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Agnès Toulouse was born in Limoges, France. Her love of art developed at a young age as she observed her grandfather, an accomplished watercolorist, paint every corner of her childhood garden. Here she had her first lesson in harmony and contemplation.
Nevertheless Agnès felt a call for the humanitarian world and she joined "Medecins sans Frontiere" in 1988 to work as a tropical nurse in a refugee camp in Zambia, then South Africa where she witnessed the liberation of Nelson Mandela in 1990.
In 1995, after several years spent in the Ivory Coast and Nigeria, she settled down with her husband and three children in the DC area. She resurrected then her love of art and resumed her painting. Her nostalgia for her native France drives her passion to paint the pastoral scenes of the French countryside.
Artist Statement:
"I would watch him (my grandfather), quietly smoking his pipe sitting on a round stool facing his easel…this was a painting in itself. Everything seemed to disappear around him; the art would transcend the insurmountable, would chase away the trauma of two wars and the irreparable loss of a child and a wife. Here I realized that art was not only a powerful healer, but an extraordinary love affair between the man and the creation...I had this urge to immortalize my childhood memories. I wanted to be able to consult them, to be immersed in them, to taste them exactly the same way they were offered to me, and this is how my desires translated themselves into colors."
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