The Artist
Linda Bergeron
She was a toddler standing in her mother's lap at church, painting in the air with her hand. The paintings were large. She reached into all the corners. She could not sit still.
She has never sat still since.
Linda Bergeron / Goodyear, Arizona
The Beginning
Linda Bergeron grew up in the Midwest making things in her father's woodshop and experimenting in whatever medium she could find. She lay in the grass watching clouds turn into animals. She made friends with the butterflies. She paid attention to everything everyone else walked past.
At Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, she earned her BFA. Three professors changed the direction of her life. Orland Rourke was the first person who understood her as an artist. Duane Mickelson taught her to observe the details of nature that others had overlooked. David Boggs taught her to trust her own perspective.
Studying art history abroad, she fell in love with the French Impressionists: Monet and Van Gogh above all. She became obsessed with the way their paintings shift under different light, the way Monet's "Haystacks" are never quite the same painting twice. She has built that quality into every piece she makes.
The Work
She builds paintings in layers: eight, sometimes ten, sometimes more. The texture rises off the canvas. Collectors reach out to touch them. In certain light the surface catches a jewel-like quality that photographs cannot fully communicate.
She begins every uncertain painting the same way: small circles of blue paint, every shade, covering the entire canvas. It brings her back to herself. From there, the layers accumulate until something appears that was not planned. That is when the real painting starts.
She is drawn to animals and has been since childhood. She wants the viewer to feel what she felt in the moment she first saw the subject. The gaze of a tiger at the zoo. A hummingbird suspended at the feeder. Two pelicans committed to each other at the edge of a lake. She believes that animals carry emotions the same way people do, and her paintings try to prove it.
Her style is impressionistic impasto: thick, layered, physical. A friend once described it at a dinner party as "abstract nature art, building in colorful layers like a forest floor, with dramatic physical depth, alive with texture, shadow, and hidden detail." That is as good a description as any.
Movement and Dance
Before she was a full-time painter, she was a dancer and a gymnast. That history lives in how she moves around a canvas, in the physical energy of the brushwork, in the rhythm she seeks between light and dark, conscious and subconscious, ambiguity and clarity. She does not paint from a single position. She circles. She steps back. She takes the canvas into different light to see what it reveals.
Teaching
She has taught art to students of all ages for decades, including three decades working with high school students in the Pacific Northwest. She returned to painting full-time after retiring from teaching, and the two things are still connected for her.
Teaching, she says, is like passing on the torch that was given to her. She gives her students the same thing her professors gave her: the belief that their instincts are worth trusting, and that they should realize their full potential and own what they are good at.
She currently teaches watercolor and drawing at Sun City, Arizona, and will be expanding her teaching at Catitude Arts in Goodyear with the Creative Aging and youth programs this fall.
Arizona and the Art Community
Linda is based in Goodyear, Arizona, in the greater Phoenix metro area. She is a member of the Sonoran Arts League and Arizona Art Link and has shown her work in exhibitions across the Phoenix region, including the Herberger Art Gallery in Phoenix. She has also shown her work at The City of Goodyear and the Artist Playhouse and Groundfloor Artists in Surprise, Arizona.
She is actively building relationships with galleries including Anticus Art Gallery in Scottsdale and others in Florida and around the country. Her goal is permanent gallery representation, and she is pursuing it the way she pursues everything: patient, persistent, certain the moment will come.
Commissions
Every painting Linda makes comes from a real moment: an encounter, a feeling that would not leave her alone. Commissioned paintings come from the same place. She works from the collector's story, finding the image that holds it.
Luminous Depths, 36 x 48 x 1.5 inches, acrylic mixed media. Commissioned for a beach home in Florida.
A couple building a beach home in Florida came to Linda with a feeling rather than an image. What they got back was Luminous Depths.
“We commissioned a piece for our beach home in Florida. Bergeron’s organic materials mixed with rich aqua blues creates wonderful textures and reflection which captures light filtering through the shadowy coral landscapes. The interplay of water and sun submerges me into the experience and reflections upon the wonders of marine life.”
Collector, Florida
“We must remain as close to the flowers, grass, and the butterflies as the child is who is not yet so much taller than they.”
“Art is proof that you are paying attention to life. You notice the shades, the silence, the little moments others miss. That is your gift, and it is worth sharing.”
Education
- BFA, Concordia College, Moorhead, MN (1986)
- MACI, University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, MN (1996)
- CTE, Career and Technical Education, Washington State (1997)
- Business Edge Program Graduate, Seattle, WA (2008)
Recognition
Publications
Linda Bergeron's work has been featured in international publications. Her painting was selected for inclusion in Night of 100 Angels, a curated book celebrating artists whose work captures the spiritual and the sublime. The publication brought together painters from across the United States and abroad, and Linda's piece was among those chosen to represent the American West.
IN THE STUDIO
