Bold strokes on canvas, a play of light and shadows, vibrant colors: JALINEPOL’s painting are immediately recognizable. Her impressionist paintings reflect her generous personality and serene nature.
While originally from Hauts-de-France, home of Henri MATISSE in northern France, JALINEPOL’s travels abroad have forged her artistic expression. The colors and shapes of traditional batik, dolls and sculptures she saw while on a visit to Cameroon in 1979 had a deep impact on her. In New Caledonia in the 1980s, she was inspired by the colors of the Pacific Ocean and Kanak culture. In Beirut, she discovered the Souks and olive tree fields. These visions fed her imagination and influenced her paintings. She never stopped travelling: in 2017, she went to Hawaii, where she painted the local flora and fauna, and molten lava from Hawaii’s volcanoes.
France, her native country, has played an important role in molding her art. JALINEPOL attended Beaux Arts School in Caen in 1984 and later studied painting with Luis Anza, the Argentinian painter and writer, whose style and technique had a deep influence on her. She also attended the Septentrion studio in Lille where she studies sculpture. Nowadays, she paints in her studio in Lyon in the winter and moves to the beautiful Quercy countryside as soon as spring arrives. The southwest region is a major source of inspiration for her and is the place where she painted her first poppies fields and the colors of spring.
In her paintings, one sees innumerable flowers with bright colors, which seem to move with the wind. The wide color palette of JALINEPOL’s first paintings sealed her reputation as one of the foremost French impressionist artists of her age, and several galleries have exhibited her artworks in the United States. Her style, however, has evolved over the years. The use of relief and mass has taken precedence over the variety of colors. Fewer colors means an increase in precision. Her poppy red and cobalt blue have not lost their intensity. The artist invites us to a journey towards abstraction. Her large black artworks, where the light’s reflections allow us to discover shapes, are the culmination of a forty years old artistic process.