Louise Laplante’s work is very introspective. Her pastels reflect her relationship with the materials she is using and explore those creatures whose interactions with that world are pure and simple. Her oil stick pieces extend this exploration with color and texture, and her collages allow her to create worlds of her own.
Her pastels are inspired by her attraction to old paper for its contents, its images, and its aged beauty. They employ the stains, discoloring, stray marks, and creases on these old sheets that give them a richness not possible with new paper. She uses stencil-like silhouettes worked densely on the existing text or music notes on the paper that form their backgrounds.
Working in collage allows for free association, using vintage periodical and book images to create discrete worlds merging image, color, and placement. They play with concepts and redefine reality. Their elements are combined intuitively, sometimes with an idea of what she wants to achieve, and sometimes just letting the elements themselves drive the image, one thing leading to another.
Collage always has a surrealist element, letting logic and reality go. These works are driven either by the text in a chosen element or by the configuration of that element. The results are pictorial “dreams,” bits of reality recombined to produce a new, free-form, invented world.
In her oil pastels, she explores her continuing fascination with black birds and how they move in the world. Simple shapes, such as landscapes or simple color backgrounds in vibrant hues, complement the dark black birds as they interact with that world.
