AN ARTIST TRUE TO HIS VISION
MARCEL GINGRAS 1921-2001

Oeuvre de Marcel Gingras

During his studies at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal, from 1940 to 1943, Marcel Gingras became a student and privileged disciple of Alfred Pellan. This great Quebec master of surrealist painting influenced Gingras’ artistic production during his long career as a painter

Upon returning to Sherbrooke, after his studies in Montreal, he joined the family cabinet making business, but still continued to dedicate his leisure hours to painting and studio work, while participating in many group or solo exhibitions.

Even though he worked at a distance from Montreal, then the stage of manifestations, contestations and great exhibitions that transformed the Quebec art scene, Gingras maintained his contacts with the art metropolis. He visited museums, art galleries, and kept informed about art trends, both at the national and international levels. A survey of his artistic production, some thousand of paintings produced over a period of four decades, indicates how well he assimilated and personalized the evolving movements that transformed the world of art during this period.

Although trained in the Academic tradition that was still the norm at the ÉBAM in the forties, Marcel Gingras remained an instinctive painter who gave free wheel to his imagination. However, in the manner of his mentor, Pellan, the importance of rigorous and disciplined drawing instilled an ordered and constructed structure to all his works. While tempted at times by abstraction, Gingras is, above all, a figurative painter where the handling of the various components of a work of art, just as much as the personal and cultural experience, remains a creative source.

Monique Nadeau-Saumier, Ph. D.
Art Historian.


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