Emilie Houssart is a Dutch oil painter and printmaker. She trained in portraiture at the Charles Cecil Studios in Florence on a teaching scholarship, graduating in 2006. More recently she has been working on a series of landscape paintings in Norfolk (UK), Italy and Austin, as well as printmaking and carving wood.
Emilie is inspired by nature in all its enormity and weirdness. Some landscapes and faces can draw us right out of our tangled inner life and make us soar, or wonder, or muse. A first-hand reaction is the best chance we have to capture these experiences, so each work is taken from life. The landscapes are painted on location with some studio reworking and her portraits are done directly from models, usually in the studio where high, filtered windows provide beautiful constant light and shadows. She paints with layers of oils, exploring the potential of the medium to harness light so that a painting can glow from within, mimicking light striking our eyes in nature.
Her current prints are lighthearted studies of small Texan seed pods which have evolved in extraordinary ways to survive the intense heat, and other peculiarities of nature. The intense, fine raised lines of etching are ideal for bringing out eccentricities of texture and form. Emilie prints at Slugfest in Austin, and is grateful to Tom and Margie, their six cats and Janet the tortoise for all their help and encouragement.
Work by Emilie Houssart is held in private collections across Europe. Previous exhibitions include the Belgravia Gallery in London; the Greenacres Gallery in Wexford, Ireland; and St. John’s Cathedral and St. Margaret's Church in Norwich, UK. Last year Emilie was guest artist for the Norwich Art Now group as part of Norwich Fringe. She exhibited with EAST in Austin in 2007, 08 and 11. In 2003 she was awarded the American Society of Classical Realism Prize for her first portrait drawing.
UPCOMING EVENTS:
East Austin Studio Tour at the Pump Project, Nov 12-13 and 19-20
Opera Festival Exhibition, Greenacres Gallery, Wexford
CONTACT:
Please contact Emilie at ehoussart@hotmail.com if you would like to discuss one of the works on this site, a commissioned project or tuition.
To be updated about new work or exhibitions, please send an email entitled "Mailing List".