J Fontaine Artist

[Magdalen Dano]

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After completing her BS Degree, Audrey looked into graduate school programs in ceramics, however decided to pursue (and was awarded) a Fellowship at Penland School of Crafts in Penland, North Carolina. This two-year Fellowship allowed her to study under dozens of internationally renowned instructors, each for an average of two-weeks, where she was immersed in their area of expertise. Audrey preferred this approach over studying with one or two instructors for a 2-year period, as would have been the case in a typical graduate degree program.

Penland School of Crafts is located on over 500 acres of land in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The school has approximately 15 studios and Audrey was fortunate to be allowed to work in any of her choosing, which fueled her desire to explore a variety of other fine-craft media. During her Fellowship she studied not only handbuilding and wheel-thrown ceramic sculpture (along with a variety of finishing and kiln firing techniques), but also steel and stone outdoor scale sculpture, woodworking, jewelry and metal working, silk painting, shibori, faux-finish painting, handmade paper sculpting and more.

Some other art centers Audrey has studied at in the past include Arrowmont School of Crafts in Gatlinburg, TN, and the Idyllwild Arts Academy in Idyllwild, CA (where she had the great pleasure of studying under her personal favorite gourd artist, Bill Colligen). Audrey has also taken numerous classes at the Brookfield Craft Center in Brookfield, CT and the Guilford Art Center in Guilford, CT, and worked in the galleries at both of these venues for a period of time. It was at the Brookfield Craft Center where she took her first class in gourd art almost twenty years ago.

Audrey was the manager for the Endleman-Kraus Galleries in New Haven, CT upon her graduation from Southern Connecticut State University, which was an early learning experience and honor. She has been a member of the American Craft Council since 1980, and is currently also a member of the California Gourd Society and the Sebastopol Center for the Arts.

Ms. Fontaine was raised in Waterbury, Connecticut, went to college in New Haven, CT, and lived in Boulder, Colorado for 4 years. A friend from college then invited her to move to Cape Cod, Massachusetts to form a ceramic studio business together. When things didn't work out as planned with the business partnership, Audrey headed to Penland, North Carolina for her two-year Fellowship, after which time she went back to Connecticut for 13 years. She relocated from Connecticut to the Monterey, California area in 2003, and to Sonoma County in 2014, where she is finding much creative inspiration.

Over the years Audrey has experimented with over 25 different craft media including gourds, clay, jewelry and metalworking, wood, fiber, leather, polymer, precious metal clay, mixed-media sculpture and driftwood art. Natural elements often make their way into her work, which tends to be earthy by design. Her gourd art which is inspired by Native American influence incorporates beads, feathers, fibers and found objects. In her more contemporary designs she has been experimenting with color and pattern juxtaposition, creating relationships between positive and negative space. Detailed patterns adorn her vessels, whereas her abstract non-functional forms allow the viewer to develop their own interpretation.

Audrey is also enjoying great success with her beaded jewelry designs which utilize lampworked glass, natural stone and crystal beads along with pure sterling silver or 14 karat gold plated earwires, clasps and chains. Her Ocean Inspired Collection is receiving rave reviews, and is a top seller at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Audrey also has a Garden Collection, Radiance Collection, Black & White Collection and Natural Stone Collection.

Other locations in Sonoma County where her work is displayed include the Made Local Marketplace at 531 5th Street in Santa Rosa (jewelry), Gallery One at 209 Western Avenue in Petaluma (gourd art), and Stones Throw at 15 Charles Street in Cotati (both jewelry and gourd art, along with some mixed-media driftwood Peace Totems and Talking Sticks).

In addition to art, Audrey is passionate about health and the environment. She also works as a Holistic Health Counselor, empowering people on their journey towards optimal health (prevention and reversal of diseases) and their ideal weight. She helps clients achieve this through nutrition (transitioning them to a whole foods plant based diet) and counseling them on creating balance in their lives.

Abstract-colorist painter Paul Emile Fontaine was born in 1913 in Worcester, Massachusetts to Elzear and Mary Fontaine, both of French Canadian descent. Fontaine had two younger brothers, Russell and Leo Fontaine. Paul Fontaine was encouraged to be a painter early on, deciding to pursue this artistic path as a teenager. He enrolled at the Worcester Art Museum School following completion of high school and remained there from 1932 to 1935. Fontaine graduated in 1935 and followed his studies with a six-month term in the Civilian Conservation Corps. In 1936, Fontaine worked as a Works Progress Administration (or Section of Fine Arts, US Treasury) painter in Springfield, Massachusetts, painting murals in the city's Post Office under Umberto Romano.

