Johanne A Lamarche
Johanne A. Lamarche’s approach to art is rooted in resourcefulness. Raised in poverty in an isolated area of Northern Ontario, she did not grow up surrounded by formal art or literature. Her home was nevertheless shaped by ingenuity. Her mother taught herself to sew, transforming worn clothing and recreating dresses seen in magazines, while her father renovated homes and produced finely crafted woodwork. Their ability to make something from limited means formed Lamarche’s earliest understanding of creativity.
That experience continues to inform how she thinks about artistic practice. “Art is not a luxury,” she says. “It is a way of solving problems, dreaming forward, and making meaning.”
Lamarche arrived at the studio through an indirect path. After moving from Canada to Philadelphia, she completed a residency in periodontics at the University of Pennsylvania and established a career as a dental surgeon. The precision required by surgery sharpened her spatial awareness, sensitivity to line, and capacity for close observation. These abilities would later become central to her visual language.
Her relationship with art developed further through two decades as a volunteer docent with Art Goes to School. The experience eventually led her into the studio, where she began teaching herself through experimentation and an intuitive engagement with materials. Rather than separating her scientific and creative lives, Lamarche found that one could extend the other.
The discovery of cold wax and oil brought those interests together. She exchanged conventional brushes for improvised tools resembling surgical instruments, using them to build, carve, incise, and scrape through layers. Surfaces emerge through a gradual negotiation between construction and removal, revealing variations in texture, transparency, and luminosity.
“When I discovered cold wax and oil, something clicked,” Lamarche explains. “It felt like the convergence of my scientific training, my tactile instincts, and my lifelong curiosity.”
Her process remains exploratory and open-ended. Curiosity determines the direction of a painting more than any fixed plan, allowing materials and accumulated decisions to guide its development. This willingness to experiment keeps each work responsive and unresolved until its final stages.
Lamarche’s paintings also register the emotional conditions surrounding their creation. During periods of political or social turmoil, her gestures and palette shift. Incised lines become expressions of fear, grief, or helplessness, while her final color choices move toward grounding, peace, and hope. The resulting works hold internal and external forces in tension, searching for beauty and solace without denying instability.
Resilience, connection, and transformation recur throughout the work. These themes draw equally from Lamarche’s childhood, her medical career, her relationship with nature, and her effort to locate meaning within complexity. Influences including Mark Rothko, Gerhard Richter, and Helen Frankenthaler encouraged her to trust abstraction, value process, and move beyond traditional expectations.
Her studio practice begins with intention. A meditative pause allows her to become fully present before working, usually in the morning, when she can follow intuition without forcing a predetermined outcome. When a work reaches a natural pause or requires time to dry, she turns to framing, photography, documentation, and administrative responsibilities for the art groups she serves.
When momentum falters, she steps away. Nature, gardens, travel, and encounters with other artists’ work provide a necessary reset, allowing her to return with greater clarity. This rhythm of concentration and withdrawal reflects her broader understanding of creative work as something that cannot always be accelerated.
Some of Lamarche’s most significant experiences have emerged through connection rather than recognition alone. She recalls a young student who said their conversation had inspired her to make art with a social-conscience voice. Having her own work selected for an international exhibition through the Museum of Encaustic Art, and later representing Pennsylvania, offered further affirmation of the direction her practice had taken.
Her current work extends these concerns through two developing bodies of work. The first is a stitched-collage series made from torn original paintings that are rearranged and sewn into new compositions. The process connects her mother’s history as a seamstress with Lamarche’s own surgical past, bringing domestic craft, medical precision, and abstraction into contact. She hopes to collaborate on several pieces with her 94-year-old mother, joining their creative histories through material and process.
A second series considers human connection during a period of deep national division. Through this work, Lamarche attempts to hold space for empathy, complexity, and shared humanity. She is also exploring the possibility of co-curating an exhibition addressing the death penalty with a friend experienced in the field. The project would bring together different artistic voices to expand awareness and sustain a difficult public conversation.
For Lamarche, personal and creative life remain inseparable. The resilience learned during childhood, the precision developed through medicine, the grounding found in nature, and the emotional pressures of contemporary life all enter the work. Her practice does not attempt to reconcile these influences into a single identity. Instead, it allows them to remain visible as interconnected layers.
Her advice to emerging artists follows the same principle: “Stay curious, stay open, and trust the slow unfolding of your own voice. Experiment widely, listen inwardly, and let your life, not trend, shape your work.”
Looking ahead, Lamarche intends to expand her practice through collaboration and continued material investigation. At the center of that development is a clear aspiration: to create work that invites reflection, encourages connection, and remains “alive, honest, and deeply human.”
