Tag Archives: nature

My Mother’s Columbines

Columbines, Watercolor, 5 x 7, 1994 © Bernadete E. Kazmarski

My mother grew columbines in the back yard when I was growing up. They started with just a few colors but eventually the pinks and violets mixed and interbred with the native indigo and red/yellow. The variety was overwhelming to my young eyes, young enough that some of the columbines bloomed taller than me. Of […]

Two Spring Paintings

“Suddenly, it’s spring, and most days are really sunny! After this winter it’s totally captivating, and distracting. I can’t go anywhere without seeing possible paintings. Like this these, which I photographed as I didn’t have my sketching materials with me because, for the past couple of months, there hasn’t been anything I wanted to sketch, […]

Greenhouse Gerberas for Summer 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 […]

Dusk After the Storm, Canoeing the Creek

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

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 […]

Summer Joy: Geraniums and Parsley

Geraniums and Parsley, watercolor, 6 x 9 © Bernadette E. Kazmarski

An artist in one of the groups I post in said she could feel the “absolute joy” in this painting. Yes, the exuberance of nature on a beautiful summer day, and my joy at even just a little bit of life and color to be inspired by in the year I didn’t have a garden. […]

Emerging Spring, Before the First Flowers

Emerging Spring, pastel on pastelmat, 13.5 x 19.5, 2021 © Bernadette E. Kazmarski

A damp, chill and overcast day may not seem to present any amount of inspiration, but those are the days when the spring woods look like this, the heightened intensity of color emerging from dense shadows and mist among the trees have hidden magic. A scene tucked away along my favorite trail, I’ve visualized this […]

Avoiding the Photographer, Not So Cleverly Hidden

I welcomed 2022 with a new painting, “Avoiding the Photographer”. 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 […]

Winter, Fading Into Sunset

Winter is represented by the frozen hillsides of a farm drifted with snow and reflecting the colors of a winter sunset. The quiet, stillness and subtle color, the snow drifted up against the fencelines in the distance and caught on the clumps of flattened grasses and brush in the fields, the flat sky reflecting the […]

Creek Study in Snow

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 steep […]