ArtBreak with Janvier Rollande 4/6/11

I went to Janvier's talk today and it was pretty enlightening.  To be honest, I appreciated her work from a technical standpoint but I just didn't look any deeper than that.  For some reason, I don't really know why, I guess I saw her portraits as just portraits, with little thought behind them.  It was great to be able to hear her talk and some of the psychology that is going on behind her images.  She told us that she came to art later in life.  She got married early and had her daughter, and one day on a whim she went into the art institute in Manchester to look at some of the work.  (Prior to this, she had really no knowledge of art or art history).  She said that she saw some works by James Aponovich and Gary Haven Smith and was immediately intrigued and thought, this is something I want to do.  She showed us some lovely portraits of her daughter as well as her and her daughter and I really wanted to post some here but it was impossible to find any of her work!  I could only find these two below (which were in the Museum show) and some other portraits that weren't my more favorite pieces of hers. 

Janvier Rollande, Adieu Maman, 2007

Janvier Rollande, Portrait of Sage, 2008

The story behind the top image was an especially sad one.  Her mother was essentially on her deathbed and Janvier had been with her for weeks.  It was such an emotionally draining, difficult experience that she felt she needed some way to process it, and making that drawing of her mother was what she felt she needed to do.  She said she felt almost as if she was doing a sort of illicit thing, doing this drawing of her mother.  Apparently later on, someone wanted to do an article about her and this drawing but their editor wouldn't print the photo in the article, saying it was disturbing.  It is so sad how afraid we are of death in our culture.