Gabrielle S. Castonguay

摘要

I started enameling when I was eleven years old. As a young child I had the chance to have parents who sent me to a drawing teacher - since I kept drawing all the time and on any surfaces, my parents figured out quicldy that something was going on! My drawing teacher ended up being a woman who I loved very much. When she stopped teaching for health reasons, I was devastated and it was very difficult for me to accept it, I missed her and I missed her teaching. I kept asldng my mother to phone her to take me again as a student, she didn't but suggested to my parents that I could start learning a new medium from her son who had recently come back to live with her in the Montreal area after having spent 2 years learning the art of enamel in Limoges, France. At first I didn't want to do it, I only went because it was a way that I might see her again since he lived with her and the class would be given in her studio. I have to say that as soon as my first piece was brought out of the kiln and was put on the marble plate and I saw the transformation operating on the hot enamel when it cools down -1 believe it is the first time I fell in love, I was hooked with enamel. I intensively studied enameling under his supervision from the age of 11 until the age of 16. It's at that age that I bought my first kiln and that I started searching for my own voice and making my own experimentation and exhibiting my work.