Author Archives: Bernadette

About Bernadette

Portraits of Animals features my latest fine artwork and photography, original art and prints, handmade creations, apparel, housewares, gift items, greeting card sets, books and calendars inspired by my household of felines and the beauty of nature. In every moment of every day, everywhere I go, I see something extraordinarily beautiful and inspiring. I am moved to share it by interpreting it in a medium that most clearly expresses my inspiration in that moment, be that medium visual or literary, 2D, 3D, poetry or prose or some combination thereof. I only hope to do honor to the moment and fill others with the same blush of joy I felt at first experiencing it. On this site I present the results of those efforts to interpret my inspirations—my cats, commissioned cats and dogs, wildlife, landscapes, flowers, waterscapes, just about anything that crosses my path.

Two New Cat Mat Designs

New kitty mats! Both are designs I’ve wanted to create since the beginning but mostly because of the stencil I started out with they just weren’t practical. I have a little more time to work things out with new materials and I’m glad I could finally follow through with these two. The Pride of Cats […]

2026 Vendor Events, June through October

My display from the Spaghetti Dinner in May.

It’s going to be a busy summer! The photo above is from the HCMT Spaghetti Dinner in May this year, but it has a lot of the things I’ll have all summer. And of course it will be in my tent for most of these 2026 events! I rearranged my display at the beginning of […]

An Oil Painting Class Still Life

Of the most common media available to me as an artist, I have never created an oil painting. So this was my first! A member of the Pittsburgh Society of Illustrators invited other members to an oil painting instruction class, a room full of experienced professional creative people who all had varied experience in oil […]

New Painting: Spring on the Rocks, Pastel

Spring on the Rocks, pastel on Pastelmat, 5x5, 2026 © Bernadette E. Kazmarski

“Spring on the Rocks” features that first flush of color, mosses, ferns, violets, speedwells, and a sprinkling of spring beauties just catching the sun on a rise of limestone draped with last year’s leaves. Yes, a little abstract, just a small, quick sketch, practice, but I think I caught the light and shapes and colors […]

Wandering in the Snow

So was the trail wandering in the snow or was I? Or both of us, me following the trail’s example, though I did step off the trail plenty of times. Today the temperature hit 50 degrees, and the thermometer on my deck actually read 60 degrees for a while, though I could tell when I […]

January Geraniums, Thinking of Spring

Every autumn I move my geraniums into the house. For decades it was the back corner of the basement, but once I began using that area as studio space and there wasn’t really any alternative down there, I started keeping them at upstairs windows. They are just as happy, still get their slight dormant period […]

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 […]

Charcoal Dusk

From my Christmas Day walk in 2013, sketched en plein air, the trail with a dusting of snow but mostly light from the moon behind the heavy overcast sky in contrast with the dense charcoal of the trees along side and on a hill beyond. This was the first time I’d used toned paper while […]

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 […]

Frosty Morning, Just Before Sunrise, View From My Window

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

It looks like this out there these January mornings. 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 […]