Yoléne Legrand

November 2023:

The mountains above Port-au-Prince, Haiti were my childhood get-aways while my formal primary education took place amidst the busy hubbub of the capital city.  It was these trips to the Haitian countryside that cultivated my love of the natural world.

As a child I drew everything in sight but it took many diversions for me to find my path.

 I went on to study Business in New York City, including a Masters in Finance, and though I had a successful career in International Banking, my passion for art drew me to formally study painting at the Art Students League, gravitating toward working in oil, charcoal, pastels, watercolor and printmaking. I’ve been an artist since then.                                                                                

 My paintings are inspired by the vistas of my travels and experiences and as such, I think of myself as a landscape painter. In painting the Haitian landscape, however, scenes would frequently be incomplete without people, which I often include: a young uniformed girl on the way to school or the market woman balancing a load on her head or vending her produce from the road.

 I don’t limit myself to my childhood and cultural inspirations. Landscapes and humanscapes that I paint are all around me; they’re the walkways of Central Park, lush hills in southern France, the sea-misted terrain of Massachusetts’s Nantucket & Cape Cod Islands or the evocative slave building ruins on St. Simon Island, Georgia

 Contrasting light that affects the scene is something I carefully select for. With some scenes I don’t add anything; everything is observed.  Others, I use my artist’s eye to augment, but always, employing a strong use of multiple colors, preferring to derive shades and hues that best suit the scene.

 Nature is pure joy to me; I am fascinated by the challenge of being able to convey to the viewer my feelings about the scene through the use of composition, color and light. The painting must express both a visual as well as emotional sensations. Color helps me express the mood of the subject, be it tranquility or excitement.