Category Archives: pastel

Familiar Details on a “Dead End” Street

Dead End, pastel on prepared board, 8 x 12 © Bernadette E. Kazmarski

I love snowy winter scenes, blue morning shadows or brilliant sunsets, snowfall, surprise bits of color. Winter has long been my biggest inspiration for landscape painting. And I also love a row of houses in the sun without snow, the bare trees, the long shadows, and this dead end street has so many familiar elements. […]

This Shining Night, a Moonlit Snowy Night

pastel painting of moonlight on bare trees and snowy trail

Sunset comes early and dusk and nightfall quickly follow near the winter solstice. Christmas is among the shortest days of the year, and on this particular year I headed west on the trail, hoping to capture a beautiful sunset as heavy clouds gathered, then parted, and snow squalls and flurries filled the air. The timing […]

Snowbird, Winter Wild Bird Pastel

Snowbird, pastel, 6" x 6" © Bernadette E. Kazmarski

There’s a bird, and there’s snow, and this also happens to be a “snowbird”, or a dark-eyed junco, clinging to a forsythia branch in my backyard. Their small rounded shape with white bellies have always looked to me as if they were dipped into paint. “Snowbird” is one of a set of four paintings of […]

Frosty Morning, Just Before Sunrise

Frosty Morning, Just Before Dawn, pastel, 17.5 x 9, 2012 © Bernadette E. Kazmarski

It looks like this out there this morning. The coldest, frostiest mornings always seem to come in January, right after all the warmth and color of the holiday season. I painted this in January 2012, standing at my bathroom window overlooking the back yard, the streets below me down to Main Street, and the hill […]

North Hills Art Center Member’s Show Submissions

North Hills Art Center Members Exhibit Submissions

Saturday, September 16 is the opening for the annual Member’s Show at the North Hills Art Center. I pulled together recent paintings I haven’t included in any exhibit there yet for my entries. You’ve seen two of these paintings in the past few months as my featured artwork, Forest Bathing and Peach Begonias, and I […]

May Nature Desktop Calendar: The Garden Gate

Desktop calendar, 1280 x 1024 for square and laptop monitors.

About The Garden Gate For someone who is a gardener and spends a lot of time in her yard–what a special place! If I can’t have it in my yard, at least I can paint it. The arbor sporting ivy, the old rhododendron crowning the entrance and the gate, mysteriously left ajar and leading to […]

North Hills Art Center Art for Animals Submissions

I dropped off submissions to the North Hills Art Center annual Art for Animals exhibit to benefit the Hope Haven Farm Sanctuary, which takes in farm animals and livestock who need to be rescued from negative or inhumane conditions. You’ve seen two of these paintings in the past few months, Big Blue and Nikka’s Jupiter […]

April Nature Desktop Calendar: Forest Bathing

About Forest Bathing A view of the misty spring woods. I’ve always loved this ravine just off the Panhandle Trail for the angle of light that enters it, that deep “V” shape creating colorful highlights and rich shadows and always mossy logs with a little sparkle of water that meanders down the center. And in […]

March Feline Desktop Calendar: Nikka’s Jupiter Ball

Register for an account on Portraits of Animals and get a free matted print of “Nikka’s Jupiter Ball” or choose from several other sketches, paintings or photos of cats and other subjects—plus a discount on the original and prints and greeting cards until March 31, 2023 Read more on The Creative Cat: Featured Artwork and […]

March Nature Desktop Calendar: Winter Still Life

That deeply angled winter sunlight reaches farther into the windows than summer sunlight, into the corner with the fruit bowl. I’ve been looking at the late afternoon sun hitting this vintage flow blue ceramic bowl where I keep my apples and enjoying the shapes of the apples, the reflections on the bowl with its uneven […]