Booooooom! Artist Spotlight →

A selection of recent work by Métis artist Jean Paul Langlois(previously featured here). Known for using ultra-saturated colours and pop culture motifs as a way of grappling with a sense of alienation from his own cultural backgrounds — both indigenous and settler — Langlois’s latest paintings mark a slight shift away from his previous focus on storytelling and family history. As he shared with us:

“I’ve been focused more on landscapes (I did a cross country plein air painting tour last fall). Interestingly enough, all kinds of stuff comes up when painting landscapes, there’s content and stories that I’m not even aware of until I’m done. In the words of Richard Mayhew, ‘Landscape has no space, no identity. It allows the painting to be about emotion.'”

Jean Paul Langlois is one of the 50 artists featured in our latest art book, Quiet. See more images below and check out the book in our shop!

Opus Visual Podcast: Cultivating Creativity: Final Presentation Part One

We're exploring the final stages of the creative process with artists Janna Yotte, Jean Paul Langlois and Nicholas Tay, and artist consultant Pennylane Shen.

Alberta Native News - Feature artist for September 2020: Jean-Paul Langlois

By Laura Mushumanski

(ANNews) – The vibrant image on the cover of this month’s Alberta Native News is titled ‘Resignation’ and it is the creation of Jean-Paul Langlois, a gifted Metis contemporary artist from Vancouver Island. It is from a series by Langlois – “Escape from the White Witches: The Graduation of Eli,” which is the story of his grandfather Eli’s time in Indian Residential Schools.

The robust colors of yellow, blue, green, pink, purple, red, and orange are used in the cover image as well as in other signature pieces by Langlois. A second painting from the Escape from the White Witches series appears on this page, titled ‘Barn Burning’, that depicts the story of Eli’s life journey before he met Langlois’s grandmother- when Eli was sold into indentured servitude.

Langlois resides on the mainland in East Vancouver, British Columbia. And just like any of us Indigenous misfits, Langlois’s Metis roots were severed when his grandfather was sent away to an Indian Residential School in Northern Alberta.

Langlois did not grow up learning about his Metis culture, but instead he was gifted with being able to tell stories through art – and would later learn the importance of art through an Indigenous lens. Langlois started cartooning at the age of three and slowly progressed into finding his own painting style, crediting his mentors that allowed him to succeed and flourish as an artist, and in Langlois’s words, “if you don’t have someone to guide you, you will be lost.”

At the age of 16, Langlois was trained in the use of watercolors that became one of many implements contributing to how he depicts his perception of Indigenous people. As he progressed in his ways of storytelling, acrylic paints helped emphasize his love for using robust and vibrant colors. Throughout Langlois’s art journey, he has been highly influenced by the beauty and violence of spaghetti western films that symbolized for him the story of colonization, as well as the first movie he fell in love with, The Wizard of Oz, “the movie that has it all”- beauty, violence, darkness, rubbish, fantasy and color.

The story of colonization within Langlois’s family tree is told in the Escape from the White Witches series, where Jean-Paul’s grandfather Eli, did not share much about his experience, other than to say that the nuns were cruel. Instead, he imparted a Langlois family legend. The family legend shared was that grandfather Eli was sent to a farm to work after his ‘graduation’ from his time at the Indian Residential School, and as seen in the art piece ‘Barn Burning’, one day on the farm where Eli worked, the barn caught fire.

The Langlois family legend taken from ‘Barn Burning’ also tells the story that when asked if Eli was responsible for lighting the barn on fire, Eli played dumb, shrugged and said, ‘I don’t know.’ That same day, Eli was released from the farm and went on to homestead land in Northern Alberta where he met Langlois’s grandmother and together they had six children.

Langlois interconnects his love of colour, the family legend and the use of dramatization taken from spaghetti westerns that he has been watching since childhood to tell the story of ‘Resignation.’ It is about both becoming resigned to the decision to start the fire as well as receiving a notice of resignation. The story being told, in that moment, is that Eli had made the decision to lash out and get revenge for all ills done to him by both the nuns and his ‘masters’ – so the Langlois family legend says.

Langlois’s artwork can be found on his website jeanpaullanglois.ca and other social media. Within the City of Edmonton, his most recent building mural, ‘The Conversation’, can be found on the sidewall of Second Skin Laser located at 6551 111 St.

