Ysabel LeMay

American Art Collector

Causette

Lenscratch

Resource Online

Ever since the invention of the camera, there are few subjects that attract photographers more than the landscape. Whether photographing from the sky or lying on the grass, photographers continually seek to understand and explore the ground upon which we live and walk. While it seems almost impossible to capture nature in a unique way, Ysabel LeMay defies all odds, creating spectacular images that radiate with color, density and awe.

Quebec born Ysabel LeMay found photography later in life, after a successful career working as a graphic artist for prominent advertising agencies. Seeking greater fulfillment, she turned to painting, and in 2002, left the corporate world to pursue painting fulltime. Eight years later, she turned her attention to photography, garnering significant success in a few short years. Combining her technical expertise with her painterly eye, LeMay creates photographs that challenge our perception of the landscape.

Lemay’s technique is very straightforward, yet extremely time consuming. She photographs flora, birds, tree limbs, flowers, and anything else she finds along her daily walks. Once back in the studio, she assembles all her files into her computer and starts layering images, using hundreds of individual files to construct each final photograph. Balancing color, light and subject, Ysabel LeMay creates pieces that vibrate with an intensity often experienced in dreams. Wonders continues LeMay’s dedication to the land and the endless beauty it evokes.

Austin, Texas-based artist Ysabel LeMay is gaining ever-widening recognition for her digitally composed panoramas of natural richness, which she creates through the process of hypercollage. LeMay reveals the real world remixed to paradisal perfection, so vividly realized that one feels drawn to step into her immersive tableaux.

Since winning the New York KiptonART 2011 Rising Stars Program, LeMay’s work has seen more than 115 exhibitions around the globe and has been acquired for the corporate collections of Chevron, Bloomingdale’s and Bacardi, and the permanent collections at Museum of Photographic Arts and the Morris Museum. In 2013, LeMay participated in the Texas Biennial and in 2015, where she represented Texas at the fourth edition of Women to Watch in Washington, D.C. In 2017, LeMay held a solo retrospective show at the Morris Museum in Morristown, New Jersey. In addition, she was commissioned by the U.S. Department of State’s Art in Embassies Program for the American Institute in Taiwan. In 2018, she was a visiting instructor at the Santa Fe Photographic Workshop in New Mexico.

Growing up in Quebec, Canada, LeMay fastened her connection to the natural world at her family’s cottage in the northern wilderness of the province. But it was the jungle of the advertising world where LeMay honed her visual expression. After 15 years in the industry, she sought a more rewarding path for her creativity, refocusing initially on painting and then photography.

From there, LeMay developed her own distinctive technique, called hypercollage. Her practice, refined over more than a decade, sees her traveling the globe on photographic expeditions, accumulating vast reserves of natural imagery. These she studiously reviews, extracting elements according to her intuition and assembling them into baroque tableaux venerating the undeniable majesty and generosity of nature.

While her technique is high-tech, LeMay’s hypercollage process is instinctual and organic, allowing each piece to dictate its own destiny. From a single, simple starting point — an image, a color, an emotion — she follows a meticulous process. After first isolating and extracting elements of her photos, LeMay then weaves them together into intricate compositions of resplendent beauty.

LeMay has brought her hypercollages to a place where they now serve as records of natural splendor perpetually in motion – as expressed by an artist who herself shows no interest in standing still.

All images are available in various sizes from 32 x 32" to 32 x 96" pigment prints mounted to plexi or pigment prints made in editions of 7 + 3 AP’s and 5 + 3 AP’s. Pieces range in price from $3600 to $18,000, depending on size and availability.

Please call: (312) 266-2350 for prices of specific pieces.
Prices are print only unless otherwise indicated.