Marie-Pier Lopes’ Quest of Identity

Marie-Pier Lopes describes herself as a collagist-painter, or perhaps a painter-collagist, a distinction that points to the layered nature of her current work. Her creative life began with a focus on portraiture, specifically black and white renderings of people she knew or found interesting. During that period, she trained herself to reproduce images by focusing on specific facial features that attracted her, such as a large nose or a particular gaze. It was figurative work, rooted in the technical challenge of capturing a likeness. Eventually, the straightforward portrait began to feel limiting. She found herself bored with the simple ability to paint a face and started asking how she could make a scene more expressive or hide a message within the image.

The shift from traditional painting to her current style happened because of a physical restriction in her personal life. She lived in a space where she was forbidden from putting nails in the wall or getting anything dirty. Because she had to paint outside of her home, she began to experiment instead with small collages as a way to organize her ideas. These small works allowed her to create narratives and stories using characters, textures, and colours that inspired her. This practical solution to a messy problem changed her entire practice. She views the process of collage as a game of telephone, where there is a transformation that occurs when figurative pictures are brought together and expanded into large-scale pieces.

In these larger works, Marie-Pier finds the space to express internal energies that often feel chaotic or trapped. Recurring themes serve an expression of an intense energy she finds difficult to express. She populates her canvases with figures she calls healers, which represent parts of her own personality that manage anger and sadness. These healers appear as women or as hands, which she describes as her verbs. Nature also appears frequently as a symbol of calm to balance the intensity of the human figures.

Her current work is a quest for identity, heavily influenced by the psychological theories of Carl Jung. She is particularly interested in the process of individuation, which involves discovering and balancing the darkness and light within oneself. This exploration includes the concept of the persona, or the various masks people wear to protect themselves or fit into the world. For Marie-Pier, painting these masks is a way to search for her own identity while trying to understand the people around her. She wants to use these symbols to see how a viewer might interpret her stories, moving between figurative images and expressive, abstract gestures without fully leaving the realm of the recognizable.

This intellectual pursuit of identity took on a sharper, more painful edge two years ago when she lost two important people in her life. The intensity of that grief was something she hid for a year. She describes the feeling of that suppressed emotion finally coming to the surface as a bubble rising out of the water. It’s a difficult subject to paint, and she admits to feeling shy or even scared to put these raw emotions on a wall for public view. She wonders if her work will be seen as valid, yet she is drawn to things that require courage, often jumping into projects that feel uncomfortable just to see how they will change her.

Currently, she is building a series of works focused on two specific themes: masks and the curve of grief. Her goal is to be courageous enough to hold a show dedicated to these subjects. Since moving back to the area, she has relied on the support of the 100 Mile Arts Network Gallery and the local community of artists in Wakefield, Chelsea, and Ottawa. This network of teachers and peers provides the energy she needs to keep art as her primary focus. She views these connections as the catalyst for making things happen, believing that the energy shared between artists is what sustains the work.