Edmonton Journal - Métis muralist Jean Paul Langlois brings The Conversation to Parkallen

by Fish Griwkowsky

Jean Paul Langlois is smiling in shades as he moves in on the finishing hours of his latest mural, a sparkling, two-storey impressionistic posed figure painting in Parkallen.

“I’ve been swimming in the North Saskatchewan River when it gets too hot,” he laughs. “People have been telling me I’m crazy, but it’s a great way to cool off. Think I’ll head there this afternoon …”

Over the last few weeks of heat and storms, with frequent visits from neighbourhood cats, the Vancouver-based Métis artist has brought his distinct and colourful style, which looks a little like something seen through a distorted reflection — and not improperly so.

There’s a wink in the way he portrays Indigenous life, intentionally borrowed from Hollywood — but in a way that’s certainly no stranger to historical art (including mural art) either: a kind of set-up-for-the-camera ideal Langlois is playing with very much on purpose, a sort of geological strata of appropriation.

“I guess you could say it’s a scene from an imaginary Western,” he explains, begging the question of what a ‘real’ Western might entail. But: “All of my work is appropriated,” he says, “usually from films and art history.”

On its own, The Conversation, as he’s named the wall, is meant to spark ideas and imagination — but also be just plain sweet to look at, which it is, a fine addition to the neighbourhood.

It’s been a busy couple weeks for new murals in this reopening city. AJA Louden and Evan Rast’s illustrated hip-hop lyrics went up front onto the dead Army & Navy, while Pete Nguyen’s beer-guzzling skull now sits on The Commercial three storeys tall. And this year’s Rust Magic International Street Mural Festival — happening but “low key,” according to co-founder Annaliza Toledo — hasn’t even begun yet!

Back to The Conversation, Langlois talks about how it all came to happen, part of a quest to find out who he is, it turns out.

Q: How did this mural come about?

A: I met Ben (Alway) from Second Skin Laser in Victoria, he’s been a patron for a few years. I stopped in to visit him last time I was in Edmonton and he had just painted his building this crazy magenta. I joked that we could put a mural up there and here we are, just over a year later, putting a mural up there.

Q: Who are we seeing in it, where do you picture them?

A: It isn’t really depictions of cowboys and Indigenous figures — this isn’t well-researched Cree and Blackfoot regalia — it’s actors in red face and what Hollywood called the ‘prairie indian kit.’ The images are taken from Western TV and films. There’s also an element borrowed from a Frederick Remington painting. It’s a Black cowboy and Indian exchanging words. So maybe that’s famous John Ware having a discussion with Poundmaker or something … (but) it’s nothing rooted in history. Hopefully it gives people an opportunity to discuss and make up their own story.

Q: You’ve gone on a bit of a journey exploring your own roots …

A: Both my parents were born here. My grandad went to Residential School in Alberta. Last year I did a pilgrimage to Valleyview, Watino and Grourard to reconnect with the Indigenous side of my family and hear some stories. My cousin still lives on the land his father homesteaded, and raises Tennessee walking horses. A colt was born while I was there. I also went to Lacombe to visit my mom’s Waspy family, the Cambells — it’s quite the dichotomy. It was a great trip. I rode the train from Vancouver and stayed at the Hotel MacDonald the first night. Apparently my uncle had his wedding there in the ’60s…

Q: How did you get into painting, I dig your shimmering style.

A: Thank you. Colour is my thing. I’ve been at it my whole life. I started getting more attention after moving from Cowichan to East Van in 2015. Now I have a few galleries and I’m part of the VAG (Vancouver Art Gallery) art rental and sales program. I have to give credit to the good people at Vancouver Mural Festival for selecting me in 2018 and teaching me mural painting. I always painted big, but this is a whole other thing. It’s closer to house painting than fine art, but it’s been fun doing one or two a year.

Q: Talk about your days in Victoria’s music scene — you were a singer, right?

