Light

My homeland, Martinique, bathed me in light and colours.
The light of the Tropics is majestic, at times a brutal sovereign who hews out a wide variety of dark, light and colourful facets in everything she touches and animates, on water as on land. On the sea, she is a magician when she scatters herself as a mosaic.
In Italy, I tasted the light of the Mediterranean. The light imposed itself on me as a natural but also a cultural phenomenon. It was an element of comprehension and prehension of the real within the unreal in art.
Fra Angelico led me to a space of pure light.
At the Louvre, I was nourished by the great book constituted by this museum.
When I returned to Martinique, experiencing of the dawn gave me an intimate and psychic feeling, the luminescent paintbrush of the sun. That moment when the machinery of nature cracks open, spreading throughout space what I view and experience as a fluid, a liquid light that advances like lava on the peaks of the clouds.
My feelings brought me, through the medium of paintbrushes, to try and capture this magic. It connects me to life’s spirit of perpetual transformation, where one element makes way for another.
It is a challenge. 

My life and career
I was born in Fort-de-France, Martinique in 1967.
Following my A1 Baccalaureate, which I studied for at Lycée Schoelcher, I continued my studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence in Italie, following the lectures of Silvio Loffredo and then Gian Carlo Caldini from 1990 onwards. Alberto Manfredi and Amedeo Lanci initiated me into the art of engraving, particularly linocut from 1989 to 1991. I then continued my studies at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris.
Subsequently I gave art lessons until 2018 at a studio I founded in Martinique, Mille Reflets.
Knowledge of the past allows feelings of the present to be reinforced. Reality exists through the intensity of the feeling it engenders. Imagination takes it over and leads it towards other existences.

Education

• 1994-1995 - Diploma of Advanced Studies from the Ecole du Louvre
  Dissertation
  The meal at Simon the Pharisee's ( Veronese, Versailles )
  
  
• 1991-1994 - Diploma of First Cycle of the Ecole du Louvre
  Specialization: History of Foreign School Painting
  ( Italy, Flanders, Spain )
  
  
• 1987-1991 - Diploma of the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence ( Italy )
  Congratulations
  Painting section

• 1998-1999 - Interim professor of art history at the IRAVM ( Fort-de-France )
  
  
• March 2000 - Model of the orientation table of the Montagne Pelée
  Morne-Rouge, Martinique
  
  
• October 1999 to December 2018 - Mille Reflets
  Private workshop of painting lessons - Fort-de-France

Professionnal Experience





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Art Exhibitions

• October-November 2022 - La Rochelle International Fine Arts Exhibition - Prize for Excellence in floral design


• February 2022 - Art Capital - Salon des Artistes Indépendants - Grand Palais Ephémère - Paris


• January-February 2022 - State of the Art - Associazione Monica Ferrarini Eventi - Galleria La Pigna, Rome


• November 2021-February 2022 - Rossocinabro Gallery - Rome - BE -FUTURE, Giornata del Contemporaneo Amaci 2021 - BE INSPIRED BY MULTIPLICITY


•  October 2021 - ArtShopping PARIS 2021 - Carrousel du Louvre, Paris, France - Stand of the Beauté du Matin Calme Gallery 


• October 2021 - Beauté du Matin Calme Gallery - Collective Exhibition
  Alessandra Viotti, Lisa Ford, Bernard Lambot, Sophie Donatien, Noro Rajaoson, Monique Anna Michel
  9, rue Alasseur, Place de Lugano, Village Suisse, 75015 Paris, France
  
  
• September 2021 - Contemporary Venice - ITSLIQUID International Art Fair
  The Room Contemporary Art Space - Calle Larga San Marco, Venice, Italy
  
  
• September 2021 - Virtual Video Exhibition - Effetto Arte Gallery
  Via Ludovico Ariosto, 19 - Palermo, Italy
  
  
• August 2021 - Focus on Color of Life London - Focus Art Fair - International Art Fair
  Fitzrovia Gallery, 139 Whitfield St, London W1T 5EN
  Saatchi Gallery, Duke of York's HQ, King's Rd, London SW3 4RY London, UK
  
  
• March 2021 - Gaia, The Origin - International Exhibition M.A.D.S. MILANO
  Corso S.Gottardo, Milan, Italy - Interactive Multimedia Gallery
  
  
• October 2020 - Color, Light, Transformation
  ( Couleur, Lumière, Transformation )
  Personal exhibition
  Espace Culturel Bertin Poirée ( Franco-Japanese Cultural Association ), Paris 1st district
  
  
• 2020 - Selection 2020 of the Salon d'Automne de Paris, France
  
  
• April 2019 - LIONS CARITATIFS ARTS
  Villa Chanteclerc - Didier, Martinique, France
  
  
• 2015 - Gallery LA ROSE DE PORCELAINE - Didier, Martinique, France
  
  
• May 2005 - Chanteclerc - Didier - Martinique, France
  Soroptimist meeting
  
  
• March 2005 - Chanteclerc - Didier - Martinique, France
  Literary meeting " From Solitude to Melody " Marie-Alice André-Jaccoulet
  
  
• November 2004 - Copying, creating from hindrance to freedom
  ( Copier, créer. De l’entrave à la liberté )
  Collective exhibition with Mille Reflets
  Hôtel de Région - Cluny - Martinique, France
  
