Category Archives: landscapes

Deserted Cottages, Lake Erie, and a Childhood Friend

"Deserted Cottages", 17" x 8.5", Rembrandt pastels on Hahnemuhle sanded watercolor paper, 1998 © Bernadette E. Kazmarski

Sometimes a painting holds far more than just the image, and connections that hold many people together, as these deserted cottages did in life, on paper, and inspiration. In October 2011 I posted the original of this painting of deserted cottages along Lake Erie, and told of memories of my mother, selling her house, and […]

Birches 1, Autumn Showers

From the time I met the paper birch in our front yard I have always been fascinated by the delicately detailed white bark of birch trees etched with deep contrast gray and black seams and splits. The trunks seemed to emit their own faint light in any season. Here, in the darkness of the woods, […]

View from Beechwood, A LIttle Time Capsule

View From Beechwood, 14 x 18, ink and acrylic, 1983 © Bernadette E. Kazmarski

This painting may look like a recent Carnegie scene but it goes way back. I was just out of college and painted it long before I’d decided to devote part of my career to art, and I marvel that I created this when I did, in 1983. It’s just the beginning of October and the […]

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 […]

Finding Inspiration at “A Bend in the Road”

June 1, 2014, on a lovely sunny day just about noon, I was leaving a morning event and on errands traveling the back roads just for fun, knowing this narrow back road had some wonderful spots. Here is one of them, “A Bend in the Road”. We never know what’s around that bend in the […]

Dusk After the Storm, as the Creek Rises and Falls

Dusk After the Storm, 9 x 12, pastel © Bernadette E. Kazmarski

So many storms lately, and I watch the creek rise and fall, one moment 12 inches deep and silently placid but so quickly a rushing torrent several feet deep. A storm overtook us as we paddled canoes and kayaks down Chartiers Creek one evening. We took out and watched it from among trees on the […]

“Let’s Go for a Ride!” on a Summer Back Road

Summer Back Road, pastel on prepared board, 8 x 12 © Bernadette E. Kazmarski

“Let’s go for a ride!” Back in the 60s in homes with no air conditioning, a mid-summer car ride on a country road with all the windows open was a real treat. Funny how just riding around and looking at things was a regular form of entertainment, even in the early days of television. Ice […]

Spring Evening on the Hills

A view out my back window, a theme I’ve returned to so many times, but then, when I walk past one of the windows looking out to the east across the valley it’s already framed like a painting by the window. What an inspiration. Since this view is in the east, this scene shows the […]

Dusk After the Storm, Canoeing the Creek

A storm overtook us as we paddled canoes and kayaks down Chartiers Creek one evening. We took out and watched it from among trees on the bank as the world turned black then fogged with rain, lightning struck just over the hills around us and the creek ran faster and faster and rose foot by […]

Curious Fawn Exploring the Yard

For this painting I used self-prepared smooth deep charcoal matboard coated with my favorite transparent pastel ground, Golden Acrylic Ground for Pastels, so that I would start with a dark background. I painted it without any guidelines, just hitting the surface with my pastels and letting it work out. And I mean literally hitting the […]