Laurence de Valmy

Laurence de Valmy is a contemporary painter based in the US. In this interview with Gita Joshi she talks about her process and the evolution of her art work.

Tell me a bit about your background.

Fairly young, I already had a keen interest in painting and my mum is an artist, so I learnt from her and I took some art classes. Then, after high school I did a Master in Marketing and started a career in that field, painting as a hobby. In 2003, I took a year off and moved from France to the USA and dedicated myself to painting. I followed some art history classes and worked in a studio. Upon my return to France, I started to exhibit my work. In 2013, we moved back to the USA with my family, first in the New York area and now near Philadelphia. I have been a full time artist since 2015.

What is your preferred medium?

I learnt to paint with oils and watercolor and came to acrylics for practical reasons when in 2003, I had to work in our living space. The toxicity of oils was out of the question! I discovered a medium that has its challenges since it dries fast, but that is very flexible, so I used both my knowledge of oils and watercolour to master it.

What ideas do you enjoy exploring in your work?

My work revisits art history through the lens of Instagram. I appropriate famous artwork and create dialogs historically accurate yet humorous. By sharing the stories behind these artworks, my goal is to invite my viewers to see them with a new eye. My work also reflects on the place of social media today since art is more often seen through a screen than in person. By appropriating the artworks, I pay a tribute to their authors and play with the concept of originality.

What is your artistic process?

My process for my current work on the Instagram paintings starts with the story of an artist or artwork and the research. Then I create a digital composition since I often use part of an artwork, and the dialogs. My goal is to show the links between the artist and his/her friends, art dealers, collectors or muse... I try to be as close as possible to the personality of the artist and convey his/her message in just a few words.

As for the studio part, I print the image I want to paint to the same size as the finished painting to get all the details. One of my challenges is to pick the right colors because photos modify them. I often work on two to four paintings at the same time, depending on their size.

You are most known for the Instagram paintings. How did you arrive at these as your core subject?

I started the Post in late 2016. Before that, I used to work in a photorealist manner and often got comments that my paintings looked like a photo. Simultaneously, I was fascinated by how artists were using instagram and thought it could be fun to create paintings that looked like they were photos on Instagram. Since I had always been a fan of art history, I merged the two ideas and that was it.

Has the development of this work meant you are reading a lot of artist biographies?

Indeed it does! It was already something I enjoyed doing since it was at the source of my inspiration, but of course I took it to the next level. I am also grateful for all the archives available online when I am searching for a precise date of the opening of an exhibition in 1865!

As your work has an art history reference, is there a period that you are particularly drawn to, or has as a genre or movement you have presented been more popular to audiences than another?

I have eclectic interests and that's why I enjoy this series so much. Of course I have some favorites ranging from Impressionism, to Pop Art, Minimalism and conceptual art. As for the favorite of my collectors, Keith Haring and Jean Michel Basquiat are very popular.

What is your studio like?

It’s an organized chaos ;-) I am lucky to have a studio at home which became even more valuable this year. It is also nice to sometimes have my younger son as my little assistant :-)

What is the most memorable thing someone has said about your work?

One of my most memorable moments was to be invited and commissioned in 2018 by the Burda Media Team to be part of an exhibition in the MUCA in Munich. The show was built around the Warhol painting Magazine and History commissioned by Hubert Burda in 1983. To be told that my work was worthy of being in such an exhibition, and that my work would be displayed next to Warhol was totally surreal. I am grateful to all the people who have helped me to pursue my project, and to the art dealers and the collectors who make it possible.

What are you working on now? What are some of your upcoming plans?

In parallel with my current series, I am working on new paintings which are inspired by hashtags. This tool created for social media to link images is now part of our way of communicating and almost a new language. We say that an image is worth a thousand words, but in our world, an image is worth 30 hashtags :-)