Stéphanie Arpels, a self-taught artist, has been painting since she was a teenager. She worked with women for many years, and the passion she felt for their fragilities, strengths and complexities, soon transpired in her paintings. In 2018, she received an award by the Ministry of Women and Child Development on the occasion of the International Women’s Day for excellence in the field of art.
Stéphanie Arpels recently held her solo exhibition titled WOMEN PASSING at the Visual Arts Gallery, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi. H.E. Mr Emmanuel Lenain, Ambassador of France to India, inaugurated the show. She interpreted women resting, squatting, dancing, walking, dreaming, and passing in landscapes.” I observe the inner beauty of women, suspended in time and space, where they can embrace their future destinations. I set my women in other worlds where they appear in different sizes, whether they are in the foreground or the background. They vanish in my landscapes and on the paths that I paint always larger, to immerse them in the unknown; an imagined paradise, a serenity.
In some of my canvases, my Indian women take flight on their way to reincarnation, a rebirth towards another body and a better life,” she shares.
Her Journey
”Women’s status has been my concern for the longest time. I am passionate about women and their fragilities, their strengths and their complexities. From a young age, I have been attracted to painting and fine art. I began painting as a teenager. Adolescence is an essential and complicated time, and I often felt I wasn’t understood. The journey from child to teenager to adult created a kind of vertigo.”
Inspiration
“Relocating to India in 2015 has impacted my work a lot. I am moved by what I see and feel. The vastness of the country challenges me to show the diversity and contrasts among Indian women. Their gaiety, their laughter, their energy, even in dire situations, is striking and awe me; and interpret this in my art. An inner spiritual awakening is taking over my work on Indian women.”
Art-A Healing Process
“My work focuses on representing the inner beauty of women. It is also a healing process where I find a lot of my energy that helps me live with a life-altering disease. Coming to the realization that existence hangs only by a thread, I have dedicated my work to subliming women. My art represents the dimensions I perceive in the life of the women.
Where are they going? What will become of them?
I wonder about the present and the future, about that which can be seen, and also the unknown.”
Color Canvas
“I use saturated black red and blue colors to unveil the sensuality of the curve of women’s bodies, but also love, anger, power, life, evoking what I witness daily.
Feeling that gold is essential in women lives, as an intrinsic part of their social tradition, religion, rituals and superstitions, it is present insome of my canvases.
Colors that I apply in my landscapes are essential for me too. Blue is for nature and infinity. It symbolizes peace, calm, serenity. White represents purity and paradise. Brown is for nature and earth. Green is for nature, stability, energy. Taupe is a color that travels through time. I feel it is timeless. Shades of white and beige, and darker colors invade my canvases, translating the contrasts of different worlds. Lastly, I use grey and black to illustrate my distress towards the unknown, the emptiness, and death.”
Spirituality of Indian women resonates with Hers
“They are in harmony with themselves and with their environment, their surroundings; accepting their fate graciously. The spirituality of Indian women resonates with mine.
I am one with them.”
-
- Stéphanie Arpels
