Danièle Rochon is a Canadian artist born in Ottawa in 1946. She works both in Montreal and in the south of France.
Following a baccalaureate degree in Quebec City, she studied political science at Laval University in Quebec and at the University of Montreal. She then started to work in journalism and creative advertising. In 1978, she joined the Art School of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and continued her art studies at the Saidye Bronfman Centre of Arts and at the Graff studio of engraving in Montreal.
Danièle Rochon’s career began to flourish in 1982. From this time, she began to show her work throughout Canada and in the United States, especially in New York and in San Francisco. During this period, she designed and created costumes and decor for the project « Vaugirard » an opera of Mardi Ellen Hill in New York. She also made a series of lithographs for the limited edition art-book « La nuit » of Claire Dé published by Art Global and was commissioned to paint a vast vaulted ceiling of 23m by 6m, entitled « Hymne à la Vie », in Quebec City.
Since 1987, Danièle Rochon has been making lithographs in Vence in the south of France at the studios of Pierre Chave and Bjarne Hansen.
During these years of creative work, the artist was constantly in search of ways of taming light by the use of colour of which she tried to find the secrets and combinations. During those years, she used pastel as a mean of expression and her work in this medium was prolific.
Always in search of a different light and thirsting for new cultures, in Paris and other European countries. Her travels led her throughout Asia and Africa, to Argentine and Uruguay.These new cultures had a direct impact on her work which was now infused with new sensual vibrant images, evocative of places visited and remembered. She eventually decided to settle in the south of France where she felt in time with her surroundings. At this time, she painted a triptych for the Roman church of Viens in Provence. She also exhibited her work in Europe, particularly in Paris, Barcelona and Copenhagen.
Since then, the artist works in both her studios in Montreal and in the south of France. Her paintings overflow with the themes which have always fascinated her- water, stone, source and nature in all its most intimate hidden secrets. Danièle Rochon has made more than forty solo exhibitions and over sixty collective ones.
An art critic sums up well the artist’s quest for light and beauty. « In this respect, Rochon is part of a long project in art, as the critic Robert Hughes put it, « reconcile us with the world, not by protest, irony or political metaphors, but by the ecstatic contemplation of pleasure in nature. It is not the world as it is but as our starved senses desire it to be ; neither hostile, nor indifferent, but full of meaning ».

References

BERNIER, Robert. Un siècle de peinture au Québec, Montréal, Les Éditions de l’Homme, 1999,
p. 338 .
HOULD, Claudette. Répertoire des livres d’artistes du Québec 1981-1990, Montréal, Bibliothèque nationale du Québec, 1993, p. 144 .
MACDONALD, Colin S. A Dictionary of Canadian Artists, Ottawa, Canadian Paperbacks Publishing, vol. 7 , 1990 .
Magazin’Art : répertoire biennal des artistes canadiens en galeries, Montréal, Editart International, 2000, p. 82 .
VALLÉE, Félix. Guide Vallée : marché de l’art, biographies et cotes de 1000 artistes, Québec, Publications Charles-Huot, 1989, p. 601 .