Tag Archives: nature

May Nature Desktop Calendar: My Mother’s Columbines

Desktop calendar, 1280 x 1024 for square and laptop monitors.

Another piece borne of January inspiration in my seed and flower catalogs, this little bunch of columbines was so joyful that it stayed with me. One of my favorite flowers, it is also a favorite of my mother, and I gave this painting to her as a birthday present one year. She has since passed […]

Emerging Spring

Though I’ve already walked the early spring woods barefoot, cold and overcast, rainy and even snowy weather persists. But damp and overcast are the days when the spring woods look like this, the heightened intensity of color, dense shadows and mist among the trees. A scene tucked away along my favorite trail, I’ve visualized this […]

April Nature Desktop Calendar: From the Ground Up

“From the Ground Up”, pastel on multi-media paper, 6.5″ x 9.5″ © Bernadette E. Kazmarski

I followed my little black cat Mimi into my neighbor’s yard, just across the fence line, no fence, from our yard, and looked up at the tall maple tree that I see out my back windows all the time. What a great view, all those colors and shapes and little bits of sky, I guess […]

March Nature Desktop Calendar: Blue and Yellow

It’s an interesting coincidence that I titled the reference photo I used for this painting “Blue and Yellow” back in 2006. It was all about those two color complements, the warm sunny yellow forsythia and the cool deep blue of the Blue Willow pattern. I remember thinking at that time that the title was another […]

February Nature Desktop Calendar: Creek Study in Snow

Creek Study in Snow, 4" x 8", charcoal, 2001 © Bernadette E. Kazmarski

I call this “my private beach” along Chartiers Creek in Carnegie. You can’t keep me away from water, not even in winter. When the creek is low, this area is above water level, ranging from a few inches to several feet wide, right at a bend in the creek. The opposite bank is a […]

January Nature Desktop Calendar: Avoiding the Photographer

I’m welcoming the New Year with a new painting, “Avoiding the Photographer”! I think that’s an accurate title since the girls were hiding behind my scruffy little hemlock while I was hovering around in the snow in the back yard trying to get their photo this past February 2021. It’s a watercolor, about 12″ x […]

December Nature Desktop Calendar: Snowbird

There’s a bird, and there’s snow, and this also happens to be a “snowbird”, or a dark-eyed junco, clinging to a forsythia branch in my backyard. Their small rounded shape with white bellies have always looked to me as if they were dipped into paint. I truly love winter paintings because the light is wonderful […]

November Nature Desktop Calendar: The Bench

I took a photo of this brilliant scene years ago, one of the first photos I took with my brand hew Pentax K1000 film camera. A couple of decades later I was surprised one autumn morning to see it wasn’t terribly different. I pulled the original photo and saw the trees hadn’t quite grown in […]

October Nature Desktop Calendar: The Lichen Tree

What treasures we find if we only turn and look. Is that awesome or what? There are so many colors of leaves in this one small area, but the lichen tree, as I named it, is actually completely dead and bare, is what really makes it for me. The sun had been covered by overcast […]

September Nature Desktop Calendar: September Morning, Carnegie Park

Morning mist illuminated by the rising sun, long shadows across the dry ground with dewy grass, and just a touch of turning color in the leaves on the trees—after a long, hot summer the cool nights of autumn have arrived. This painting is tiny, just a quick 6 x 6 sketch, layering a base of […]