Category Archives: pastel

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 […]

Commissioned Portrait: Three Portraits

Above is the first of three portraits I have of sweet Penny, and it’s the one I still have in my studio, but all from about a decade ago. I realized I’ve never written about this/these portraits, so here we are. I’ve framed the original of this portrait to sell as the original and also […]

Commissioned Portraits and a Video

Here’s the short video I created about my commissioned portraits. Our companion animals give us so much…my cats gave me my career as an artist. Back in the late 1980s my household of rescued cats inspired me to find my muse and I’ve been developing my skills and talent since then, painting them and many […]

Big Blue, and My 2016 Trip to Savannah

pastel wildlife painting great blue heron pond lily pads marsh

“Big Blue” is a pastel from one of my photos, one I’ve been wanting to paint for seven years, and I just finished it today. We have a rookery of great blue herons not far from me and I see them all the time flying overhead and fishing in the creek sometimes right in the […]