Artist Statement | Robert M. Deschenes — Canadian Wildlife Artist
Artist Statement | Robert M. Deschenes — Canadian Wildlife
I did not choose wildlife painting. It chose me.
In the 1990s, I walked into an exhibition by Quebec painter Jean-Luc Grondin and something shifted permanently. I had been drawing and observing birds since childhood, spending hours in the forests and wetlands of the Lower St. Lawrence. That day, I understood that what I had been accumulating in the field — thirty years of early mornings, of patience, of watching how light lands differently on a Peregrine Falcon in August than in November — had a place on canvas.
My medium is acrylic on canvas. My approach is hyperrealist, rooted in rigorous naturalist observation. I do not paint from imagination, and I do not copy photographs. I paint from knowledge — from field notes, from years of watching behaviour, from understanding anatomy, habitat, and the specific quality of light in a boreal forest at dusk. Each composition is original. Each work is built layer by layer, sometimes over weeks, until the surface holds what I saw in the field.
I trained in architecture at the Collège de Rimouski. That discipline gave me something most painters have to learn the hard way: the understanding that negative space is not empty, that structure determines everything, that a composition either holds or it collapses. I apply that logic to every canvas.
My subjects are wild fauna — birds above all, but also mammals and coastal wildlife of North America and beyond. I am drawn to species that most people overlook: the White-throated Sparrow, the American Mink, the Black Scoter riding a January swell on the St. Lawrence. The iconic species matter too, but I am more interested in making the ordinary extraordinary than in celebrating what is already celebrated.
At a symposium, a visitor reached out and touched one of my paintings — Northern Goshawk — to verify that the feathers were painted and not sculpted. They were painted. That moment is the clearest measure of what I am trying to do.
I paint because most people do not see what lives beside them. You cannot protect what you have never truly noticed. My work is an act of attention — and an invitation to pay the same.
Robert M. Deschenes Signature Member, Artists for Conservation Professional Member, RAAV — Regroupement des artistes en arts visuels du Québec Member, Federation of Canadian Artists Member, International Guild of Realism Saint-Hubert-de-Rivière-du-Loup, Québec, Canada rmdartiste.com