Class Instructor: Gabrielle Castonguay
Gabrielle S. Castonguay is an enamelist from Montréal, impassioned by enameling since the age of eleven when she started learning the art from one of the lead master enamelists in Quebec, Canada. She studied and graduated from Fine Arts, Theatre and Design programs from local Colleges and Concordia University in Montréal. She subsequently worked as a designer for distinguished architectural firms in Montréal. For many years now Gabrielle has been back working as a full time enamelist, the essence of her true passion and the expression of her artistic engagement.
Her work is well known and well regarded in North America as well as the larger international enameling field. She specializes in enameling wall pieces, sculptures, vessels and integration of enameled metal pieces in design/architectural work. She was a faculty member of the Richmond Art Center, Richmond, California, teaching the art of enamel from 2012 to 2014. She has exhibited in Canada, Europe, the USA and Japan, and her work is part of private collections in Canada, the USA, South America and Europe. She co-curated the national Canadian Enamel Exhibition 2013: “Fire and Fusion”. She has been awarded several grants for her work over the years.
She was named “First Prize Winner” in the category “Wall Art” at Alchemy 3 - Vision + Passion + Creation- Transformation in Contemporary Enamels, the 15th Biennial International Juried Enamel Exhibition organized by The Enamelist Society, in 2015.
She is the Second Place Laureate for “Traditional Use of Enamel Technique” at the Sixth International Biennale of Enamel Art Vilnius in Lithuania in 2015, as well as the laureate of the Vilnius Municipality Award for the category “Conceptual enamel works” at the Fifth International Biennale of Enamel Art Vilnius in Lithuania in 2013.
“Our world of superabundance where all seems transitory, denatured and replaceable causes in me the need to seek a sense of the sacred and evocation. The esthetic of my work exhibits the beauty and the untamable force of nature, the rough splendor of the corrosion of metal, and the intensity of the light with all the reflections which it causes.
“My approach in the treatment of the fusion of glass and metal is at the same time contemporary and exploratory while cultivating a control of classical and traditional techniques.
“I am searching remarkable textures, degrees of luster, coloration and oxidization to produce inimitable effects, creating extended contrasts. My creations emerge from universes of colors, transparences, and opaques, from depth and light. I create pieces where the atmosphere and the imagery reveal traces of art thousands of years old, perfected and sustained in time where our passage on earth reveals a sense of the sacred.”