Robert Savignac is a talented chronicler of daily life, through visual poetry.

Robert Savignac - Gardens, sunshine and balconies

Robert Savignac is a talented chronicler of daily urban life, through visual poetry remarkable for its simplicity and exuberance. His rich palette of pure colours lends a peaceful yet lively air to these activities.

Date and place of birth
Robert Savignac was born in Montreal in 1946, and maintains a genuine fondness for the city's neighbourhoods, which he paints with a skilled hand. >>

Training and career
Robert Savignac has always felt an overwhelming urge, a driving passion to paint. In his thirties, to pursue his dream, he enrolled in an evening art course at the Cégep du Vieux-Montréal. With his college diploma in hand, he moved on to Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). The painter vividly remembers the joy he during that time at learning to work his medium and develop new techniques. Savignac was already creating his own niche: more a craftsman than an intellectual, the artist avoided deep analysis and the study of theory in favour of democratic art, painting that is accessible and authentic. His desire to paint for the people has paid off a thousand fold! He has been featured in a steady stream of exhibitions since the early 1990s and his work has won a loyal following. Many have even begun private and public collections.

His work and his art
In his painting, Robert Savignac reinvents the city, conjuring up parks and neighbourhoods, lush gardens, balconies laden with flower boxes, expansive green lawns of summer and other examples of the earth's fertility.

His oil paintings portray joyous visions of inviting places where the natural world creates an oasis amidst the surrounding blacktop. Although his compositions are deliberately inhabited, trees and flowers reign supreme. Through his work, the painter seeks to convey a message of joy and optimism. The result is a cascade of colour on his canvas, where flowers contrast with lush greenery. His paintings are sunlit, tidy yet refreshing.

Savignac makes no attempt at realism. He quite clearly loves flowers and paints them everywhere with enthusiasm and generosity. Far from seeking to reproduce the real world, he takes full poetic licence. Instead of enslaving himself to forms, he explores and works with them. Although a figurative painter, he shows little concern for the effects of depth. For this happy adventurer, perspective is unobtrusive and theories remain in the abstract.

At La Galerie d'art Au P'tit Bonheur
Since 1999.

Provence, February 2003

May 2002

Provence, April 2003

Garden, Val David, June 2003

Provence, August 2003

Provence, September 2003

December 1997

August 1996