Low Down Articles
Artist Profiles - Heather Lamorie
Article 34 of 73
From the book Artists of the Gatineau Hill by Catherine Joyce. This article first appeared in the "Artist Profiles" column in the March 29, 2006 issue of the The Low Down to Hull and Back News.
Reprinted with permission. Search complete list of Low Down Articles.
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"What I See in My Sleep"
Heather Lamorie has always painted from the images in her mind - symbols of birds, animals, boats, flowers, feathers - a vivid, interior landscape mysteriously born of her undiscovered native heritage.
Ten years ago she learned that her grandfather had been an Ojibway adopted by a French Canadian family who changed his birth certificate and kept his ancestry secret.
"Here I was - a blonde, blueeyed chick! Finally I understood the wellspring of my inner images. I began to research native symbolism and traditions. The discovery freed me to embrace what has always been there - this interior world of charged imagery that opens and heals the heart."
Her painting is an affirmation of the spiritual energy behind these archetypal symbols. A bowl becomes a vessel of containment, a metaphor for society's need to contain the explosive energy of the natural world. Fish are about to leap out. A pulsing heart glows in the belly of a mythic bear. A demure lady sports a watermelon head, seeding the world with new ideas. Breaking barriers - that urgency to go beyond the given - this longing lies at the root of Lamorie's symbolic domain.
"I always painted. It is my passion, what I was put on this earth to do. Even as a child visiting my grandmother, who was a painter in B.C., I painted on her canvases. I was never told not to, or directed in a certain style. I never felt any fear - painting grounded and guided me every step of the way."
With a background in Interior Design (Fanshaw College, 1980) and a Fine Arts degree from York University (1990), Heather moved to Ottawa where she taught art for three years at the National Gallery. In 1994 she took a teaching degree at Ottawa U and became an art teacher at the Adult High School, then at Glebe and Hillcrest, and finally at Canterbury High School where she now teaches English, Design and Tech, and Film. She has exhibited widely, both in Toronto and in the Ottawa area, and has been for years a member of the Studio Tour and a co-ordinator of Art Beside the Park.
Heather has always kept daily art journals where she draws her initial sketches and communes with an imaginary companion. "I see him as this wonderful gay guy, sitting on a billowy sofa, wine glass in hand. I write him letters - Dear Arthur (Art, for short). We talk and discuss ideas. I get to explore what's in my mind. It's a dialogue with the Self really, the source of my paintings, of all that I am working out.
"Everything comes from within. I often work on ten pieces at once. The first two or three may be difficult but then I hit my stride and the later ones fly off the canvas. They seem to paint themselves. "
The paintings that emerge are free, open, bright with colour and alive with spiritual energy. Heather writes small messages of affirmation on each canvas to carry the healing symbolism further - to create peace, hope, celebration.