  
• November 2001 - Regards et métamorphoses
  ( Gazes and metamorphoses )
  Personal exhibition
  Distillerie Dillon - Fort-de-France - Martinique, France
  
  
• 2000 - Ti-Balcon - Fort-de-France - Martinique, France
  Ceremony of induction of the Women Entrepreneurs of Martinique
  
  
• 1999 - Chanteclerc - Didier - Martinique, France
  Concert of Martinique Harmonie
  With the help of Annick Ozier-Lafontaine
  ( meeting - painting - music - literature )
  
  
• 1999 - Les Lutins - Didier - Martinique, France
  Inauguration of Martinique Harmonie 
  
  
• 1991 - Trouville’s Casino painting and sculpting contest
  Trouville - France
  First Prize for Still Life
  
  
• 1991 - Mostra degli allievi del quarto anno
  Stamperia Pistelli ( Florence ) - Italy
  
  
• 1991 - 27th International Grand Prix of Painting of the French Riviera ( Nice, France )
  Diploma Grand Final
  
  
• 1990 - Salon d'Automne - Grand Palais - Paris, France
  




• Art Universal 2021, The Great Encyclopedia of International Art, Salvattore and Francesco Saverio Russo, Effetto Arte Editions, Palerme
• Artisti di Oggì e di Domani 3, Monica Ferrarini, MF Eventi, Gangemi Editions, Rome

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Poems, essays

Colours of the Night

On a upside down day,
A night,
In a rose-petal coloured life,
In tender splashes,
The antagonistic peacocks,
Proud and dusky,
Walked their avatars,
Then gazed at themselves in the waters of the Styx,
Swelling with promises.
Garnet red,
They weigh anchor,
And the sea, slowly,
Before them,
Turned into vines.
Forever,
They have confided in the most tender,
Forever,
They have lived off their plunder,
Of a thousand patched up lives,
Stolen in the entrails of time,
And never does the night betray them.

​Paris, 1992

​Artichoke flowers
​
Artichoke flowers
Pelican flowers with open mouths
At once round and pointy
Spiky, hedgehog
But with a generous and lush heart
Sculptural forms
Shrivelled, winter blackened
Wombs of torment
Abandoned as you were to the bite of hostile winds
Sophie Donatien
​
Florence, Italy
1989

ArabesquesThere are lands where serenity crumbles into golden rain,
Where light is the measure of an intangible life,
No tear ever soaks these faraway lands,
There are shores lit by a pale, intermittent light,
Miserly,
Painful is the bite of their winds,
Fatal the fall.
And the dream prowls still,
Intangible,
Wisps of smoke,
Intoxicating inoperative thought on the boundaries of mystery.

Sophie Donatien
Firenze, 1990

Pontassieve life

​Your eyes are suns,
I follow you with quiet steps,
Along an ancient and dusty road.
You lead me through your garden of delights.
But it is still only a garden,
Disorder and dampness,
Rainy days and perching cats.
Cats,
Black ink stain.
Confucius,
Diaphanous watercolour from China.
Hector,
Aristocratic beneath the old porch.
Pulcino,
Little cat hidden between the branches of a tree that the wind undresses.
Big cat, metallic purr.
I followed you with quiet steps,
I held my breath in your garden,
Admiring the luxuriousness of your elegance,
The magic of your attitudes,
The delights of your presence.
I love you,
Forms born from all rhythms,
And whose deep respiration gives me life.

Sophie Donatien
​Firenze, 1990
​

I was fifteen
My parents and I were in Florence in Italie.
We were in the vestibule of the Chapel of the Princes on a hot July afternoon in 1983.
Brunelleschi’s sensible architecture had, for the moment, opened the doors for us to a peaceful place full of immobile beauty.
A perfume of ancient remains abounded. The grey pietra serena stood out against the light rendering on the walls, columns, grooved pilasters, capitals and discreet, precise mouldings.
I held my breath at the idea of what I was going to discover.
We entered the Chapel and it seemed to me that we were suddenly propelled into a vertiginous universe with an icy splendour, where we held our breath, as if about to dive into water.
A place where dust returns to dust, and where flowers wilt in the shade of this marble bower.
The opus sectile design embraced and constrained the shapes in the natural blackmail of the hard stone marquetry.
The octagonal building was topped by a cupola with a fresco, whose abyssal light was filtered through the oculus of a skylight some fifty metres above.
This zenithal and ghostly ray of light imbued the place with a disturbing aspect.
I had never seen such a spectacle before.
In the half-light, my eye gradually became used to the veins of the polychrome marble, the semi-precious stones and the corals.
Jaspers of all colours embraced the lapis lazuli blues with veins of gold, grey or amber agates, the colour of honey, polychrome marble and immaculate alabaster. Dark onyxes composed the geometrical shapes of the shining stones to form heraldic and geometric patterns.
Everywhere, under invisible scissors, the stone submitted to a desire for curves and reverse curves, Hellenistic engravings and delicate flowers perched atop fragile stems.
The marble epidermis covered absolutely everything…the floor and the eight walls of the octagon, since only the painted ceiling was spared. 
We were captivated.
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