I was born in 1952 in Paris. My first passions were music and movies, then sailing and many years later  painting. I still love playing music and going to see movies.

I got into painting while staying on the island of Itaparica in Brazil after three months of ocean crossing from France on a small sailing boat. On my way back to France a few months later, this material served as the basis for my first exhibition in a gallery in Antibes, on the south coast of France.

From then on I was less on boats and more and more into the visual arts. In the 80's I started to work as a freelance computer graphist specialising in interactive applications. I worked on graphic content for French museums and institutional clients. In the 90's I joined the French American advertising agency CLM BBDO and I am still with them 15 years  later.  During all that time I kept an almost daily practice of non digital drawing and painting.  I needed the feeling of the brush and the paper versus the many hours I was spending behind a screen with Photoshop and the like.

My work and styles are often quite unpredictable. When I set to work and I grab the brush soaked in Indian ink, I have most of the time no clues about what I am about to do--it might be a tree, a nude or something totally abstract.  I try to let it go from my hand rather than with a preconceived image I would have in mind. At times I like to play small games like doing a serial of inks with my eyes closed--if you never did that, I would advise you to try it, it's great fun!

For the last 15 years I attended a weekly live model drawing session. It gives one not only a sense of shapes and volumes, it is also a very relaxing and peaceful practice, close to a meditation in more than one way. This is probably how the female shape gradually invaded my creative world.  I often end up drawing a line that becomes a silhouette and 99% of the time it is a female one. Maybe I'm biased...,  at times I draw cats and trees too.

People have asked me the reason why I was often using the pages of old books or newspapers as a support for my inks. I have forgotten how that started, it was more than a decade ago. Maybe I did not have any more white pages that day to draw my nudes and I grabbed the newspaper, I don't recall too well but I liked how the printed words or photographs showed up through the black ink, adding an other dimension and an interesting text-ure to the visual. Now and then I get friends to offer me old accounting books--they know I will make good use of them.

If you are interested in more information about this artist email: info@threeravensgallery.com and enter Bertrand in the subject line. We will respond with details and tell you how you can purchase her work.
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