Painting
Jean Paul Langlois
Jean Paul is a Métis artist from Vancouver Island, currently painting in W̱SÁNEĆ. His work is informed by television and cinema, particularly Westerns, 70s sci-fi and Saturday morning cartoons. Using ultra-saturated colours, references to art history and well-worn cinema tropes, he seeks to understand the alienation to his own cultural backgrounds, both indigenous and settler. His work is an examination of his own life, through the reinterpretation of family stories using characters and motifs from the pop culture he was weaned on. The result is a very recognizable style of familiar figures in their own world of bright colours and flattened space.
These 3 paintings were from a series he did called ‘Quest For Something Reel or painting places I saw in crusty old films in a school gym’.
In 2021, he received a grant from Canada Council of the Arts to do a cross-country ‘plein air’ painting tour. The locations were to be from 3 NFB films from my childhood, ‘Nahanni'(1962), ‘Corral’ (1954) and ‘Paddle-to-the-sea'(1966). This journey would take him to the foothills of Alberta, the Great Lakes and St Lawrence seaway and to Nahanni National Park in the Northwest Territories.
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