Tag Archives: nature

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 […]

Soft November Afternoon, Shades of Red and Gold

Soft November Afternoon, pastel 10 x 8, 2006 © Bernadette E. Kazmarski

I did this little painting was done en plein air on a sunny November afternoon in 2006. I was photographing a conservation area owned by a conservation organization I worked with, and at that time I toted some art materials just about everywhere. The rich burnished colors of the remaining oak leaves and the ghostly […]

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 […]

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 […]

Dawn on a Foggy Summer Morning

Yesterday and last night’s rain produced a foggy morning today. When the sun finally began to shine through the mist it reminded me of this painting from 2000. It’s the view out of one of my back windows toward the east where I always enjoy seeing what the sunrise, or at least the morning sky, […]

The Old Apple Tree

A little bit of mist among the trees illuminated by the rising sun, tinges of gold among the leaves, but the old apple tree will hold its leaves until they begin to turn bronze in the first frost. The land that is Carnegie Park was a farm less than a century ago, and this apple […]

Red Climbers, Ready for Summer

Red Climbers, watercolor, 6.5" x 14.5" , 1998, Bernadette E. Kazmarski

The photo reminded me of my mother’s climbing red roses which grew up a trellis on the side of the house and now grow on a trellis on the side of my house. These roses have always fascinated me, they just keep going–up the fence, over the fence, down the other side. As a watercolor […]

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 […]

Greenhouse Gerberas Full of Color

I took the reference photo for this painting at a local greenhouse in 2013. I’ve always liked colorful gerbera daisies and their bold smiling faces. I’ve used it for a few graphic designs and decided someday I’d paint it too. So that time was in 2019. I chose oil pastel because I’ve come to enjoy […]