Rowena Fok-Shan Van de valle is a subtle mixture of European, Indian, African and Asian influences.

Artist using essentially oil on wood with a classical brush, her themes are always on actual concepts and preoccupations...

 

Her mind travels between: To be or to be seen... To be alone or to be connected...

 

She sees herself as a free mind, without boundaries and taking her inspirations from people  and elements...

 

Born in Mauritius from a Chinese/African father and a French/Indian mother, she is naturally inclined to extreme curiosity and necessity to invest in the wider stream of life...

She went to an English Catholic School in Mauritius and then came to Paris to study Art at the Université Paris VIII where she now lives and teaches “Art Appliques” at a High School in Paris.

 

She can be found indulging in her passion for art at his studio (a secularised nave of a XII century church)or at home in the village of Picardy where she lives.

 

Her paintings can be seen in three parts:

The first part is a question between to be and to be seen... The paintings are quite naive and very colourful, but yet a subtle volume on the wood and underneath the lines, invite us to feel and to think about the content and shape… The work is a macro vision of small natural elements.

 

The second chapter leads one to think and question one’s relationship with time. How do we travel through our modern underground thoughts and reality? So often a common and connected experience but yet most of the time so alone.

 

The third part of her work in progress explores a more Enigmatic side of her life... The wood and the Body natural elements... Two frames where ideas and concepts can be materialised... Using both, the surface of the wood and the Body as place of expression. Does the veil of a beautiful painting hides the meaning or does the beauty of a body reveal the sense...or hide the content? Why is women body a place of expression through ages, traditions, culture or modernity? Each segment of her paintings are linked to different phases...either an introversion or and extraversion of her living... But yet her work goes through a complex but coherent network overlapping of concepts of experiences and questions.