A: (Laughs.) Long time ago. I was in an obnoxious noise band called Hump. Our only claim to fame was opening for Ween and getting the club shut down after peeing on stage. Everyone in Vancouver hated us. In Victoria we were boycotted from everywhere, even college radio. Then in the 2000s my day/night job was DJing as djplan. I wanted to play raves, but wound up playing grad parties and horrible nightclubs instead. I’ve DJ’d over a hundred weddings. I hate weddings. I’m a lot happier painting full time, I assure you…

fgriwkowsky@postmedia.com

@fisheyefoto

Art Connects | The Joy of Painting with Jean Paul Langlois

In this special instructional edition of Art Connects, artist Jean Paul Langlois demonstrated his painting process for us live! After a brief introduction to his work with Art Rental & Sales Manager Zoe Mackoff de Miranda,

Nelson Star - VIDEO: A Nelson mural about displacement

by Bill Metcalfe

Jean Paul Langlois is an artist of Métis descent from Vancouver. He’s working on a piece for the Nelson International Mural Festival in the alley on the back of the Cowan’s Office Supplies building. See photos and video below.

He told the Star he often works from movies and television, and this mural is based on three movies he’d just watched when the mural festival approached him.

“One is Heaven’s Gate, a western about immigrants being forced out of a town by wealthy land barons. The other was Cheyenne Autumn, a John Ford film about the Cheyenne being forced from their traditional grounds and sent to the reserves, and a lot of them dying.

“The third was I Will Fight No more Forever, the story of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce escaping to Canada when they were taken away from their traditional lands.

“So it is the idea of displacement and eviction, and I knew there were two sections to the wall so I wanted to do it as a diptych, so one side may be very specifically Western looking, so this the evictors or the muscle that is evicting people. The other side will be a bit more vague and playful although it is people being evicted. They are a little bit alien looking and morphed. It is a community mural so you can kind of put your own meaning to it.”

Langlois said he started creating murals quite recently.

“I am primarily a painter and got interested in it as a teenager so it has been three decades of painting. I work big, normally, and last year I was elected for the Vancouver Mural Festival and that is when I started doing murals. So I am new to this but it is basically the same thing as painting, it’s just brick instead of canvas.”

He said he’s enjoying his time in the alley behind Cowan’s and has received good public reaction.

“It’s been positive. I have met some local colour while hanging out in this alley too, but everyone has been supportive.”

The Star will be visiting Langlois again next week, to track his progress on the mural.

New art at The Kube

A little press coverage from the Coast Reporter for the exhibition at The Kube in Gibsons.

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Vandcouver Mural Festival Alumni: Jean-Paul Langlois

-What was your experience with VMF like? (challenges, surprises, memories):

It was a great experience. I made lots of friends, really enjoyed having the super talented (and delightful) Sarah Khan as a neighbour. Painting in public is actually fun. You meet interesting folks, there was a crew of homeless that always partied around the corner. They were easy to get along with once we got them to stop peeing on my wall….

-What did you learn about yourself?

I prefer going to the beach over standing in front of a white stucco wall when its thirty degrees out. If it wasn’t for my friend Benoits work ethic and guilting me into sticking around I’m not sure the wall would have been finished in time. 

-Any rituals to get yourself amped up or in the zone while you work?

Always music. Classical in the morning, then hip hop or house or something weird as the day wears on. For mural painting I like to have my van with a little shelter and chairs and a cooler full of beer. Friends come by to help, although half of them just hinder….so its good to have a place for them to sit and heckle you.

-What's your go-to painting outfit?

Im the worst, I collect t-shirts and track suits and hats and usually wreck them with paint splotches within the first week. I should probably pay more attention to what I wear in the studio…

-What are some of your favourite pieces you've worked on since VMF?

I’m pretty excited about the series I did about my Grandfathers experience in residential school. “Escape From The White Witches-The Graduation of Eli”. Its some of my best work. 

-Any advice to 2020 VMF artists?

Get a canopy and a cooler full of beer. Enlist friends. Hope for a wall that isn’t in the sun all day…

-Any other arts festivals you've painted for/attended?

Paintillio did a collaboration with me for Pride at the VAG. That was cool….those girls are great to work with.

I did the Nelson International Mural Festival this summer. It was awesome. I took Fred(my dog). For the first week we lived in an alley in my van like a homeless and then the organizers hooked me up a beautiful luxurious cabin in the woods. Its a great little town, I’d never been. Theres so many cool people, good restaurants. Plus we could walk down to the lake for swims multiple times each day….which was neccesary considering it was so hot my paint trays melted.

-Future goals/aspirations/sweet projects you want to be a part of?

