About the Artist | Robert M. Deschenes — Canadian Wildlife Artist

Robert M. Deschenes — Wildlife Artist

I paint what most people walk past without seeing.

For over thirty years, I have been observing and painting the wild fauna of Quebec and North America — birds above all. Not from a studio imagination, not from stock images assembled by algorithm. From the field. From early mornings in the Bas-Saint-Laurent forests, from the shores of Lake Grande Fourche, from years of watching how light hits a Peregrine Falcon's back or how a Wild Turkey cock inflates his caruncles in the first warmth of spring.

My medium is acrylic on canvas. My approach is hyperrealist — not as a technical exercise, but because precision is honesty. An animal painted vaguely is an animal dismissed. I paint feather by feather, eye by eye, because the creature in front of me deserves that level of attention.

At a symposium in Quebec, a visitor quietly reached out and touched one of my paintings — Northern Goshawk — to check whether the feathers were sculpted or painted. They were painted. That moment told me more about my work than any jury ever has.

Grounded in the territory

I live and work in Saint-Hubert-de-Rivière-du-Loup, in the KRTB region of the Lower St. Lawrence — one of the most ecologically rich corridors in eastern Canada. The boreal forest, the St. Lawrence Estuary, the wetlands and mixed woodlands of the Bas-Saint-Laurent are not a backdrop to my work. They are its source.

My training was in architecture — structure, proportion, negative space. That discipline never left me. You can see it in the way I compose a canvas: the placement of a bird within its habitat is never accidental.

Conservation through visibility

I do not paint to decorate walls. I paint because most people do not realize what lives beside them. You cannot protect what you have never truly seen. My paintings make the invisible visible.

This conviction led me to become a Signature Member of Artists for Conservation — the highest membership level of the world's leading organization for conservation-focused wildlife art. I hold professional status with the Regroupement des artistes en arts visuels du Québec (RAAV), and I am a member of the Federation of Canadian Artists (FCA) and the International Guild of Realism.

In 2026, I was awarded second prize ex aequo in the Quebec Wildlife Federation (Fondation de la Faune du Québec) stamp art competition — one of the most rigorous wildlife art competitions in Canada.

My work has been featured in Western Art Collector, Art Tour International, and Argentine art publications. I am represented in Quebec by Galerie Josette Tilmant.

Private commissions, corporate acquisitions, and gallery inquiries are welcome.

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