“People say that my paintings are musical and that my music evokes images.”
The Art of Becoming: A Journey Through Sound, Color, and Self
For Monique Désy Proulx, art is less a profession than an identity that has shaped her from a young age. Her mother’s legacy instilled a love of the arts, and she has never separated sound from image, music from color. A classically trained pianist, Monique initially pursued a career in the musical world as a performer, composer, and accompanist. Yet painting and drawing remained a constant parallel passion—first scrawled in school notebooks, then explored more seriously through formal instruction as a teenager under the guidance of Jeanne Vanasse, a student of the notable Quebec painter Jean-Paul Lemieux. That early exposure to 20th-century European masters planted seeds that would flourish decades later into a distinct visual language. Now defining herself as a “multi-indisciplinary” artist, she embraces a hybrid path where various creative disciplines interact, complementing and amplifying each other.
This duality has only deepened with time. While Monique has long worked in both music and visual arts, it wasn’t until recent years—especially during the Covid period—that her commitment to painting evolved into a profound exploration of personal meaning and style. Her approach to the canvas echoes her work at the piano: a spontaneous interplay of intuition, gesture, and rhythm. She begins by making contrasting marks, allowing chaos to emerge. From this energetic base, she extracts forms and intentions, often layering in collaged elements such as old musical scores that serve as symbolic bridges between her two creative worlds. Sanding, scratching, and manipulating paint layers, she brings forward the hidden textures underneath, injecting each work with emotion, sensuality, and a sense of discovery. It’s a process that not only unveils the image, but also reveals aspects of herself, making painting an act of inner transformation.
While she has always known that she was an artist—thanks, in part, to the constant affirmations of those around her—Monique admits it took time to fully accept this role. The label “artist” once felt burdensome, even disorienting, in a society that often prizes conventional careers. For years, she worked in communications and publishing, often in roles connected to cultural institutions and museums. Yet her artistic life never paused; it simply ran parallel. Everything changed when she moved to the countryside over fifteen years ago and converted an old chicken coop into a hybrid space where she could paint, compose, and host events. This bold move marked the turning point. Now fully immersed in her art, she organizes exhibitions, participates in artist collectives, and prepares for the release of her upcoming album «Les herbes folles», which tells her story in song. Art, for Monique, is not a compartment—it is the architecture of her entire life.
Monique Désy Proulx: Painting to the Rhythm of the Unseen
Monique’s visual art refuses categorization, hovering between abstraction and figuration with a style that pulses with energy and emotion. Though she resists labeling her own work, its signature is immediately recognizable. Inspired early on by the bold shapes and vivid palettes of European comics, her work bears the influence of stained-glass windows, with sharp contours and luminous expanses of color. Her paintings are alive with movement, echoing expressionist and fauvist tendencies, while simultaneously offering a lyrical softness reminiscent of abstraction infused with narrative threads. This synthesis creates an emotional resonance that captures both her joy in creation and a deeper meditation on transience and memory.
Themes rooted in nature dominate her imagery. The ocean, forests, rivers, birds, stars, and the moon are recurring presences—elements that speak to her connection with Quebec’s landscapes and her lifelong proximity to water. These motifs are not mere illustrations of the natural world but poetic evocations of places lived, remembered, or imagined. There is a bittersweet undercurrent too; disappearing rural landmarks such as steeples and convents often make quiet appearances in her compositions, acting as visual elegies for a vanishing world. Occasionally, musicians or surreal characters emerge, adding a sense of the dreamlike and theatrical. Rather than narrating concrete stories, her paintings offer emotional maps, capturing the fleeting moods and unspoken harmonies of inner experience.
The influence of music is inescapable throughout Monique’s practice. It’s present not only in the subject matter—such as whimsical musicians embedded in abstract scenes—but also in the structure of her compositions. Rhythm governs her brushstrokes, tempo guides the layering of paint, and silence, like negative space, creates tension and release. Her process mirrors improvisation: responsive, fluid, and unpredictable. She draws inspiration from an eclectic musical palette, spanning from classical composers like Bach, Debussy, and Prokofiev to chanson, blues, samba, and even the Beatles. This musicality imbues her work with a unique dynamism, allowing her visual language to speak in tones as much as colors. The result is a body of work that doesn’t just depict but resonates—offering a multisensory experience that lingers beyond the surface.