Doing Houstons HUE Festival in 2021. Im currently designing a 10x60 foot wall for Mozart Park in Chicago. I’ll go down and do the outlines in the spring and their Youth Mural Group is going to do all the color work. Im pretty stoked. 

-If you could get a piece on any surface in the world where would it be?

Geez, good question. Somewhere bland and depressing with great sight lines where the patron has a lot of money to pay me? 

-Favourite local and international artist? 

Local:

 Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun. His totally unique style, use of colour and attitude are a real inspiration. 

Andy Dixon, before watching his meteoric rise to fame I didn’t know artists could make a living just painting. He just gets bigger and better. 

Sandeep Johal, the hardest working artist in Vancouver. So talented, a real freedom fighter. Its great to see her taking over the world. 

International:

Kara Walker. I saw a show at the New Orleans Museum of Art years ago and it really stuck with me. . Its amazing just how much she communicates with just silhouettes…

Richard Prince. He’s just the best. From the biker chicks and Marlboro Man stuff to his Nurse paintings. A true innovator. Maybe my all time favorite. 

Theres so many more. Eric Fischl, Henry Darger, El Greco, Frederic Remington,Walt Disney….I could go on for days….

collater.al - Artist Feature

Featured on www.collater.al

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BOOOOOOOM.com - Artist Spotlight

Featured in the Artist Spotlight on BOOOOOOOM.com

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AN INTERVIEW FROM THE WORLD PEOPLE PROJECT: JEAN PAUL LANGLOIS

My mom claims I’m named after Jean Paul Sartre but I suspect I’m named after the Beatles. Apparently my Dad thought it was stupid since no one in his family had spoken French since the 1600s. He said we might as well name me “Chicoutimi Bob”.

Artist, DJ, Film Technician

Age: Born in 1971

Provenance: Born in Victoria, went to college in Nanaimo, bought a house in Lake Cowichan, all places on Vancouver Island. Lived in Toronto for a bit…

How long have you lived in Vancouver? I’ve lived here just over three years, but being from the island this was the nearest REAL city so I’ve spent half my life here, playing in bands, having art shows, DJ-ing, partying and working and hanging out with friends.

Occupations: I have always been an artist but it wasn’t much of a living until I moved to Vancouver. I grew up just down the road from Butchart Gardens in beautiful Brentwood Bay, which seemed like the most boring place in Canada. As a young teen I fell in love with punk. Not just the music, the culture, everything. So much so that I quit school, left home and spent my days and nights hanging out at Victoria’s “Piss Alley” drinking, panhandling, and sniffing glue. I had a double mohawk, ripped clothes, anarchy symbols, combat boots. The full cliché. Of course, that lifestyle doesn’t lend itself to magnificent careers – at least not way back in 1985. Luckily I got involved in the music scene and playing in bands. Most of them didn’t amount to much. The only real notable one was HUMP. Our claim to fame was opening for WEEN and getting the club shut down for peeing on the audience. After that I started to grow up a bit. I went to art school and had a few careers of varying success – dope growing, wedding DJ and the film industry. I still have my union membership in the grip department and work once in a while. Although it’s gruelling and a bit mundane, it can be worth it just for the camaraderie. It’s cool hearing the old guys telling stories of brushes with celebrities and on- set cocaine abuse. Now I spend most days painting and make a modest living. There are a few galleries that sell my work and some loyal patrons who give me commissions. I work in my home studio in Mount Pleasant. It’s a ghetto building with a nice view. It’s owned by notorious slumlords so it might catch fire or completely fall to pieces any minute but it’s cheap and its home. I listen to spaghetti western soundtracks or put on cartoons or an old episode Bonanza while I work. I find a lot of inspiration in that kind of stuff. Most of my work is inspired by cinema and the western genre. My next show is titled East meets West and it’s at Stockyards Gallery in Toronto.

Passions and Interests I’m pretty good at leisure – vacations, socializing, partying, eating out or hosting a night at my place, hanging out at the beach, nightclub or after-hours establishments and visiting friends. I’m good at friendship (I hope my friends agree). Taking care of my immediate family which really only consists of my girlfriend, my dog and my mom. I also love literature, and read a lot: William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy and Philip K. Dick. Most of my wall space is dedicated to books and records. I also have a lot of coffee table books on art and film. It’s satisfying to have reference material you can touch and smell close at hand.

