings at any given time, I move from one to the other, rotating them as I go. This method enables me to develop the pictorial space as I work the painting deeper onto the canvas creating a multi-layered composition of colour , balance and light. The use of cold wax, marble dust, wood ashes and oil sticks helps me achieve a richer, textured surface. Each painting can go through many lives or “seasons”, changing drastically during the process, depending where my inspiration takes me on any given day.

Led by my passion and visually influenced by Québec Automatistes painters such as Riopelle, Borduas and Ferron, I have found freedom of expression in abstraction pursued through automatism and strive to create art that is fresh and uniquely my own. My hope is that my abstract paintings hint at something familiar, yet remain open ended to allow the viewer’s imagination to complete the story.

BIOGRAPHY

Johanne Brouillette is a Canadian abstract painter whose richly layered oil paintings invite collectors into immersive, emotionally charged landscapes of colour and texture. Her dynamic compositions—built through instinctive gestures, palette knife work, and raw physical engagement—merge the spirit of the natural world with the expressive freedom of abstraction.

After nearly two decades painting representational landscapes, Brouillette turned to abstraction, drawing deep inspiration from the Automatistes—Riopelle, Borduas, and Ferron.