Sorrento artist, Titane Laurent is a fearless world traveller who has circled the globe creating art that inspires contemplation, evokes emotions, or lights the soul with laughter – sometimes all three at the same time. She feels divinely guided to a place and puts her full faith in the call. It’s never led her astray. Now, settled in Sorrento, she’s found her true happy place working as a sculptor and sharing her infectious joie de vivre as a life coach.
Titane was born in Morocco to Belgian parents. After a few years, the family left Morocco due to political unrest. Titane grew up in Brussels. Her father was an engineer and her mother worked intermittently as a colourist for Hergé’s Tintin comics.
Because her teachers didn’t know what to do with such a self-possessed divergent thinker, Titane changed schools several times. It made her adaptable and resilient but, as a child, it could be lonely too. Now, she loves working in solitude and values the self-reliance those early experiences built.
From childhood, it was clear she’d be an artist. Art is in her blood. She comes from seven generations of painters. Titane drew from an early age and enjoyed creating cartoons. This skill emerged again later, but her career did not begin in art. She worked in corporate marketing and was very successful, but it didn’t make her heart sing.
While working for a film festival in Brussels in her early thirties, Titane had an epiphany. She knew she wanted something different. She put the question about what to do next into the universe. Immediately she heard a voice ask… “If you had only one year to live, what would you do?” She knew three things. She wanted to wear comfortable clothes, be an artist and live in a climate warmer than Belgium.
New Zealand, being the opposite side of the world, seemed the perfect place to reinvent herself. Titane became a full-time painter while studying Illustration and Cartooning at New Zealand Institute of Business Studies in Auckland, where she graduated with Honours. This was all the more remarkable because she didn’t speak English when she arrived. In six months, she had a working knowledge of the language. Titane went on to become a successful cartoonist for international newspapers.
Lovely as New Zealand was, Titane wanted to move somewhere bigger, so she chose Australia. She started out in Sydney and then moved to Perth to work with The Sunday Times. Titane had created an award-winning niche cartoon called God’s Stuff that illustrates the scripture through the eyes of a little girl. Funny and poignant it was very popular. Her proudest moment was having this syndicated cartoon translated into French and published in France, in a book called Dieu Kiladi (God who said it).
After several years, Titane left her busy life in Australia behind and moved to Mauritius with her partner and two children to find peace and inspiration. She worked as a painter and cartoonist. During this time, Titane travelled to a cartoon fair in Angouleme, France where she saw a poster that triggered something in her. She shared the experience with her partner and together a new adventure began.
The family moved to the United States. Her partner worked as a musician while going to Kentucky University. Titane met the director of Art League (Florida) who connected her to teaching abstract art classes. After their five-year American adventure, they returned to Australia settling in Melbourne.
In 2014, Titane launched Laurent Gallery, an exhibition and studio space, but COVID lockdowns led to the closure of the gallery. At that point, Titane was again ready to reinvent herself. She moved to the Mornington Peninsula about a year ago where she happily works from home as a conceptual sculptor and life coach. She’d like her artistic legacy to be a major public sculpture, representing ‘oneness with source’.
Earlier in her career Titane spent many years working with Chinese conceptual artist, Gao Xuyong. She became his apprentice and learned, among many other things, what she calls the abstract essence of line. “Line is the foundation of all art,” she says. Her early calligraphic lines developed into figurative works then black and white abstract paintings. Now she has come back to the line, but in three dimensional organic shapes.
Titane’s inspiration comes from solitude, time in nature and her deep spirituality. Living on the Peninsula brings all of those aspects together in one place.
“There’s a healing energy here that I needed. It’s brought me clarity and a sense of inner peace and joy,” she says.
“There’s a healing energy here that I needed. It’s brought me clarity and a sense of inner peace and joy,” she says. Creating sculpture and helping people find their divine authentic self through her life coaching are her main focus now. Currently, she’s exhibiting at The Continental Hotel in Sorrento through the end of April. See the culmination of her many years seeking her truth while working as an international artist in her new collection of sculptures called Anima.