Earth Day


“You’re my best frond.”
A few years ago I used an online calculator to test my “carbon footprint”. I was off the scale—the bottom of the scale, lower than the test measured.
So give me some sort of sustainable laurel wreath, but I don’t really deserve one since I haven’t made much effort. Most of what gave me a good score has been through what others have sometimes considered strange habits that I’ve maintained all my adult life: piling up stuff—cardboard, batteries, construction materials—until I can make one trip to wherever I can recycle them; avoiding packaged foods by cooking most of what I eat from fresh materials, most of that from my organic garden complete with compost bin to mix vegetable scraps and coffee grounds, scrap paper and dryer lint to turn into fertilizer; salvaging older and used materials in maintaining my home and car; using age-old cleaning methods instead of packaged cleaners; walking or riding my bike instead of driving when I can, etc., etc.
But the creative burden…
Good for me. It’s not so difficult to maintain a daily lifestyle that doesn’t overburden the environment. More difficult, in fact sometimes impossible, is keeping my life as a creative person as green as possible. It’s been a constant frustration that I have very little control over the manufacture of the art materials I purchase, and in many cases those materials need to be made from chemicals I’d rather not think about in order to create the effect I envision. Oil-based block printing ink, for instance, is made from petroleum, and cleans up with turpentine—I cringe each time I use it and try to minimize the amount, but nothing else prints as well from a block or is as durable when printed on fabric. The pigments in my pastels, watercolors, acrylics, the fibers in my drawing papers, the cotton in the yarn I crochet…I can and do make decisions on the purchases to find the most sustainable products, but often there’s no alternative.
The chemical-free digital camera
Which is why I am grateful for the digital camera, considering the amount of chemicals that went into developing and printing all my film through the years. I gave up on my own darkroom years ago because I just didn’t want those chemicals in my home, but someone somewhere else had to use them if I didn’t.
I did not find the change to digital easy, and floundered my way through several little point and shoots and lots of research until I found the magic combination that produced photos much like my beloved Pentax K1000, the battered old fully-manual SLR I purchased just out of college, the one that taught me about photography and over the years became an extension of my eyes. My Pentax K10D has all the same manual controls available, I can use all the lenses and filters I collected for my K1000 and every day happily shoot more photos than I ever did before, knowing that I can simply download them to my computer with no use of chemicals whatsoever.
So on Earth Day I celebrate both the earth, in a few galleries of the photos I’ve taken, and this advance in photography that allows me to take thousands of photos and view them without anyone taking a bath in volatile chemicals, including the air, soil and waterways where everything ends up no matter what we do.
Enjoy the galleries in Nature Walks Around the Lower Chartiers Watershed.
Happy Earth Day!
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All images used on this site are copyrighted to Bernadette E. Kazmarski unless otherwise noted and may not be used without my written permission. Please ask if you are interested in using one in a print or internet publication. If you are interested in purchasing a print of this image or a product including this image, check my Etsy shop or Fine Art America profile to see if I have it available already. If you don’t find it there, visit “purchasing” for availability and terms.
The Enchanted Allée


The Enchanted Allée
The rows of sycamores leads me off into the colors.
Below is a gallery of all the winter sunset images.

















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All images used on this site are copyrighted to Bernadette E. Kazmarski unless otherwise noted and may not be used without my written permission. Please ask if you are interested in using one in a print or internet publication. If you are interested in purchasing a print of this image or a product including this image, check my Etsy shop or Fine Art America profile to see if I have it available already. If you don’t find it there, visit “purchasing” for availability and terms.
The Road Home


The Road Home
Who wouldn’t follow those swashes of color?
Below is a gallery of all the winter sunset images.

















