Astrée Lhermitte-Soka is a French painter. Trained at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia, she worked as a graphic designer in New York before dedicating herself to painting. Her work, primarily accessible through her personal website, combines painted images, titles of works, and accompanying texts, a whole that deserves to be examined beyond mere biographical elements.
Paintings, titles, and texts: what Astrée Lhermitte-Soka’s website allows us to observe
Most articles dedicated to Astrée Lhermitte-Soka focus on her lineage. Her personal website offers another entry point, more revealing of her practice.
The homepage features a text titled “At the Origin,” dedicated to her first name and its resonances. This text is not a simple biographical note: it establishes a relationship between word and image that continues in the pages dedicated to her works.
The paintings are accompanied by captions or short texts. The series Otom Potom, for example, groups individually identified works, such as For Pavese and his Iréos, measuring 50 x 50 cm. The title refers to the Italian writer Cesare Pavese, suggesting a practice where literary reference contributes to visual construction.
You can consult Astrée Lhermitte’s profile on Véron for a summary of her background, but it is on her own site that the relationship between writing and painting is truly revealed. The question remains open: do these texts function as comments added afterward, or as constitutive elements of each piece?
Artistic training in the United States and Astrée Lhermitte-Soka’s professional journey
The Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) is an institution specializing in visual arts and design, located in Georgia. Astrée Lhermitte-Soka obtained degrees in graphic design and illustration there, two disciplines that involve a close relationship between text and image.
After her studies, she moved to New York for three years and worked as a graphic designer. This American period precedes a stint in film as a makeup artist, a diversion that may seem distant from painting but belongs to the same visual universe: color, material, surface.
From graphic design to painting: a transition that is not an abandonment
The shift from graphic design to painting is not a renunciation but a change of medium. Training in illustration directly feeds into her painting practice, particularly in the treatment of visual storytelling. The titles of works such as Sweet-Sister, Lucky Dresses, or Tight Hexagon testify to a vocabulary that serves as an extension of graphic work.
This journey distinguishes Astrée Lhermitte-Soka from many self-taught painters. Her American academic training provided her with precise technical tools, even if the traces of this training in her canvases remain to be documented due to the lack of a public catalog raisonné.
Painter and visibility: the limits of available sources
One point deserves to be made clear: public sources on Astrée Lhermitte-Soka’s artistic practice remain scarce. Search results mostly lead to biographical entries centered on her father, actor Thierry Lhermitte, or on family composition (her brother Victor, her sister Louise known as Lonny, her daughter Alice).
Her personal website constitutes the richest primary source, but it does not provide information on the exhibitions she has participated in, the collections that hold her works, or any potential collaborations with galleries. This lack of documentation does not imply an absence of activity, but it hinders the assessment of the actual dissemination of her work.
- No online catalog raisonné lists all of her paintings or series.
- Celebrity news articles mention her works by title without describing or reproducing them.
- The administrative status of an artist, sometimes mentioned, does not provide information on the volume of production or frequency of exhibitions.
For an artist who claims a distance from media notoriety, this documentary silence is coherent. However, it poses a challenge for anyone seeking to analyze her work beyond autobiographical elements.
Astrée Lhermitte-Soka painter: the Otom Potom series as a case study
Among the verifiable elements, the Otom Potom series offers a concrete anchor point. Rather than an isolated work, it is a long-term series comprising several pieces identified by individual titles.
The title Otom Potom itself does not have an immediately identifiable meaning in French. This opacity contrasts with more readable work titles like For Pavese and his Iréos, which anchors the painting in a network of explicit literary references. The alternation between opaque titles and referenced titles creates a tension that questions the viewer about the role of language in the reception of the image.
What the formats reveal
The 50 x 50 cm format mentioned for some pieces indicates a modest scale work, suitable for the intimacy of a studio or interior. This choice of small format contrasts with contemporary salon painting, often calibrated for the large walls of galleries or fairs.
This square format also imposes specific compositional constraints: symmetry, centering, tension between the edges. Without high-resolution photographs of the works, these hypotheses remain avenues for interpretation rather than completed formal analyses.
Astrée Lhermitte-Soka’s journey illustrates a form of artistic practice that escapes the usual circuits of media visibility. Her solid training at SCAD, her years of graphic design in New York, and her investment in painting outline a coherent path. What is currently lacking to fully measure its scope is broader access to her works, whether through documented exhibitions or gallery presence.
