Discover the contemporary work of Jacqueline VERNAY-MILLOT

Born in Saint-Etienne (Loire), living in Le Mans since 1992. She has exercised the function of a schoolteacher, mainly with young children, until 2007, the date of her departure to South Africa in expatriation to follow Pascal, her husband.It is in 1999, in the framework of a workshop on creative art, organized by the Ecole Normale of Le Mans, that she rediscovers various painting techniques and the choice of acrylic on canvas is very quickly becoming obvious. She then started her artistic production that stayed confidential during several years.It is only in 2005 that Jacqueline cedes to the pressures of Pascal, and encouragements coming from friends -themselves recognized as artists and painters- that she finally agreed to showcase in Le Mans, at the famous “Galerie Des Remparts”. A dozen of her paintings were part of the exhibition "les Zanimaux dans tous leurs Zétats" (Ze Animals in all Zeir States). It was an immediate success since enthusiastic amateurs acquired almost all of the work exhibited.Two years later, at Verneuil sur Avre in the Eure at the International Festival of Naive Art, she met her public with renowned success. If her work can initially be classified in the Realm "naïve" and if she claims loving the jungles of the Douanier Rousseau, the jungles that she paints and which are one of her thematic of choice, are following a lived reality fed by multiple stays in tropical countries that she affections particularly for their warmth and luxuriance.Although Jacqueline likes to introduce in her work a wide range of animals in which leopards, panthers, giraffes, zebras, elephants, parrots, toucans, hornbills…, it is always in an authentic visited landscape that her paintings begin, then making it her own. She paints a reality transfigured, organized and idealized with an extraordinary sense of detail served by an appeal to the instinctive pointillism. The remarkable use of a symphony of greens allows a treatment of light giving their full depth to her jungles, whose composition is perfectly mastered and which luxuriance envelope and absorbs the one who contemplates.It is with passion that Jacqueline paints jungles allayed, without aggressiveness, where animals that she recreates are all "nice" and integrated, in a perfect agreement, with the serene paradisiac landscapes. Her jungles are at the same time real and transfigured, restoring the tropical heat which is, in some way, the signature of the artist and in which she leads us in a quest quasi initiatic.If humans are not absent from the work of Jacqueline Vernay-Millot, it is the landscape, just as exotic, lush and tropical, which is necessary to the artist who places then the inhabitants entered in their everyday and with which a direct contact will always have been established with the concern for authenticity that she, as an artist, claims.Even if she has been absent of the exhibition halls for several years, Jacqueline Vernay-Millot has continued to pursue her artistic work through paintings inspired by prolonged stays in countries such as South Africa and Trinidad and Tobago where she has accompanied her husband, an acoustician in its missions on major industrial sites.It is with forty new paintings, with renewed thematic, that Jacqueline Vernay-Millot proposed a new exhibition in May 2016 at the “Espace Cherche-Midi”, in Paris. Once again, the visitors were conquered with the universe of the artist.At the dawn of 2017, she awaits her next exhibition with impatience and enthusiasm. The location this time will be in Amboise –famous for its Castle along the Loire Valley- in the setup of the Choiseul Hotel from February 11th to April 29th, 2017.