Women Artists We Love ❤️ Natalie Lamotte
About Natalie
Natalie Lamotte (b. 1964, France) is a painter living and working in Vitry-sur-Seine. For several years, Lamotte has chosen to present a more engaged pictorial vision that affirms femininity, exploring its sensitivity and its relationship to intimacy and the world. Through painting, she aims to express emotion, feeling, and sensitivity to the organic, mineral, and vegetal world that resides in every being, especially women.
Her work speaks of femininity and the entirety of women's bodies. It explores forms, techniques, and performances that suggest the female body and its social context in intimacy, physical space, history, and society.
Can you tell us about your works and how they reflect a certain point of view on femininity or feminism?
For several years, I have given a new dimension to my work, to my commitment as a woman and painter, with a more political approach in affirming the feminine, the history, and the place of women in our society.
In addition to the lack of transmission of our history as women, there is also a lack of understanding of our intimacies and emotions. Through painting, I want to position myself in this space: emotion, feeling, sensitivity to the organic, vegetal, and mineral world that inhabits every being.
My painting bridges all the moments in a woman's life, of all women, from all eras, my sisters. It also represents their place in the present world. It speaks of the feminine and the female body in its entirety, exploring forms, techniques, and performances that show the bodies of women in their intimacy and in physical space, in history, and in society.
The choice of the color RED became evident to me as the color of the strength of life, the strength of women, all those who, through the centuries, have fought for their freedom and emancipation. Red, as a universal, timeless, and symbolic link, without borders between us all. My compositions are opaque or transparent, deep or light, heavy or airy, evoking organic, sometimes sensual, vegetal, or mineral forms. They are always connected to the world of the living.
It is a painting that expresses energy, breath, spontaneity, contemplation, patience, resilience, and the incredible strength of girls, women, sisters, mothers: our sisterhood. These red forms, enclosed in the frame of the stretcher and free on the canvas, are not figures but evocations, portraits or self-portraits, soft or violent, dense or airy, emancipated or constrained.
All these forms together are Us, the Sisters.
What message would you like to convey to women around the world in honor of International Women’s Day?
I would like to echo the slogan of Iranian women: Women, Life, Freedom, which honors all our sisters and gives hope to all feminist struggles. Despite current events that do not respect freedoms and end domination, progress is being made, the cause of women is moving forward. Everywhere, women continue to fight for their rights, and have done so since the dawn of time. But they are often alone. So, I would like to address men, inviting them to join the struggles of their mothers, companions, sisters, and daughters. With them, everything will go much faster, and the world will be better for it.
Are there any female artists who have inspired you in your artistic creation?
Because female artists were made invisible, I started painting by looking at male artists—Matisse, Monet, Rothko, Hockney, Knifer, Giotto, Fra Angelico, and dozens of others. At the beginning of my career, I greatly admired American abstract expressionists and painters from the Quattrocento. I admired some for their strength, freedom, and monumentality, and others for their finesse, the boldness of their compositions, and the beauty of their colors. Seeing one of their works in a museum still moves me.
Then, one day, I discovered women whose works were rarely seen: Camille Claudel, Louise Bourgeois, Georgia O’Keeffe, Niki de Saint Phalle, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell… Their strength and will to create in an exclusively male world have always inspired and motivated me. In recent years, we have seen more and more women artists with immense talent, and thanks to the work of the AWARE website, we can rediscover many older women artists who have hardly ever been shown in museums until now.
Every woman who struggles or creates can claim this phrase by Rosa Parks:“You must never be fearful about what you are doing when it is right.”
Our top selection of Natalie's works