What do people know you for? Being charming obviously. Different scenes know me for different things. I am getting some recognition in the art community, I work hard as an artist, painting everyday, show my work a lot and go to art openings when I can. Whole swaths of people know me from the punk scene and/or rave scene. At the dog park everyone knows me as the owner of my handsome dog Frederick. At the public pool, I am known as the guy who reads in the sauna and shushes people.

Thoughts on Vancouver? Vancouver means civilization to me, especially compared to Vancouver Island. While it’s certainly not as cosmopolitan as Toronto or NYC, it’s still pretty cool. Some of the things I like about Vancouver – East Van, Mount Pleasant, old ladies doing tai chi in Queen Elizabeth Park, going swimming at the Kits Dog beach or Lynn Canyon. . It’s small enough so you can get to know everybody in your neighbourhood pretty quickly and still big enough to have actual city culture. Decent music venues and party spots: The Commodore, The Vogue, The Fox (although they really should have just kept playing porno movies), VAL and Open Studios. I like the street culture, junkies selling their weird garbage down in Gastown, graffiti on trains and tags in the streets. The fact that the main pollution you smell is actually weed smoke and the crows that commute from Burnaby and back everyday. That still trips me out…. What I don’t like: skunks, the Lululemon people, black Audis and Mercedes, hipsters slacklining in public, the putridness of Trout Lake. But whatever, there’s not much to complain about except the cost of living here. 

Conversation by Tallulah
February 2017, Vancouver
Published November 2017

INTERVIEW FOR STOCKYARDS GALLERY

In one paragraph, who are you?

My name is Jean Paul Langlois. I am an artist of Metis descent but I have almost no connections to my culture or heritage. I grew up on Vancouver Island but currently live and paint in East Vancouver. I'm also sometimes known as DJPLAN. Although I rarely play music in public these days I still collect records and go out to shows and parties as much as possible. I’m actually a very private and sensitive person and value my solitude but some  people only know my public persona which can be a bit loud and caustic….
 

How did you become an artist ?

I’ve been drawing as long as I can remember and started painting watercolours when I was a young teen. Early on I was inspired by Mad and Heavy Metal Magazine. I loved Moebius and Sergio Argones. The cheesy sword and sorcery oil paintings of Frank Frazetta.

When I was a teen my Mom, bless her heart, thought she was giving me a great art education by buying these dusty old coffee table books at garage sales. A lot of Cezanne, Gaugin and Impressionists. Really boring Canadiana: Lawren Harris or Robert Bateman. I thought these were the only painters in the world. There were no real art galleries to visit growing up on Vancouver Island. West Coast watercolour landscapes at tourist shops were what I grew up on….

So obviously Art History at College was a revelation. Learning about all the major movements in the 20th century blew my mind. And seeing artists like Francis Bacon or Mark Rothko for the first time was life altering. I really connected with Eric Fischl and was influenced by his brush style and subject matter. In art school I felt shock value was important, so attempting to deal with themes like sexual violence and drug abuse (in the most ham handed and inarticulate ways) got me kicked out. Of not one, but two art schools on Vancouver Island.

These days some of the artists who have the most direct influence on my practice include Richard Prince. His appropriation and reinvention of cowboy images speak to me but I love his humor and ‘don’t give a fuck’ attitude. His concepts are clever but he’s also an excellent painter and hard worker.

I’m obsessed with Henry Darger, the outsider artist who secretly wrote the longest novel in history and illustrated most of it using a completely innovative style of appropriation. Because of a lack of confidence in his ability to draw freehand he would trace and collage. Taking images from comics, colouring books and catalogues to create fantastical landscapes and portraits of beauty and horror. His story is quite moving. His work is lovely but disturbing. I find the technique of combining opposing elements from pop culture to create alternative narratives a useful tool. Of course he never considered what he was doing, he just did what he had to…

I love the photography of Edward Curtis. The posed portraits or documentation shots of indigenous peoples in N. America at the end of an era…some of it is exploititive and staged for shock value but most of it is dignified and honest. Its moving to see an image of a Blackfoot on a horse and think that's how my ancestor lived…I think you can see his influence in my Fake Indians and Planet of the Apes portraits.