Heidi Taillefer

Born in Montreal, Quebec, Heidi Taillefer began drawing at the age of 3 under the encouragement of her mother who is also an artist. During 10 years of private art lessons as a child at the La Palette school of art in Beaurepaire Village, Quebec, she developed skills mainly in watercolor and was strongly influenced by surrealism, combined with general interests in technology and biology. It was by the mid-80s that her work began to take on the markings of an obsession with technological development throughout society, with imagery that reflected a growing hybridization of biology with technology. 

While pursuing a degree in Humanistic Studies at McGill University, her focus was to study the classics, which influences her work to this day as she parlays many mythological and cultural references into my paintings. 

Her work has been collected internationally and has been exhibited in galleries and museum venues in North America while undertaking high-visibility art projects with such companies as the Cirque du Soleil and Infiniti (Canada and Taiwan).

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Heidi Taillefer is influenced by a number of sources, from the natural world and quirky thrift shop objects, to oddities in general and all manner of artistic genres, surrealism to the abstract. She pursues the deeper meaning of things while possessed by a strong sense of humor. She paints mostly about philosophical observations on life which are drawn out of the personal experience, and parlayed into an exploration of more universal issues, although her interests have generally encompassed ideological concerns about the environment and the impact of technology on society. Her work is an original creative fusion of classical figurative painting, surrealism, contemporary realism, and mythology combined with popular figurative traditions ranging from Victorian romanticism to science fiction. It is consonant with some of the early 20th century surrealists such as Max Ernst and Giorgio DeChirico. She paints subjects comprised of seemingly incongruous objects characterized as symbolic, forming a complex composite of various elements and adding a contemporary spin to often classical icons.