Meet Clarisse Bertiaux | Artist and applied arts teacher

We had the good fortune of connecting with Clarisse Bertiaux and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Clarisse, can you walk us through the thought-process of starting your business?
After my studies, I worked in different places, but always with a link to art and artistic culture. Whether professionally or as a hobby, the cultural sector has always attracted me. I like to create, I like to share.
At first, I mostly shared. Through artistic management, diffusion and cultural mediation. But one day creation took over. I then started to draw, a lot. And I loved it. So I decided to turn this passion into a profession. And I don’t regret my choice at all.
I started my business after a professional failure in a salaried job. That was in 2019 and it was my last salaried job (as a side note, Notre Dame burned down the day I left, I don’t know if I should take that as a sign). Today I’m a full-time self employed entrepreneur, and I’m very happy with that.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
Today and for many years, I am specialized in pointillism. I learned this technique on my own, but it is a whole context that allowed me to do so. During my studies, I was an exchange student for a year at the School of Fine Arts in Palermo, Sicily (Italy). It was in 2014. It was there, for a drawing class, that I started drawing in pointillism. And it never let me go! I started by drawing chairs, shoes. But I also liked to contemplate sculptures in churches and museums, and I started to reproduce some of them in pointillism.
Very quickly I noticed that it was the female body that I liked to draw, because I like their poetry, their beauty, and I ended up making them my main subject.
I had no difficulty meeting an audience, and I began to receive jury awards at art shows. But the most difficult thing for me is to get out of the erotic look that people can sometimes have on my works. I don’t want to make an erotic representation of the body, or objectify it. It is for me to represent a form of poetry and strenght.
Today I am happy to see that the vision I want to give is shared by many, and that my work is beginning to be recognized. With the Covid and the cancellation of all the exhibitions, the road was not easy, but I worked tirelessly (my last vacation was in August 2021) and this work finally paid off.
I would say that the most difficult thing is to go through and overcome the periods when you believe less in yourself, when you feel like you don’t fit in anymore, because the best always comes right after.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
I am French and I live in Lille, in the north of the country. I love this city, and if my best friend didn’t live here, this is the city I would make him discover first. Here, we are known to have bad weather but to be welcoming and warm. This welcome would surely be done by discovering our culinary heritage, which is very comforting. We would go to a restaurant to eat and drink some specialities, like the welsh, the Flemish carbonade, always accompanied by French fries and a good local beer.
The city of Lille has a lot of museums, I think we would go to visit one or two of them, like the Palais des Beaux-Arts and the museum of natural history.
Brussels (Belgium) is 30 minutes by train from Lille. We could spend one or two days there to visit this incredible city, and browse its numerous second-hand bookshops and record shops.
Belgium and Brussels are known for their delicious waffles, so we could take a break to eat some before leaving.
The trip could end on one of the beaches of the Opal Coast, where it is often gray but the sea is beautiful, as in a novel of which one is sad to turn the last page.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
When I started my business and the two years that followed, I was in an abusive relationship, away from my family and friends. So I started working alone and without support. I owe the beginning of my success to my own determination, and to the support I received from my clients, who allowed me to believe in myself and in my work. Then, at the end of 2020, I decided to start all over again and move back to my native region.
I was still determined to develop my business. But this time I had the unfailing support of my current partner, of all my friends, and of my family who started to believe in me. The fact that I was finally fulfilled in all the strata of my life, and also well surrounded, allowed me to believe more in myself and to see bigger.

Website: https://clarissebertiaux.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/clarissebertiaux_art/?hl=fr

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clarisse-bertiaux-1331b8147/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/clarisseillustrations