About the Author L’OR Artiste

L’OR Artiste was born in Montréal in 1960. She is an international artist primarily known for her nude figures. Her favorite model is her husband, who also serves as agent and publicist. Since their marriage in 2013 the two have worked as a team producing art exhibits in the U.S. that tell of French and Quebec contributions to American history and culture. These exhibits are of urban scenes that have a sense of motion and spontaneity of figure paintings. The artist adopted her initials to her professional name. She lives with her husband, an anglophone from Chicago in Longueuil, Québec.

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Quebec artist, L’OR visited the Bahai Temple in Wilmette, Illinois in 2017. She was impressed by the garden and captivated by the Temple’s design. She would later learn that the architect was Louis Jean-Baptiste Bourgeois.  Unfortunate circumstances often present opportunities. In this case, the planned  Chicago 2020 return exhibition of L’OR was postponed because of the Covid 19 pandemic. All of L’OR’s American exhibits explore French and Québecois influence on American culture. The postponed exhibition “Réflections” was to pay tribute to architect, Phyllis Lambert, who worked in Chicago and Montreal, L’OR, taking advantage of the postponement, looked for another architect who had a career in both Québec Province and Chicago. That’s when she discovered that Bourgeois had also designed several cathedrals in the Mauricie region of Québec. Knowing that the Society of Architectural Historians had scheduled its annual meeting in Montreal for April 2021 and learning that 2021 marked the centennial anniversary of the beginning construction of Bahai Temple, she further researched Bourgeois’s career. She chose three buildings he designed at different stages of his career to augment the exhibit. The Assumption Cathedral in Trois Rivières; Québec, the William Gilman House in Chicago, and the de Longpré home have been included in the exhibit.

L’OR, Quebec Gothic; L’Assomption Cathedral,
mixed madeia on Terraskin, 40 po x 30 po, 2020