Alex Garant

About

Canadian artist Alex Garant is known as the Queen of the Double Eyes and a pioneer of figurative op art. Her signature drawings and oil paintings are portraits that seem to almost vibrate, thanks to her use of symmetry, superposition, and repetition. Garant’s choices in composition and colour are deliberate to achieve her desired effect. Garant notes that “To me, the vibrancy created by the double exposure is more than just an optical illusion. It represents life emerging from a structural setting.” Having survived a heart attack she suffered at just 30 years old, Garant has a keen understanding of what it feels like to experience life emerging again: this event catalysed her decision to pursue art as a career. Garant uses models, but she says that there is an element of self-portraiture in all her pieces; she is often expressing something about her own life while creating works about our inner and outer selves. Innocence, introspection and evolution are common themes in her work. The pieces can be difficult to view because of the visual effects she employs; Garant is aware that some feel dizzy or even nauseous from looking at the pieces. But it is Garant’s desire to create art that is more than simply “pretty”; noting that people instinctively are drawn to the eyes, she hopes that having to make that effort of processing the images promotes more engagement with the pieces and that viewers will be more affected by what they see. A native of Quebec, Canada, Garant was born in 1982. Her artist mother always had supplies about, and Garant naturally gravitated toward creating, participating in an art contest at age 5 and taking her first oil painting class at age 7. She studied visual art at Notre-Dame-De-Foy College, but she also had other interests, including history and science. Her work life after graduation was eclectic, including jobs in marketing and advertising; she even had stints as a flight attendant, makeup artist and clown. While Garant had always kept art

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