Carolline Auclair

“Art shapes my soul and changes my life”.

As states one of her artwork’s title, Carolline Auclair was a natural born artist: “Born to be an artist and happy” represents a white cloud, a swing, a tree and a big gust of wind on an orange background. Dated back to 2006, this artwork includes these words all over the canvas as a mantra. So, from the earliest age, Carolline drew portraits and landscapes and already created to pay homage to beauty, so as to catch the human soul. An extremely sensitive person, it was often very difficult for her to find the meaning of Life and therefore, a meaning for her own life. The artist likes to mention her parents when it comes to her artistic vocation which they contributed to shape. At sunset, her mother used to say while looking through the kitchen small window: “Look, young ones, how pink the sky is!” and she repeated the same sentence during the family trekkings when she saw a magnificent sky. “Look, young ones, how pink the sky is!”. Her close link with nature was also born from walking in the forest, with her father, who taught her how to observe the natural elements, to chew spruce gum, to discover that Nature talks about essential and survival. “It is time that transforms”, Carolline’s father was saying in front of the sight of a drying lake. This awareness of impermanence, is a lesson Carolline Auclair has never forgotten.

Therefore, every elements of Nature, fire, air, water, earth, speak to the artist’s heart, even more river Chaudière’s water from her childhood, that still lives in her today : this is where she learnt to swim and breath underwater, where she discovered the secret of the stones’ colors – scratched onto another stone, they make a magic pigment she covers on her face and body with. The thousand twinklings of this stream are engraved in her, their spring and impetuous overflowings, and the memory of her mother who died in its bed. Fifteen years life together with a man who didn’t like visual arts made Carolline create under a tense climate and eventually her artistic urge itself led her to choose a more harmonious life.  “Art shapes my soul and changes my life”, says Carolline. Becoming a mother revealed her later on how to be proud of herself and of who she has become. Today she collaborates with her husband who supports her to follow her dreams. From this collaboration were born especially the “light boxes”, painted in acrylic on plexiglass and lit with LED (light-emmitting diode).

Carolline’s creative work is a non-ending discovery always renewed, a learning experience and most of all, a permanent enrichment. That’s why the choice of medium settles by exploring different ways: ash peel, mushrooms, canvas… These changes in medium soothe the artist and give her a distance and a time for reflexion.

In quest of herself through Art and thanks to Art, Carolline Auclair was “born to be an artist and happy”.