Anne LAVOIE – Inspiration and enthusiasm

From an early age, Anne Lavoie has been drawn to the arts. Her whole life has revolved around her practice as an artist and her profession as a teacher. In fact, she recalls that it was her artistic practice that nourished her life as a teacher for some twenty years.

Early on, she left her native Saguenay Lac-St-Jean for Montreal, where she lived for 40 years, studying Visual Arts at UQAM, then Education, with the aim of becoming a teacher. For many years, she has devoted herself to painting, drawing and various techniques that enable her to assemble elements, disparate at first, that then form a coherent and meaningful whole.

Anne Lavoie loves movement, color and nature. The North Hatley house she has moved in with her husband in 2023 welcomes the light and exudes calm and serenity, a kind of gift box surrounded by trees and greenery. The same is true of the artist’s face and eyes, which come alive when she talks about the many projects she has completed over the course of her career, or which sometimes fog over when she evokes certain memories of times gone by.

Anne Lavoir’s personality is a happy blend of spontaneity, warmth and openness, but also great sensitivity, modesty and reserve. Gifted with an abundant imagination, she varies techniques and mediums, with a preference for non-toxic materials: watercolour, ink, acrylic or other. She has developed a gift for transforming the most mundane objects and ordinary moments of everyday life into works of art on canvas.

She was able to exercise this gift abundantly throughout her career as an elementary school teacher at École Marie-Claracq in Montreal, where she applied herself to cultivating children’s creativity through songs, drawings and environmental explorations. She also put her gifts as an artist and teacher to good use in the modeling and live-model workshops she led for twenty years at UQAM.

Having recently settled in the Eastern Townships after her retirement from teaching, Anne Lavoie has returned to the nature that inspires her, the warmth of the local people – she says she was warmly welcomed as soon as she arrived in North Hatley – and the vitality of cultural activities. In a spontaneous gesture, she joined Arts-Cultures Massawippi, where she naturally finds herself, and where she works as a volunteer member.

On a number of occasions during the summer of 2024, she generously led workshops where young people and adults pooled their talents and inspiration to create a collective mural, which she is working to complete and finish to make it durable and long-lasting. The first was inspired by the fruits and flowers of the market, the second by the water tones of Lake Massawippi. Both murals are destined for public display, one at the North Hatley farmers’ market, the other on the Bleu Massawippi premises in Ayer’s Cliff.