As a child Rene de Loffre immigrated to the United States from Normandy, France. His family soon moved to Los Angeles where he still resides. Retired from thirty-five years as a public-school educator, he is now a full time artist working from his home studio in the Hollywood Hills and often writes about artists and exhibitions. He holds a B.A. in fine arts and an M.A. in art history. He has also studied at Chouinard, Art Center School of Design,the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art, and with the artist Tom Wudl. During the 1980’s, de Loffre left studio work for fine art photography. By 2003 he was making computer manipulated photo images and in 2004 he returned to painting. De Loffre is currently a member of Gallery 825 (LA Art Association), the Blankfort/Clothier Artist Group, and served as a member of LA Artcore’s Board of Directors from 2003 to 2005. For the past several years de Loffre has been an art critic on his blog “The de Loffre Post” and is now heavily involved in creating sculpture that utilizes bronze and wood.
Biography
Statement
My sculpture incorporates elements of realism and abstraction in each piece, often in varying proportions. As Georgia O’Keeffe wrote, “Objective painting is not good painting unless it’s good in the abstract sense … the abstraction is the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself …” By pursuing a similar philosophy, I allow my works to remain open-ended and thus receive my own intangible marks.
Why heads and human figures? This was best expressed by the sculpture Stephen De Staebler that: “The human figure is the most loaded of all forms because we live in one.” De Staebler was correct; the figurative form is an impulse I can never resist. And creating it in sculptures feels immensely comfortable; there is no need to render illusions in a two-dimensional space. Once a piece is completed it becomes a dynamic object continuously changing with the light and the viewer’s position.
Bronze, distressed or exotic woods, clays, metallic and earth pigments are equally irresistible to me, representing a world of solidity and immortality that is nevertheless embraced by the decay of an Ozymandian reality.