Artist, illustrator and painter, Sandra Chevrier, creates her work with a powerful message of social freedom and an open mind imbued into the canvas. Her works have been shown in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Norway, and will soon be making an appearance in Las Vegas. Chasseur wanted to know more about the encouraging messages behind her pieces, and we were lucky enough to get the inside look on this process.
Is there a certain reason that drives you to create art?
To me, Art is not only a way of expression; it’s a language in itself. It is the liberation of something that I hold inside. When I was younger, I used it as a release just like one would use a diary. Now, it is a part of my everyday life- it has become a need, a drug.
Do you often experiment with different techniques when creating pieces?
I am mostly doing works that involve paintings or drawings. The methods of Comic books /collage/watercolour are new to me. I started working with mix media just to have fun.
How did you become involved within the world of art?
I feel like I always had it in me. As far as I can remember, I have memories as a tiny child holding a pencil. But there was a precise moment in time that made me realize that I wanted to be an artist. I entered a gallery in Montreal at age fourteen. I was attracted by the painting called Detritus Of Devotion, made by the great Heidi Taillefer. I was so drawn to it. Suddenly there was a rush of emotion inside of me, and I started to cry. It made me realize that I wanted to be able to make people feel such strong emotion while looking at one of my creations. An image can be worth a thousand words.
Where did inspiration come from for your Comic Book cages?
Let me start by explaining how my ‘Cages’ series came to life, which was about one year ago. I used to work in a really controlled and hyper realistic way. One day, I was doing crafts with my kid, and just started painting with loose and heavy textures of paint on some of my old drawings of women portraits. I found that there was something really interesting there. And for the past year, I’ve been working on this idea, trying new things, and playing with it. The comic book collage was another idea that was born by accident. I was working on a DIY project by covering one of my Ikea dressers with comic book pages but it broke during the process. I had no idea what to do with all the comics I bought, but by recycling them on to my art, the idea of creating these different cages came to life.
What kind of creative process do you go through when creating a piece?
Creativity is the result of experimentation and evolution. It is easy to repeat something over and over because it was successful. By trying and making mistakes one can evolve and create something new and powerful. That’s what I am trying to do every day. I am a really hard worker, but I’m not always happy with the results. There is always something good in what we do, even if we fail, because we learn from it.
What kind of message does your art carry for its viewers?
The aesthetics are important to me, but without a social message it isn’t worth anything. The series I am working on at the moment is about women trying to find freedom from the cages of society’s twisted preconceptions of what a woman should or shouldn’t be. By doing so, society is asking them to be superheroes.
All your works seem to feature women as the subjects. Is there a reason for this? What purpose does that serve?
My Cages are made with brash imposing paint or comic books which mask the identity of a female human and symbolize the struggle that women go through every day. Being trapped within the expectations of false beauty and perfection, women are held captive by the limitations forced upon them by society and culture. This series is meant to show how corrupted our perception of beauty has become. Our modern ideas of what we consider beautiful has become distorted and we fail to see what truly makes women beautiful by putting them in these prisons of identity.
Would you consider your work to be improvised, or more thought out?
Sometimes ideas come from a lot of thinking while other times it just happens suddenly. There is less control in my work than there used to be.
The eyes you incorporate into your work carry much of the subject’s emotion. Why did you decide to put so much of the emotion and detail within the eyes?
When I first started to draw, for a few years I would only be sketching eyes, all the time, everywhere. I am a gaze collector; I feel that you can read all the emotions of a human being just by looking in their eyes. It is hard for me to find a model that will have the exact gaze that I am looking for; they need to tell a story.