Category Archives: My Home Town

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 […]

October Sunset After a Storm: How Small Beneath the Sky

The many-faceted history of “How Small Beneath the Sky” I don’t know what it was about this image as a photograph in 2011 that stayed with me from the time I took it. It’s that sense of my tiny self, smaller than one of those dots in the valley below, one of which on the […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Evening Lights, Acrylic Painting

Those clear spring evenings in April are touchingly beautiful with the turquoise glow in the sky for the longest time after the sun has set. The velvety blackness of the creek and its banks reflects the lights on the street and on the buildings, illuminating the fronts and sides of the buildings. I took several […]

A Rainy Violet Sunset on Main Street

Rainy Violet Sunset, pastel on black Canson paper, 9" x 12" © Bernadette E. Kazmarski

I love rainy dark streets with reflections on the wet pavement, and streetlights shining up the faces of buildings. This one, however, was all about that tall violet sky making the buildings and hills beyond look small, the clouds breaking apart after the sun had set, leaving a red glow in the clouds on the […]

A Favorite Spring Scene, Pear Trees on Main Street

Walking down Main Street in mid-March I could see a few buds opening already on the pear trees lining the street. Now at the end of March they are in full, glorious bloom, and in this spring scene Main Street looks alive again. A familiar spring scene When the ornamental pears bloom, Main Street seems […]

A Winter Afternoon in Ink: Library Avenue

Library Avenue, ink, 12 x 16, 2007 © Bernadette E. Kazmarski

One of our older neighborhoods, familiar in small towns all across the country, each house lined up with porches and dormers and flags and hedges that make it unique, and make it look like home. I carry with me a little pouch of art materials including pencils, gel pens, fountain pens, markers, charcoal and Conte […]