Tag Archives: pastel

Avoiding the Photographer But Caught By the Artist

The girls—two does from the small herd that lives in our back yards—were hiding behind my scruffy little hemlock while I was hovering around in the snow in the back yard trying to get their photo on a snowy, sunny morning the previous February. It’s a watercolor, 12″ x 18″, from 2022 that had been […]

Turn Around to See: Winter Sunset Reflections

Winter Sunset Reflections, 7” x 17”, pastel © Bernadette E. Kazmarski

I painted this scene for my August 2014 exhibit “Sun Shadow Ice & Snow: Seasons of the Panhandle Trail” during Rock the Quarry, the annual fundraiser for the Panhandle Trail. I decided to do this painting at pretty much the last minute, though I’d been visualizing it for years. The scene is one I’ve often […]

Walking the Tracks

Even when there’s snow, there’s still a lot of color in the landscape. I regularly walked railroad tracks for my Sunday hike, a day when few if any trains ran. They’re not too different from other established trails and are kept clear, and the views are interesting, going past the backs of everything, and even […]

Night Window

This is my neighbor’s house and a scene I see from my kitchen window. Years ago, every night the light was on in this window and the beacon felt so familiar that it was like a part of my own home. They told me it was their living room so the light would always be […]

That Magical Light, This Shining 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 […]

Sold Original Painting, This Shining Night

I had a “little” open house at my home this weekend, and one customer came to buy this painting. What a joy that someone who loves the painting, and loves to be out on the trail even in weather like this, now has the original to enjoy, and I know my painting is in good, […]

The Bench, Pastel

I took a film photo of this brilliant scene in 1983 on a steep street I walked down to Main Street daily. A couple of decades later I was surprised one autumn morning to see it wasn’t terribly different. I pulled the original photo and saw the trees at that time hadn’t quite grown in […]

Evening Wildflowers

On a sweltering, sticky August evening I discovered an incredibly beautiful patch of native wildflowers intentionally seeded at Scott Conservancy Kane Woods. I forgot about sweaty hands and the pulse of the sun directly in my face because it was also touching each and every flower on that hillside, filling leaves and petals with brilliance. […]

Main Street, September Morning

Every time I go back to one of my sketches or paintings of Main Street I find it’s changed again since then, lost a building or two, added some trees. The losses hurt just a bit, taking away just another bit of the older, traditional part of Main Street. Where you see the American and […]

Serenity, A Slow Summer Sunset

This sailboat drifted lazily for hours on the calm waters of Lake Arthur in Western Pennsylvania. As the August afternoon tended toward evening, the sky began to grow pink and the shadows darkened and lengthened, and the serene moment seemed to last for hours. Painted en plein air as I sat on one of the […]