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All images used on this site are copyrighted to Bernadette E. Kazmarski unless otherwise noted and may not be used without my written permission. Please ask if you are interested in using one in a print or internet publication. If you are interested in purchasing a print of this image or a product including this image, check my Etsy shop or Fine Art America profile to see if I have it available already. If you don’t find it there, visit “purchasing” for availability and terms.
Winter Waterfall


Waterfall Woods
A little bit of a waterfall along the lower trail in Kane Woods was ice free and a destination on a darkish day. The woods are very interesting on days like this, quiet, still. It’s a nice visit.
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I am adding this to this week’s “Five Sentence Fiction” with the keyword of “offering”.
I can hear a trickling sound, so loud in the quiet of the woods it seems to move about between the bare trees where honeysuckle and wildflowers had bloomed, now empty of leaves and flowers and berries it is full of detailed interest of branches and vines, and a light cover of snow. I follow the sound along the path down and down and down into the ravine and walk along the frozen slip of a waterway where I can hear it gurgling over the rocks and gravel under the ice. Tall trunks of trees rise straight up around me, and far above me their barren canopy of twigs melds with an unyielding overcast sky. In the dimming light I find at a bend in the little stream that a portion of ice has opened, offering a space for the water to flow freely if only for a short while, and the hushed gurgling becomes laughter as the water runs recklessly to the end of one rock and leaps off, and then another, splashing, without a care that it will soon slip under the ice again. On a brighter day it might have been the laughter of children, even of myself in these woods as a child, but in this quiet space the music is the moment.
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All images used on this site are copyrighted to Bernadette E. Kazmarski unless otherwise noted and may not be used without my written permission. Please ask if you are interested in using one in a print or internet publication. If you are interested in purchasing a print of this image or a product including this image, check my Etsy shop or Fine Art America profile to see if I have it available already. If you don’t find it there, visit “purchasing” for availability and terms.
Snow, Overexposed


Snow, Overexposed
Letting my camera have a little fun.
I had left my camera on manual settings for low light, and when I began photographing the snow yesterday I still had those settings. The photos were mostly white with some specks of this or that and I was about to toss them, then decided to take a look at them on my computer. I increased the contrast, and this is what I got. I couldn’t have done this if I’d tried.
From November 27, 2013
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All images used on this site are copyrighted to Bernadette E. Kazmarski unless otherwise noted and may not be used without my written permission. Please ask if you are interested in using one in a print or internet publication. If you are interested in purchasing a print of this image or a product including this image, check my Etsy shop or Fine Art America profile to see if I have it available already. If you don’t find it there, visit “purchasing” for availability and terms.
“Winter Sunset Reflections”


“Winter Sunset Reflection”, 7″ x 17″, pastel on black paper © Bernadette E. Kazmarski
It’s not winter yet but the trees are bare and today’s afternoon and evening sky were completely free of clouds. Just after the sun dropped below the horizon that pure blue of twilight smoothed the sky but for the glow above the horizon. I knew it was coming and hurried to my favorite place to watch the sunset, on a hill with a long view of the landscape, then traveled down to the valley to the Panhandle Trail to see this sight once again.
I painted this scene for my August exhibit “Sun Shadow Ice & Snow: Seasons of the Panhandle Trail” during Rock the Quarry, the annual fundraiser for the Panhandle Trail.
I decided to do this painting at pretty much the last minute, though I’d been visualizing it for years. The scene is one I’ve often seen along the trail on a winter evening. This painting was done from a photo I’d taken one of those winter evenings on the trail, a clear, cold day with a cloudless sky at sunset, the sky reflected on Robinson Run. The velvety darkness of the land contrasts so completely with the brilliance of the sky and its reflection on the water and, simple as it is, it’s always been one of my favorite images.
I used black Canson charcoal/pastel paper and only painted the areas of light and finally achieved what I’d been visualizing.
PURCHASE THIS PAINTING, AND SEE MORE ART
This painting is available for sale, framed, in my Etsy shop, along with prints.
You can see other paintings from this exhibit here.
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If you are interested in purchasing this painting or any other originals I have posted here on Today, please contact me. I will also have prints of this painting after the exhibit.
Award of Excellence for “Snowfall”