The Studio as Sanctuary: Tools, Light, and Creative Solitude
Monique’s workspace is a lively extension of her creative philosophy: layered, unpredictable, and rich with potential. Her studio, affectionately housed in a repurposed chicken coop, overflows with tools of the trade—paintbrushes in every shape and quality, pastels both oily and dry, ink, charcoal, gouache, and stacks of sketchbooks and paper. Scattered among these are fragments of old sheet music, stencils, and scraps she uses in her collages. This controlled chaos is part of her process; each object has a purpose, even if its moment hasn’t yet arrived. She alternates between painting on the floor and hanging canvases on the wall, keeping a wheeled cart close by so materials are always within reach. This mobility enhances her spontaneity, supporting the kind of energetic gesture-based work that defines her style.
Despite her energetic approach, Monique thrives in silence. Living in the quiet of the countryside helps her focus, especially when working late into the night. She teaches and welcomes students, but otherwise maintains a solitary rhythm. While her curiosity can be a source of distraction, she turns this trait into creative fuel, allowing tangents to feed her imagination rather than derail it. The limited natural light in her studio has prompted her to design a new space filled with windows, a change she anticipates will transform not only the way she paints but also how she experiences color and space. Light, after all, is not just an element—it’s a co-creator.
Her experimentation with materials is just as diverse as the tools she surrounds herself with. Acrylic paint remains her preferred medium, despite her ambivalence toward its synthetic qualities. Its fast drying time enables her to layer, erase, and reinvent her work with freedom and speed. She often incorporates collage elements—musical scores, newsprint, and textured paper—into her compositions, along with marks in grease pencil and pastel. While she occasionally revisits oil for its richness and depth, she finds its slow drying process too restrictive for her spontaneous style. Her surfaces range from canvas stretched over wood to panels that allow for more aggressive physical interventions like sanding and scratching. Through this wide array of techniques and supports, she constructs not just paintings but environments—sensory landscapes where texture and time intersect.
Monique Désy Proulx: A Life Inspired by Masters and Memory
The lineage of Monique’s influences runs deep, stretching across continents and centuries. In her formative years, the reproductions she lived with became more than decor—they were silent mentors. A particularly impactful piece was Gauguin’s Arearea, whose audacious color schemes and disregard for realism struck a chord in her. The painting’s red dogs, blue trunks, and yellow waters offered a vision of art unconstrained by convention, and its flat, vibrant fields of color sparked something bold within her. It wasn’t just an aesthetic choice—it was a declaration that imagination could rewrite reality. Gauguin’s influence helped validate the instincts she already carried and gave her permission to pursue painting on her own terms.
Her admiration for early 20th-century European painters continues to shape her work. She draws on the emotional intensity of Van Gogh, the symbolic lyricism of Chagall, and the geometrical elegance of Paul Klee. Artists like Cézanne and Matisse inform her approach to structure and color, while Kandinsky and Miro offer cues on how abstraction can carry emotional and spiritual resonance. This constellation of inspirations serves not as a blueprint but as a set of guiding lights—points of reference that help her navigate her own path. Rather than replicating their styles, Monique interprets their courage and freedom in her own visual vocabulary.
Today, her compass also points westward. American and British painters such as Rothko, David Mankin, Lewis Noble, Thomas Steyer, and Nicolas Wilton provide contemporary models of how gesture, color, and landscape can be synthesized into compelling, non-literal works. What draws her to these artists is their fearless embrace of imperfection and spontaneity, their unfiltered dialogue with nature, and their ability to balance structure with fluidity. She sees in their work a shared commitment to emotional honesty, and it is this ethos that she aspires to uphold. Whether working in oil or acrylic, with a piano or a paintbrush, Monique Désy Proulx continues to blur the boundaries between disciplines, creating a practice that is as expansive and layered as the life that informs it.
