Academia das Artes dos Açores

Biografia de Christine Arveil
Born in 1958 in Lyon, she was the first in her working-class family to enter university. Placed in Classe préparatoire, an elite French program that adds honors-level work to the university curriculum, she obtained her BA in 1978, majoring in literature, philosophy and ancient languages.In 1979, Arveil moved to Paris, connecting with contemporary music circles including IRCAM, directed by Pierre Boulez. She studied painting with Luis Ansa, master of lacquer restoration and brush calligraphy, whose teaching focused on the fundamentals of the craft, combining technical knowledge and a forceful style. Ansa formally introduced her to ink-on-paper and lacquer-on-wood Chinese landscape painting. She had coincidentally used similar Chinese landscape imageries as a teenager, while executing a floor-to-ceiling home fresco. After her studies with Ansa, Arveil worked in several studios while simultaneously testing early painting formulas and techniques that she discovered through her archival research. She explored lacquer as both a method of painting and as a cultural metaphor for the unachievable state of perfection. Her fascination with the intersections between West and East grew as she practiced and adapted delicate varnish processes inherited from the 17th and 18th centuries. She wrote her M.A. dissertation (Sorbonne, 1985) on the 18th century author and varnisher Jean-Félix Watin. At the same time, she experimented in her paintings with emulsions and astringent solvents such as 97% alcohol which, if improperly used, could instantly destroy the work but, when controlled, revealed intense images.Following several years of painting non-permanent images, she returned to work on paper, sold all her pigments, and began using stone-ground black ink exclusively. During this more ascetic period, she met contemporary Arab artists, calligraphers such as Abdallah Akar and Hassan Masoudy, who introduced her to a new notion of space different from that found in Chinese art. She later worked with Brahim Alaoui, Head Curator of Contemporary Art at the Arab World Institute in Paris.Writing has always been part of her creative life. Her early poems evolved into dense, surrealistic prose. Large-scale brush calligraphy first unified her writing and painting in a series of deconstructed words which, over the years 1984-1986, proposed a statement about life and our cultural environment. Following the initial exhibition of this work in Paris, Arveil was the only western artist invited to participate in the 1987 Contemporary Calligraphy exhibition at the Japanese embassy in France.In 1987-88, she moved her studio to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she taught alternative painting. This was a period of intense production. Color reappeared in her work, pigment by pigment, used on various kinds of paper sometimes inlaid into one another. She then moved toward wood and lacquer, which offered a depth and consistency lacking in water media on paper. She mastered the complex multi-layering of an alcohol-based varnish over large panels, creating the haunting images that grounded her style.In 1989, Arveil believed it was time to validate academically her self-taught artistic process. Returning to Paris, she applied herself to an early intersection of visual art with literature, reviving the lost technique of illumination: the illustration of medieval manuscripts. She researched documents detailing the techniques of medieval illumination and formulated a water-based medium from period recipes. She restricted herself to the physical circumstances under which medieval illuminators worked, and re-created a set of images without having seen the original books, relying solely on her understanding of the craft. This kind of execution, bringing to mind performance art, depended on maintaining both the sustained focus that she acquired while studying far-Eastern calligraphy and her grounding in archival research. Both continue to guide her art.She submitted the replications to François Avril, the European Curator of Rare Manuscripts in Paris, who confirmed the accuracy of the reproduction against the originals. In 1994, her reproductions were part of the Centre Pompidou (Beaubourg contemporary art museum, Paris) traveling exhibition Ecriture. Later, in the United States, Arveil had solo shows of her more recent work using these techniques, and she taught medieval illumination at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio from 1999 to 2001.In 1992, Arveil completed an MBA in contemporary art management at the University of Paris-Dauphine, formalizing her involvement with the international art community. Curatorial responsibilities added to her experience. But her own call to uncharted territory soon took her back to studio work exclusively. She has regularly interacted with artists at her home and studio ever since. In 1996, she started using varnish as a medium after switching from an alcohol to an oil base. She was invited by Joseph Curtin, luthier and 2005 MacArthur Fellow, to study violin varnishing in Ann Arbor, thus grounding her exploration of varnish and instrumental restoration.Continuing this work in the field of musical instruments, Arveil was commissioned by collectors to replicate the painted decoration of harpsichords preserved in museums. Her expertise was recognized by violin makers: she lectured for the Violin Society of America convention in 1998, and at the British Violin Makers Association conference in 1999. She was interviewed by Tasmin Little for the BBC following the British conference and published several articles in particular in The Strad, a reference publication in the classical music world.As she was honing her technical skills, she found that the replication of ancient finishes nurtured her creative process: the wear patterns observed and reproduced on musical instruments deepened her own understanding of abstraction as a representation of the passing and erosion of time. Settling in Boston in September 2001, Arveil turned to organizing and editing her writings. This work so far includes fifty short stories, a novel, autobiographical texts, essays, and early poems.Technical mastery has now freed the artist from conventional approaches to writing and painting. Through mental introspection, she expresses her deep search for meaning, investigating the related areas of feelings, image, and recollection of early sensations to create strongly embedded images that seem to elude their confinement in the panel.Her technique resembles the sculpting process: it involves the layering and building up of grounds that she later transforms to create haunting images. She has largely abandoned the use of brushes for rags, as the drafting of delicate details no longer requires a dedicated tool but rests on the fluid circulation between sensation, brain, and hand.In 2008, Arveil is mid-way through The Volcano Fault: a new, large-scale body of work that unifies her painting (an installation of lacquered panels) with her writing (a novel, an art manifesto and autobiographic materials) to reflect the process of building a utopian entity in its entirety. The images, painted or written, are visionary and yet rooted in life experience and broader history.Each image, built from a raw concentrate of mostly monochromatic color, carries with it residual matter from previous experience. Overcoming trying periods in her life without abandoning her pursuit of art has given Arveil strong perspectives from which to create.Arveil’s work is shown and sold in the United States and Europe. Pieranna Cavalchini, Curator of Contemporary Art for the Venice Biennale and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, wrote an introduction to the artist’s work for her second exhibition in Boston in 2005 (Carney Gallery, Regis College).At several points in her career she has received offers to work exclusively in one of her fields (medieval illumination or violin varnishing, for example). She has instead pursued an evolving vision –combining painting, writing, research, and technical expertise – that today is condensed in her Volcano Fault project. She is married to Benoit Rolland, master bow maker and composer. Her daughter is a professor of international law, JD in the U.S.; her son is an anthropologist and PhD candidate in the U.K.; and her two stepdaughters are studying literature and history in France.