Artist to mix fantasy and dream at Gourgaud exhibit

   Agnès Holzapfel Seugnet will display her works at the Gourgaud Gallery.

By: Lacey Korevec
   
   There is a magical, fantasy world that Agnès Holzapfel Seugnet taps into when she works. It inspires her to create circular, swirling images of people flying into a dark blue abyss with a path of birds and flowers leading the way.
   "It’s like I have another part of my personality, which you can see in my fantasy paintings," she said. "I feel an energy in me. I have to paint this movement, these happy people flying around."
   But her reality is also like a dream. Ms. Seugnet bounces back and forth from her 15th century Renaissance castle in France, where she can frolic through fields of purple lavender, yellow sunflowers and delicate, red poppies, to her apartments in Paris and downtown Princeton.
   The walls of her tiny, square living room in Princeton serve as a gallery of landscapes she sees in France and Princeton, as well as ones from Mexico, where she and her husband escape to twice a year. The room also features some of her signature fantasy works, many of which will be on display at the Gourgaud Gallery in Cranbury through March.
   "I try to paint Impressionistic landscapes and seascapes of the places I love," she said.
   Ms. Seugnet began drawing as a little girl in France, inspired by her mother who worked as a physician, but often sketched her children in her free time. After earning a master’s degree in art at Sorbonne University, Paris, she studied painting under artist Joël Réal. In 1995, she moved to the United States with her husband, Jean-Louis, and daughter, Sophie, and began studying at Highland Studios in Hopewell. The work she did there motivated her to further her art education at Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
   In a black blouse and stylish black and white vertical striped skirt, with a cup of coffee in hand, Ms. Seugnet walked about the room, explaining how some of her favorite pieces came about. One, titled "My Einstein Galaxy," shows Albert Einstein’s head floating in space.
   "I decided to honor him by painting his life within the galaxy," she said.
   She moved her hand to the bottom right corner of the pastel image to a small fiery yellow and orange circle and then to the top left corner, pointing to a faint, blue violin.
   "Here is the Big Bang and he played violin very well," she said.
   That particular work also shows Einstein riding a bicycle across the moon and his famous formula, "E=MC¯."
   Her castle, Château d’Alba, located in Alba-la-Romaine, on the Atlantic coast of France, is a historic monument that Ms. Seugnet owns with her siblings. The building, which overlooks vineyards and a small village, shows up in a number of her paintings. She also often captures a more widely known structure, the Eiffel Tower.
   One of her oil paintings, "Happiness is Contagious" shows a female figure flying through the universe and embracing the Eiffel Tower, as a gust of poppies breeze past. Ms. Seugnet said she includes poppies in many of her paintings because the flower symbolizes happiness.
   "It’s so fragile," she said. "Once you cut it, it dies. They are like happiness. Happiness is also fragile. Once it’s here, you must catch it, otherwise it flies away. With my paintings, I like to share a sense of happiness."
   Ms. Seugnet paints every morning in her apartment, with classical music playing in the background and sunlight pouring through the windows into her small, bright living room. She said working on her art is her own form of meditation.
   "For an artist, creation is a kind of state of grace," she said. "In order to create a painting, an artist must feel no conflict within himself. He must feel poised, peaceful."
   Though her art is often considered to be Impressionistic — and some of it is — Ms. Seugnet said she prefers another term for her fantasy paintings.
   "The word Impressionistic, I think, applies much more to landscapes," she said. "And for my fantasy world, I prefer ‘poetic’ because the Impressionists did not paint in that style."
   Ms. Seugnet used to dedicate much of her time to writing poems, but has since abandoned the art form to focus all of her energy on her paintings.
   "I can say much more in a painting than in a poem," she said.
   And as a woman who is fluent in six languages — French, English, German, Spanish, Greek and Latin — Ms. Seugnet also appreciates visual art for another reason.
   "A painting doesn’t have to be translated," she said, adding that she published a book in French about her mother and a boy she saved during World War II, titled "Petite Claude: The Orphan of Auschwitz," which was later translated into English. "Painting is international. It’s a universal language," she said.
   If her name sounds familiar, it’s because Ms. Seugnet’s work was displayed at the Gourgaud Gallery in December as part of the "Cranbury Gardens IV" exhibit, which showed paintings from the Cranbury Arts Council’s plein air Art in the Park program.
   Having her own exhibit at the gallery comes at no better time, she said, since she and her husband are leaving Princeton and the United States inn June to live in France full time, where her daughter already resides.
   "It’s kind of a retrospective for me, as I’ve been living here for 12 years," she said, adding that the gallery is large enough to display a variety of her works, including landscapes, seascapes, poetic, fantasy works and nudes.
   Ms. Seugnet works on nude paintings at live workshops in Paris and Princeton. She said being able to paint people is crucial, even for artists who mostly concentrate on landscapes.
   "It’s important to know the human figure," she said. "It’s important to be able to paint these wonderful nuances on the human body, on the flesh. The light plays beautifully on the body as well."
   She said she also likes painting interpretive images of exotic fish in the sea.
   "For me, it’s a little like painting the stars and the galaxy," she said. "The undersea world is very poetic. It’s sort of magic with all the colors and corals."
   The First Friday reception for "Agnès Seugnet: Oil & Pastel Paintings" will be held March 2 from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Gourgaud Gallery, located in Town Hall on North Main Street, Ms. Seugnet will be at the reception and will also be in the gallery every Saturday and Sunday throughout the month from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. to speak with viewers about her art.
   To learn more about Ms. Seugnet and her work, visit her Web site at www.agnesseugnet.com.