Abstract painting is usually thought of as a fairly sterile affair, a flirtation with transcendence. Marie Le Lievre’s work, on the other hand, is a deeply personal peeling back and layering on of emotion. This layering and overlapping also describes the paintings themselves. Their retinal machinery depends on the interplay of what the artist chooses to hide beneath pools of poured dark paint, and what she chooses to reveal around the edges.

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The making is often a taxing physical process for Le Lievre, which involves pouring slips of translucent oil paint on the canvas as it lies flat on the floor, and then, on hands and knees, working it with rubber-gloved hands. The paint spreads out, mingles, and dries to a delicate craquelure or thick shiny skin. What the paint wants to do is not always what the artist wants it to do, but that’s part of the process. Often the kind of painting produced depends on the weather, temperature and season.

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Sometimes Le Lievre augments these amorphous blobs with fine scaffoldings of drawn lines that bristle like hairs or allude to writing in an illegible script. Like a black hole, any information that escapes the surface of the canvas is somehow incomplete. Le Lievre’s paintings are open and raw, but never give everything away for free. “All my work is informed by consideration of formal values of painting such as composition, colour, tone,” she explains. “I make the paintings the way I do to allow the paint to have a say, to let a feeling of uncontrol in the work that liquid paint merging makes.”

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Le Lievre was born in Te Whanganui-a-Tara and studied criminology and education at Victoria University of Wellington before embarking on a career as an artist. That background probably explains her interest in the mind and its mysterious processes. “That partly comes from my interest in expressing the chaotic or fearful or unmanageable aspects of ourselves and our attempts to control that, which feeds into my art,” she says. “I’ve always been an artist.”

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Along the way came a marriage, her son and daughter, divorce, and a commitment to spiritual growth. You don’t get through all that without acquiring a gift for introspection. “I was a creative child and took art at school, however I focussed on making art after my marriage breakdown. Painting has always been my main method of artistic expression because of its seemingly endless ability to experiment, layer and create visual forms that have depth.”

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The big OE is often a good opportunity to open up to new experiences and find yourself. After Wellington, Le Lievre gave in to the allure of overseas, travelling, living and working in the UK, Israel and Argentina. In Argentina she became fascinated by the vibrantly baroque flavour of Latin American Roman Catholicism, which made her own Catholic upbringing and education back home seem a little anaemic. This led to an interest in the way the mystical and ritual intertwine with daily life. Le Lievre remains fascinated with religions and belief systems, relics and reliquaries, prayer, meditation, superstition, magic and luck, and the ways they blur between the personal, subjective experience and public, objective reality.

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“My spiritual practices,” says the artist, “are a vital part of my wellbeing. They help me understand my fears and to forgive myself and others for being imperfect. One day at a time. I’m not given to a specific tradition. I take what feels right and what I need to learn. I have spiritual teachers and many of them are my friends and whānau, especially my children. It’s a community and it’s a two-way street. We nurture each other at different times, without even knowing it mostly.”

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On her return to Aotearoa, Le Lievre enrolled at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts in Ōtautahi Christchurch, gaining her Master of Fine Arts in 2008. “I decided to focus on an art career and to put my artistic work first,” she says. “I’ve always loved the journey of painting and its parallels with the unpredictable and making good aspects of life. I’ve always loved abstract expressionism and colour field because of its ability to elicit feeling. The recovery of feeling and belonging and connection inspired me to be a painter. I was reintegrating myself through painting.”

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Maybe that’s all part of the hypnotic magic of the paintings. There is a therapeutic aspect to them, both in their making and in experiencing them. It speaks to something in the struggles of the heart and the plasticity of the brain. Silicon Valley tech bros bore on about uploading human consciousness into the cloud or swapping memories around like collectables, when maybe we really should be more interested in how art already does that. Painting is the first virtual reality. Art is the closest we’ve come to telepathy, to transmitting inner states across space with any sort of accuracy.

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“For me,” says Le Lievre, “artmaking is creating and inventing from a place of curiosity. It can give a great sense of wonder and also anxiety. I wish it was a kind of therapy, but it exists as income too, and it’s driven by a desire to invent or embrace new happenings and creations. It’s therapeutic in the sense that I feel I’m being true to myself, and satisfying in the offering of a unique visual experience to others.”

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Since her graduation, private collectors in the know have been steadily acquiring Le Lievre’s work, and her paintings can be found in the collections of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū and The Fletcher Trust in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. She shows regularly in New Zealand and has been exhibited in Australia, Japan and France. She is represented in Christchurch by Jonathan Smart Gallery and in Auckland by Two Rooms.

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In recent years, the artist has moved away from the large, obscuring opaque lakes that frequently dominated her canvases. The fragile, flamelike aurorae of colour that used to flicker around their edges are now coming to the fore. Her recent solo show at Two Rooms, Loot isms, was a revelation of delicately bleeding forms. The more colourful work developed in summer heat. The leavening darkness is still there in paintings produced in the colder autumn nights.
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“Perhaps,” she says, “the colour is a focus on letting things come and letting fear go. I also feel that the use of more colour is an antidote to what’s happening in the world in general.”