Artist Biography: Denise Verret
Denise Verret, born December 13, 1957, in Lake Charles, Louisiana, has drawn as far back as she can remember. As a young girl, she sequestered herself in her parents’ car in the warmth of their sunlit driveway, sketching self-portraits from the rear-view mirror. In 1980, she earned her undergraduate degree in art at McNeese State University in Lake Charles. Afterward, she received her MFA in painting with a minor in printmaking at the University of North Texas in Denton and soon began teaching as an assistant at UNT. In her first year, she was offered a part-time teaching position at Mountain View College in Dallas, where she taught painting, drawing, and watercolor. Throughout her undergraduate and graduate years, Denise entered various national shows, earning recognition and awards for her art.
While holding down a day job as a concierge at the Marriott in Dallas and part-time jobs teaching art to children and the elderly, she continued teaching night classes at Mountain View for over 11 years. Once she stopped working as a concierge, she became a bookseller for The Texas Bookman in Dallas and then for Powell’s Books Wholesale in Chicago. Both these jobs took her traveling across the country as well as overseas to Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Wales, and Ireland with the added benefit of museum-hopping in her spare time working at book fairs. While living in Chicago, she concentrated mainly on mixed media drawing until the urge to paint returned and she reconnected to a kind of “automatism” in detail—an adding and subtracting approach, yet liberated from preconceived ideas of what to paint. Pattern, line, and texture are the crux of her methodology. Dadaism appeals to her, as does some Surrealism and various other schools of art, but so does the odd Medieval and Renaissance painter. There are many approaches to admire, but none to mirror.
The shapes and colors, the lines and dots, the marks and patterns in her artwork come from a plane of creativity isolated from the ordinary. There is an apparent observation of landscape, sky, water, fire, figures, and structures that infiltrate each work. Where the boxes, circles, bowls, and mazes she feels inclined to draw and paint come from, remain an enigma to her. How they end up appearing visually is a result of the quest the artist makes to express herself convincingly to the viewer.
Denise Verret, Artist [email protected]
Artwork Inquiry Peg Ramier, Director [email protected] 337-453-4223
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