Following employment as a WPA painter, Fontaine continued his studies at Yale's art school. Francis H. Taylor, director of the Worcester Art Museum, secured a matching grant for Fontaine to engage in further studies at Yale University, the only time the Worcester Art Museum School donated significant funds to a student's career. Fontaine began at Yale in 1938 and graduated among the top of his class in 1940. Fontaine was awarded the Winchester Wirt Traveling Fellowship the same year, but due to wartime exigencies[citation needed], chose instead to study and paint in the Caribbean.

Paul Fontaine married fellow Yale art student Virginia Hammersmith in 1940. Virginia Fontaine was trained as a painter at Yale but did not graduate, and she became a major force in Paul's subsequent creative activities. Virginia was born in 1915 to Paul and Myrtle Hammersmith of Milwaukee, Wisconsin (founders of the Hammersmith Printing Company). Following their marriage, the Fontaines went to the British Virgin Islands, primarily Tortola, on Paul's fellowship.

In 1953, the Fontaines moved to Darmstadt, where Paul became the art director for Stars and Stripes, the Army's European circular. This was his principal source of income until his retirement in 1969 at age 55. The Fontaines' third daughter Claudia was born in Darmstadt in 1956. During this period, Virginia began to focus more on her own work, which included curating and photography. At the request of Gordon Gilkey, the print curator for Oregon State University at Corvallis and former Adjutant General in charge of salvaging looted European art, she curated and procured prints for an exhibition of contemporary German prints in 1963. She was also the translator for the first definitive work on Hans Hartung published by Ottomar Domnick, who was a major collector of contemporary works from that time period.

Paul Fontaine sought a European sojourn as a way to put into practice what he had gleaned from his studies at the Yale Art School, a traveling fellowship (the Winchester Wirt Fellowship) that would have taken him to Paris and to Italy. However, with war breaking out in the 1930s, Fontaine used his fellowship to take himself and Virginia to the Virgin Islands. They lived mostly in Tortola, but also spent time in Puerto Rico, Guana Island, and Virgin Gorda through 1940 and '41. With the conditions posed, it was a source of inspiration for Fontaine's later abstract works.

After this year abroad, the Fontaines returned to the States where they built a studio in Worcester called Rocky Tor. In 1943, Paul was drafted and sent to Italy as an infantryman.[citation needed]

After the war's end, Fontaine began working for the Historical Division as a cartographer in Paris, but a change in position to graphics director found him relocating to Frankfurt, to be joined by Virginia and their young daughter Carol in the winter of 1946.

Fontaine's work of the 1950s and 1960s, a large body of work executed mostly in oil and acrylic, were a break in scale from the war watercolors and works of the 1940s. His meeting of gallerist Lucia Stern in Boston was a turning point, as was an exhibition in Wiesbaden of the paintings of German abstractionists like Willi Baumeister, Otto Ritschl, Erich Heckel, Karlheinz Schmidt-Rotluff and Emile Nolde in 1949. In 1978, the artist explained that "in 1946 I discovered that a picture could be made without literary content. This filled me up with such excitement that up until today it's the only form of painting that still captivates me. The purity of it. Form, color, line, rhythm, without compromise creating the picture. No need to reproduce a scene or tell a tale. What liberation."

Fontaine was, by the mid-1950s, living in Darmstadt, where he also had contact with composers of new music (Karlheinz Stockhausen and Mauricio Kagel would be among these) and practitioners of modern dance and other arts. Crucial in this was his wife, Virginia Fontaine, who was socially well-connected among the area's cultural and artistic circles. She was also instrumental (as was Baumeister) in getting Paul Fontaine to show in galleries and connect with the Darmstdter Sezession (where he was the only American member).

Upon retiring from Stars and Stripes in 1969, the Fontaines moved to Guadalajara, Mexico. Leaving Darmstadt and Europe, writer Robert d'Hooge noted the following in Schlosskeller: "Since he has discovered his problems and his way of translating and expressing those in his paintings, Fontaine has gone without hesitation, his own way. It was always the intrinsic value of color, the improvement in their comparison and contrast, the vision of light and dark that was moving to Fontaine. Now the evolution has arrived at the Stadium of Wisdom, where the sonorous double-sound of two colors creates complete harmony in the smallest space. We do not know how the bright light of Mexico will affect the development of Fontaine's painting. What is a loss for us can be gain for him. We wish this from our hearts."[citation needed]

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