June 2024: Bergen Rose and Evelyn Woods

Bergen Rose has painted in distant locales from Nepal to Norway, inspired by landscape and culture. She began serious pursuit of her art in 1979 after participating in Judy Chicago’s now historic Dinner Party Project, which opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and is now a permanent acquisition of the Brooklyn Museum. Bergen has exhibited her work for over 40 years in Los Angeles, New York, Portland, Seattle and Europe.
Considered an emotional and intuitive painter, as well as a landscape and figurative artist, with an appreciation for the surreal and view toward the abstract, Bergen’s work contains quiet narratives within dreamy and often blue views of light, land, water and sky, coupled with geometry within many layers of paint. The titles of her work and the light-infused ethereal views mirror bits of her own interior-scape, and often reflect aspects of humanity
Born in Washington D.C., Bergen spent some of her early childhood living on a farm with grandparents in Oklahoma after her mother took ill. Her grandmother, a woman of few words, painted images of their rural surroundings. She put a paintbrush in Bergen’s hand, and Bergen never let go.
In addition to painting, she is currently working in ceramics, creating textured kiln fired clay figures with various clays and glazes. Her influences and inspirations include many artists – her favorite being Nicholas DeStaël, as well as Stephen De Staebler, Turner, Inness, Nathan Oliveira, a handful of other artists, and the poetry of Rilke, Lorca, Rimbaud, Dylan Thomas and Leonard Cohen, to name a few... The inspired visuals that continually hold her interest are within nature itself, the sky and the sea, the innocent world of animals, and an aesthetic to find simplicity with random, irregular, and imperfect beauty... She paints because she has deep feelings for nature, for beauty and for humanity, and strives to express and connect those feelings with her art...