Nadège Marneffe
Nadège Marneffe
Lives and works in Meudon, Paris, France.
Nadège Marneffe is a French artist born in Eastern France, in a region famous for its Art Nouveau tradition. She gets her love of gardens from her father, and her mother inspired her to explore needlework and embroidery.
A graduate in art and architecture, Nadège started as a teacher. She then became an entrepreneur in the textile industry, never ceasing to paint and draw on a variety of mediums, and taking part in various fairs and collective exhibitions.
In 2020, after a lot of self-questioning, Nadège decides to develop her painting work and joins a shared atelier on the outskirts of Paris, where she lives with her husband and daughter.
Nadège a has a long tradition of traveling in the UK, from the wild beauty of Scotland to the magnificent Kew gardens that gave her a new inspiration, helping her to develop the poetic take of her art where colour plays a prominent role.
In 2023, after visiting Kew Gardens, she launches a series inspired by this extraordinary place that she contemplates with a slightly offbeat, romantic twist, as a dialogue between the classic architecture of the translucid glass canopy and the sumptuous giant leaves.
An amateur and enthusiastic naturalist, Nadège finds through walking, observation, literature, and nature-writing the sense of being in communion with the living world, source of her creations.
She sees the painting phase as a suspended time when the preparatory part of the work gives way to colour, freedom, energy, and spontaneity of the brushstrokes.
Nadège defines herself as a “colourist”, all media combined: colour is her way to connect with living beings, near or far, and to re-enchant our relationship to them.
Nadège’s work draws upon traditional techniques to respond to a contemporary inspiration fuelled by her regular travels to the UK.
However, Nadège does not see herself as a landscape painter. Or if she is one, it is not from behind a window but from the outside, from the point of view of a naturalist always ready to be blown away by the unexpected vision of a lynx or an owl. Joy, love, empathy, respect, fascination, reverence.
Because what truly matters is the life in a landscape, or in a glasshouse. The life piercing through, springing up, twinkling, hanging on and showing beautiful strength.
