Summary

Helene decides to become a member of a painters workshop with evening sessions every week, during the fall and the winter season, with Mme Gaetanne Sabourin. Two years later she decides to work under the direction of Jean Perigny, a well known painter in the Mauricie region. She participates in a very strict way for the years that follow. The atelier directed by Jean Perigny gives her the oppertunity to meet with may other artists and she devellops into a more all-round painter due to the different styles and expressions of her fellow artists. Complicity, humor and human warmth are the basis of their weekly endeavours and she will come home enriched by her personnal experiences and the experience of the others in the groupe.

Helene starts in oils but soon will try her hand at acrylics. These weekly encounters will create a deep rooted friendship between certain artists and these frienships will be renewed every time they meet at different synposiums, throughout the province of Quebec or in a weekend session of an atelier in the Charlevoix region with Gérald Trudel, for example.

The evolution of a painter is like an ocean, it progresses by small waves and than, all of a sudden a high tide will lift you up and transport you like magic, much farther then ever before. Her patience and perseverance will be fruitfull, specially the last couple of years where her landscapes and flowers will be in sync with her profound search to let us partake in the beauty of nature soaked with light (the feeling of wellness of the ocean, a lake after a thunderstorm passed, very intense light of a beach under the tropical sun) as well as the fragile beauty of the flowers that she loves to paint in her intense macro reproductions.

Patience and perseverence is her motto and she is very gratefull for the help and the inconditional support of her husband who is at the same time her admirer, her critic, her technicien and her computer specialist. Nathalie Vanderveken, her daughter, student at the university of Quebec at Trois-Rivieres in the fine arts department, is also a firm supporter and encourages her enormously.

Following is a list of some of the activities (such as symposiums and expositions) that she attended over the last years.

2001
Centre Commercial du Cap de la Madeleine
Exposition Atelier de peinture Jean Périgny

2002
Centre Commercial  du Cap de la Madeleine
Exposition Atelier de peinture Jean Périgny

2003
Centre Pauline Julien du Cap de la Madeleine
Exposition Atelier de peinture Jean Périgny

2004
Centre Pauline Julien du Cap de la Madeleine
Symposium des Fleurs et des Jardins: 26-27 juin 2004

2005
Symposium des Fleurs et des Jardins: 25-26 juin 2005
Symposium Moulin Michel: 28-29 mai 2005
Atelier de peinture Faune et Flore (Les Éboulements, Charlevoix) Automne 2005

2006
Symposium Moulin Michel: 27-28 mai 2006
Atelier de peinture Faune et Flore (Les Éboulements, Charlevoix)
Automne 2006

2007
Symposium Moulin Michel: 26 - 27 mai 2007
Symposium des Fleurs et des Jardins Sainte-Anne-de-la-Perade, 9 -10 juin 2007
Atelier de peinture Faune et Flore (Les Éboulements, Charlevoix) Automne 2007