I draw the subjects of my paintings from scenes that I’ve experienced or witnessed. I express the emotion I felt in front of a landscape or an event, like Fireworks near the Jacques Cartier Bridge. This painting, as well as the Five Roses Flour painting, is meant to commemorate the 375th anniversary of Montréal, my adopted city.

I lived in Paris for nearly 30 years and am still very attached to the city of my childhood. I recently recovered from a brain operation and, while I don’t know how my surgery and long stay in hospital have changed my faculties, my family tells me that my painting is both more flexible and more powerful than before—perhaps more purified, too. One thing I noticed was that my recovery reawakened my love of Paris, which I expressed in a number of paintings for this exhibition. These kinds of sensations and impulses prompt me to paint a particular subject. Sometimes it may take years, or even decades, before a subject matures in me. When it is ready, the painting is already finished in my mind, and I change almost nothing in the realization of the work.

My intention is to always do my best as a painter. I purposefully tap into the light and love I feel inside as inspiration. I want people to feel emotions by looking at my paintings rather than to analyze them intellectually. The intellectual analysis of creativity, like that of art critics, is of no interest to me. I believe that art is made to move, to open a breach in the soul; to help a human being to reconnect more deeply with—and to better love life and those who surround us. It should awaken us and prompt us to see the world in a new light. I also try to express beauty rather than ugliness. It is so much easier to show the latter and to encourage meanness and violence than it is to love! For this exhibition, I deliberately chose to show the beauty of this world, be it in music, architecture, nature, creative processes, sports, or everyday life.

Pierre Pivet