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| Link to Sculpter Laurence Groux's website |
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Laurence Groux (Elle) was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, and raised in one of her villages in Etagnières. Coming from an extended family of different sorts of craftsman, with her father being a carpenter and her mother being a seamstress, she was naturally drawn to working with her hands, and at a tender age of four, she won a teddy-bear at a potato-carving print-making contest, which she smilingly owns till this day.
That was the beginning of a long, sometimes arduous, self-instructed career that forayed into oil- and acrylic-paintings in her mid-teens, and by age twenty-two, sculpture. If there is at all a single muse that haunts her, that would be French sculptor, Camille Claudel, whose work ignited a realization that she must sculpt. With this realization came her first sculpture entitled, "Jeanne D'Arc," a clay testament to Joan on her knees, head bowed in an expression of disbelief, with her hands bound behind her back. After this infant sculpture came many others, and Ms. Groux explains that through each and everyone of them, it is really Claudel's "tutelage" and the grace of God that make them all possible.
Ms. Groux always had an unexplainable sense that she is an instinctive artist, and with this instinct at heart, she staved off formal training at any art conservatory. Today, she is convinced that this one act has given her an edgier, "guerrilla" if you will, approach to her art, more willing to take chances than to stay within any realm of artistic nomenclature. Somewhere between a storm and its eye is where you will find the spirit of most of her art.
Oftentimes claiming to be only a channel for Spirituality, Ms. Groux's art is resplendent in recurring motifs of the dove (or some other bird), angels, wings, crowns, trees, gatherings of sorts, humanity's impudence, its fall, and its saving grace, to name a few. This might be a result of some sort of lasting visceral reaction towards "El Greco's" paintings. At any rate, to recognize these motifs is synonymous to recognizing Laurence Groux. Ahead she plans to start work on a series of housepaint-on-canvas called, "Meditation Paintings," comprising of an intricate interplay of dots and color, which she first created serendipitously on 4" X 6" cards with gel pens. For now, she continues to draw and scratch on paper, post-its, bar napkins, and what-not, (an interesting collection in-and-of-itself,) searching for that perfect inspiration when artist-meets-muse-meets-God.
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