Yukon News - Halin de Repentigny’s art is ‘constantly changing’

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“For me, painting is a necessity, just like talking. I speak four different languages and painting is the only one where I don’t make a fool of myself.”

I come from a very poor background (by Canadian standards) with little formal education. When I was 10 years old a family friend gave me a few old tubes of oil paint and I painted my first piece of work, a Greek village scene that I copied out of an encyclopedia. I painted it on an old piece of canvas that I stretched over a window frame I found in the alley behind our Montreal home. At the time my Mom was a waitress in a Greek restaurant and she took me to show my painting to the owner. He loved it and he bought it from me for $75. This was 1969 so that was a fortune for me. I decided right there and then that I would become a painter and make my way in the world through my art. Even without a lot of formal education, and no formal art training, I was full of confidence and a hunger to create and learn from my own experiences. Here was a way to make money doing what I liked and what I was the best at!

Today painting is my vocation and my passion. After 45 years of painting I feel like I’m only scratching the surface of what my inner energy needs to create. I will paint as long as I can and hopefully that’s long enough to become the very best I can be.