Its April 4, 1945 in Giffard, near Quebec City, that I first made contact with the real world. My childhood has been rocked with love of beauty, because of my father Blaise Marchand, who was a talented architect and sculptor. He allowed me to grow up among books I could admire for hours, and the works of some painters and sculptors from all eras.

From the very beginning, my child eyes and spirit were dazzled by the techniques, colors, drawing and the composition of the Renaissance masters like Willem Kalf, Pieter Claesz, Baugin or Jan Davidsz de Heem.

I was born with a pen in the hand, and I first tried to paint with oil at 14, hoping to join these masters. In vain. So in 1963, at the age of 18, I went to the Quebec Fine Arts School.

Unfortunately, realism was unpopular at that time. We were preaching freedom in art, but this freedom was excluding mine. The masters’ techniques were not worth my teachers’ attention.

So it was through a personal progression that I learnt the style, which would allow me freedom of expression: readings, museums and gallery visits, personal experiments. I went from abstract, which had been almost imposed on me by my teachers, to surrealism, to impressionist landscape, to realist landscape, to symbolism then to hyper realistic still-life and finally to trompe l’oeil, which allowed me to express my precious freedom in its entirety.

Today, although I make a living creating art and it allowed me to raise my family, I know there is always this little thing to learn that remains.

We can not summarize 500 years of painting in one lifetime and I think it is presumptuous to casually reject, like others do, the precious techniques of those who preceded us and whose works crossed the centuries with only little damage. Some say that art must be like nature, ephemeral. But nature is free. A sunny day; the fall colors; a winter landscape: free. And it is not sell at to the highest bidder.

From my perspective, a collectors freedom is as precious as mine and his freedom is to be able to transmit his collection to his descendents or to sell it, but especially to preserve it for a long time in the same condition the works were in when they charmed him the first time.

Its called respect. I know, it’s not in style.

But as I am the mother of five girls and as I lived from the making of my art, although I am a woman, I don’t exist statistically speaking. So I conclude it gives me the right to express an opinion which is not in style.

Françoise Pascals