WHO IS PIERRE OUVRARD? His parents were collectors and bibliophiles, his uncles booksellers, and his sister a writer. Ouvrard enrolled very early in graphic arts and met the master Albert Dumouchel, who had created a small circle of illustrations and who enthusiastically ushered modernity into the art of printing. Around 1946, the choice was made: Ouvrard would create bindings and cover illustrations for books. After assimilating various trends, numerous styles, and different schools of painting, he soon realized that the illustrator's vision often differed from the author's. he has bound more than fifty Maria Chapdelaine during his life, but no two copies are similar, because through his images periods, his inner vision and creative inspiration have remained close partners. The achievement that emerged from this was personal and the image was unique in the intimate journey of the artist-binder. For creative emotion to exist, it requires the involvement of a moment lived with the work of art, to which the artist will add a skin and a vision of his own.

In the 1950s, with the wind of freedom brought about by the Refus global, Paul-Emile Bordaus, and a few others, Ouvrard felt liberated from imposed constraints regarding styles, frames, and borders. Art had the ability to make personal images manifest. On Canadian soil, until the end of the nineteenth century, binders such as Forest, Perrault, and Belanger, and the art of painting itself, were in something of a rut. It was because of Louis-Philippe Beaudoin's school that binding became an art form, whose foremost credo was freedom-just think of Jean Lariviere, In Trouillot, or Louis Grypinich.