"Art must now beget the desire to recapture lost vestiges: traces from time of complicity ... complicity of all species, individuals, nations and civilizations ... with the Earth."

Thus Chantale Jean expresses her feelings towards her art. Painting is a prime, pleasant and essential need for this Charlevoix-born Quebec artist. It brings also a means of praising Nature and specially the animal kingdom whose qualities impress her. She says "Animals respect each other and exist in harmony with the environment. I think that a human being should spend more time studying their behaviour and applying it to himself in order to bring back his own complicity with Earth."

Although she is also a sculptress, painting is her personal and even eccentric way of bringing life to all those sheep, geese, ducks, Canada geese, hens and other budding comedians. With the same forceful strokes, she paints thick and colourful undergrowths or lavish gardens in full colours and dazzling shapes.

A self-taught painter, Chantale Jean has been drawing since the tender age of three. Favoring acrylics and creating particularly fascinating stands through their texture and raised designs, her effects with colours are indissociable from her work on materials. Venturing beyond painting's two traditional dimensions. Chantale Jean is henceforth overlapping onto the third one. With great success, she brings out new and fascinating effects which let her "Paint the wind and the squall." Movement is strongly felt by binding together both the medium and the support. The results of the raised designs upon her subject create a sense of startling motion and give the spectator a new sense of stimulated perception of the subject. This density also brings on surprising shadowy shapes which lend much plastic quality to her works.

Sometimes this turbulence recalls rupestrian sketches when the first human artists had to deal with rough uneven surfaces such as stone or raised lines similar to bas-relief. All these remind one of the artist's taste for sculpture.

As vigorous in her work as with her character, Miss Jean transfers her spontaneity and whim to her paintings. Her intuitive strokes are sharp and express the moment's feelings. Chantale Jean is gifted with an ever-present sense of humour; she takes pleasure in creating subjects which look like or mimic us ... One is never too sure! True to form, her works are titled with the same touch of joviality.

The artist points out that hers is not an "animal art," but rather "natural art" which is filtered and rendered in her own way through her passions and feelings. Even if her pictorial language is realistic, she offers new views and dimensions through her surprising interesting blend of representational and abstract use of brash colours. Sheep and hens are now shown in a bevy of colours; on the purplish pond, ducks go from green to blue while the Canada goose in flight is magenta!