Tango I Painting

"Her desire is to capture everything that lives, using precise brush strokes and a lively palette to bring color and light to the emotions she portrays. » Clotilde Maillard was born in France in 1960. After earning her baccalauréat, she completed a two-year program at the Académie Julian, honing the artistic techniques of her time, particularly drawing, under the guidance of Roland Guillaumel, a Grand Prix de Rome laureate in sculpture. She then spent two years living in England, followed by over a year in the United States, driven by her desire to explore new artistic perspectives and improve her English. A mother of three, she has passed on her passion for art to each of her children: one through social sciences and psychology, another into architecture, and the youngest into digital imagery. Today, she lives and works in Occitanie, in the south of France. Deeply convinced of the richness and infinite possibilities of pictorial representation, Clotilde Maillard explores a wide variety of media (canvas, wood, plexiglass, cardboard, paper, fabric, tapestry) and techniques (oil, tempera, acrylic, alkyd, ink, pastel, charcoal). She engages with all artistic genres — portraiture, landscape, life drawing, figurative abstraction, and more. Her art is primarily guided by the reflections inspired by her surroundings. These reflections give rise to mental images, some of which assert themselves as clear visions, dictating her choices of dimensions, colors, and context. Passionate about her craft, she collects photographs, family films, and fabric and color samples to inform and direct her creative process. Her ambition is to paint the universal, hoping that each piece will resonate with its viewers. Clotilde Maillard is a member of a collective of artists (Dessiner le Vivant) dedicated to portraying life in motion. Each member explores this theme through their chosen mediums, including painting, drawing, engraving, and fabric printing. Together, they have worked on diverse themes such as tango, contemporary dance, and horses. For their tango project, they observed performances by a professional dance couple, first in person and later via Zoom during the pandemic. This collaboration culminated in a public performance where the artists drew and filmed the couple dancing live, inspiring a corpus of tango-themed artworks. Clotilde maillard also take on commissions, which bring her a delightful rush of adrenaline, and she is open to any artistic proposals.