Getting her first solo show at age 99
Montreal artist Sonja Lasalle Hugonnier de Ginet gets her first solo show — at age 99
Pastel artist Sonja Lasalle Hugonnier de Ginet has painted and drawn for most of her life, been in group shows and won prizes and awards — but she is only now having her first solo exhibition.
At 99.
She will attend the vernissage at the Espace Mushagalusa on Friday evening.
“It is a celebration of her life; I think she deserves a bit of recognition,” said her daughter Monique de Ginet. She frequently looks in on her mother, who lives autonomously. An older daughter lives in Europe.
Sonja Lasalle was born in 1919 in London and started to draw and paint as an adolescent. “It was the beginning of a sort of passion that lasted my entire life.”
“I painted first in oil but, when the girls were small, it was too complicated to work in oil and (difficult) to clean and so I decided to try pastel and that’s how I started,” she told the Montreal Gazette.
She draws “whenever I am in the mood — and the mood is often there.”
These days she works in a seated position, on the floor. The circulation in her legs is poor and she is most comfortable that way.
One recent day, “I had my pastels strewn around and I started at 10 in the morning and then it was 6 o’clock in the evening and I had been so involved in what I was doing that I had no lunch and no dinner.”
Observed her daughter: “She is very talented — and I am not saying it because she is my mother. There is so much light and movement in her work.”
In 2010, Hugonnier de Ginet, who often uses nature as a source of inspiration, took first prize
in an exhibition of the Société de Pastel de l’Est du Canada; in 2012 she won another prize from the society.
She grew up wanting to be a fashion designer. “I was told that to do fashion design, I had to do good drawings of the human figure,” she said. “So I went to the Slade School of Fine Art in London. And then the war started.”
During the Second World War, she joined the Free French Forces, the government-in-exile led by Charles de Gaulle after the fall of France in 1940, and worked as a cartographer.
Her mother was French, “and I feel more French than anything,” she said. “When France fell, I thought it was the end of the world.”
At a reception for de Gaulle, she met the man she would marry: Roger Hugonnier de Ginet, who was active in the resistance. It was love at first sight — a “coup de foudre.”
They immigrated to Canada in 1947 and settled in Montreal. Said Monique: “They were really connected; he was the love of her life.”
His death in 1996 was devastating. In time, though, she returned to her pastels.
A fall in June landed her in hospital for eight weeks, but she rallied. As Monique observed, “She is a very resilient lady.”