“Snowfall”, pastel, 11″ x 8″ © Bernadette E. Kazmarski
I submitted three paintings and I learned that I’d won an award in the South Hills Art League annual juried show. Above, “Snowfall”, which I’d shown in my exhibit “Sun Shadow Ice & Snow: Seasons of the Panhandle Trail”, won in the second highest award category, “Award of Excellence”. Of the three pieces I entered I’m surprised this one was a winner, but I like snow, so why not? The original is for sale, framed, for $250, as well as prints for $25.00 each, which I will add to my Etsy shop after the opening reception tonight along with the other two paintings.
If you are local, please join us tonight:
Opening reception Saturday, October 11, 6:30 to 8:00 p.m.
Exhibit open Friday, October 10 through Sunday, October 19, 2014
The Galleria Of Mt. Lebanon
1500 Washington Road, Pittsburgh, PA 15228
Below is the story behind the painting, and below that are the other two paintings I entered in the exhibit.
It isn’t always eternal summer on the trail, though memories might make us think so. Winter is my favorite season to paint. I love the subtleties of color and shape with snow in the air and on the ground, and on the trail I am often all alone with the quiet of a winter day, or a gentle snowfall.
In this case, I was glad for the time alone and quiet, and my art materials. This is from several years ago, one of the sketches I’d actually done in the front seat of my car during a late winter ice and snow storm, with a personal connection. I’d moved my mother to a personal care home in a neighborhood adjacent to the trail and often combined visits to the trail and visits to my mother. She didn’t care at all for trails, but she thought it was pretty cool when I would pull up in front of the home on my bicycle in shorts and a tank top to visit and cool off and eat my lunch on a summer afternoon when all the other daughters were in jogging suits driving minivans. Though my mother suffered from a number of heart and lung conditions she was overall well but weak, though she often suffered from mild dementia; visits could be troubling.
So it was this winter day when I had driven there. The roads were cleared but the trail was not, still, I wanted a dose of nature after my visit and knew of a spot close where I could pull up next to the trail. Not a mark was in the deeply fallen snow, and I decided I would not be the one to leave mine, it was just too perfect. The snow was falling too heavily to work outside my car, so I angled my car just right and sat in my font seat and began a sketch, then decided I should leave before the roads grew worse.
I’d always intended to finish this off, adding some bare trees fading into the distance in the heavy snowfall, but I think there was a reason I stopped at this point, and I think it captures this snowy afternoon and my conversations with my mother as it is.
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A Bend in the Road (sold), prints available

“A Bend in the Road”, pastel, 14″ x 22″ © Bernadette E. Kazmarski
The Swimming Hole, $350

“The Swimming Hole”, pastel, 17″ x 8″ © Bernadette E. Kazmarski
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If you are interested in purchasing this painting or any other originals I have posted here on Today, please contact me. I will also have prints of this painting after the exhibit.
Backlit Bouquet


Backlit Bouquet
I photographed this scene for the obliquely backlit combination of bold yellow coneflower and delicate wormwood, but all the varied patterns and shades of green in the background, silhouettes, shadows, blurs and bokeh, were too interesting to crop out.
Your beauty
delicate, ephemeral, eternal;
had I not chanced by
as setting sun journeyed deep into the autumn woods
to touch your face
you would still have been
as beautiful.
verse ©2014 Bernadette E. Kazmarski
That is the first draft of a new poem, written just now after I posted this photo. We’ll see what it develops into some time in the future.
September 7: I have an edited version of this poem in progress…once I’d written the rest, I found I just didn’t need those two first lines, they felt heavy and formal, and without them I found I could reorganize the lines of the poem, especially that really long one that I couldn’t split before. I also changed the word “journeyed” to “reached” because it was more of what I’d intended, remembering the sunlight that day as it moved down toward the horizon and reached and touched different spots deep in the woods. Added a comma too.
Had I not chanced by
as setting sun
reached deep into the autumn woods
to touch your face,
you would still have been
as beautiful.
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If you are interested in purchasing this painting or any other originals I have posted here on Today, please contact me. I will also have prints of this painting after the exhibit.
My Booth Friday Night

My exhibit Friday night.
Last night was a lovely night–a little warm and humid but well attended, lots of visitors, the rain held off until after we left and I’ve sold a few things already! I had wanted to share this photo on social media last night but simply could not get enough of a signal so I’m posting it here. Hopefully I’ll be able to share today–after a foggy, soggy morning has turned into blue skies with pretty puffy clouds.
Looking forward to a great day during Rock the Quarry in my exhibit “Sun Shadow Ice & Snow: Seasons of the Panhandle Trail”. Take a look at other paintings from this exhibit.
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If you are interested in purchasing this painting or any other originals I have posted here on Today, please contact me. I will also have prints of this painting after the exhibit.