Collection: Giselle Gautreau

Giselle Gautreau is an artist who creates landscape and nature-inspired paintings in oil and encaustic. 

Giselle has received awards and recognition for her work, including a Professional Artist Fellowship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Art and was a Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.  She received her MFA in Painting from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA in Painting from Maine College of Art and Design. She has exhibited her work widely and her work is in public, private and corporate collections.  Giselle is currently a resident artist at the McGuffey Art Center in Charlottesville, Virginia where she keeps her studio. She is represented by Carrie Coleman Fine Art, Norfolk, Virginia.

ABOUT THE WORK/ARTIST STATEMENT

In my work I explore ideas of memory of place, the landscape and ecology. Endlessly influenced by nature,  my paintings explore the intersection of color and atmosphere along with the impact of what nature inspires. 

I paint with numerous layers of oil or encaustic paints, using both opaque and translucent layers to achieve a sense of depth, atmosphere and luminosity. 

My paintings reflect my ongoing interest in nature and the landscape.  My work is rooted in direct observation and experience, but as I paint it becomes more about the memory of a place and my connection to it.  In some ways, my work is rooted in landscape traditions of Tonalism, Luminism and the American Landscape tradition, but with a contemporary approach.  Because of my focus on the landscape and love of nature, I’m increasingly interested in ecology and impacts of climate change.  The landscape for me is both visual inspiration and sometimes a metaphor for loss, change, resilience and adaptation.  For me, painting the landscape is a reminder of our connections to it.