France Jodoin is primarily an oil painter who also sketches, works with watercolours and creates prints in sugar lift and aquatint. While her subjects include seascapes and landscapes, peopled beach scenes, harbours, boats both moored and on the water, as well as flowers, birds, apes, monkeys and gorillas, her deft, gestural handling of paint renders these with a distinct and contemporary sense of presence. Her declared interest is “the very brevity of life itself,” and to that could be added an abiding concern with Otherness. Other places, other times, other people, even other species, all are watched over with care and intimacy in her works. She achieves this timely presence of the Other by treating paint, this fluid medium, as an elemental force driving her narratives in which mere depiction defers to an atmospheric quality that invites the eye to linger and into which the viewer then becomes enmeshed, implicated. When her works delve into history, it is as a perspective with which this presence of the Other can best be awoken, and to create a mise-en-scène in such a way that the contemporary viewer may construct their own particular signs and stories from the layered marks, washes, wipes and drips on the canvas. In her own words, “The fundamental impulse animating my creative process is to esteem time passing.” France Jodoin has been exhibiting in galleries and museums in Canada, the United States and Europe for the past fifteen years.