Bernadette Gockowski, Artist

As the fourth of six children with three highly successful older siblings, I didn’t have many untried avenues for excellence. I decided early on that I needed to choose one thing that my siblings didn’t do, and focus on it. My parents always encouraged us to draw (my mother was an art major in college), so I stuck with that, drawing so much during the summers that “watching Bernadette draw” became a daily activity for my little brother.

In fifth grade, a visiting artist came to our classroom and taught us to paint a little watercolor with some cheap pan paints. I came home and told my mother that I was going to be an artist when I grew up, and I wanted paints for Christmas.

I got my paints, and I kept painting throughout college, when I majoring in Visual Art and got my K-12 art education teaching license at St. Olaf College. After that, life led me on a series of fortunate (but very non-art related) events, so that I virtually stopped doing art for over ten years.

Becoming a mother to four young children led me to pick up the brush once more. What began as ‘mommy’s alone time’ spread and continues to grow in my heart and in my life.

I can hardly keep from including the human figure in my work. I try to focus on other subjects, but somehow, the building or flower or landscape is only intriguing to me if there is some element of humanity in it. I tried to suppress that tendency in my art for a time, but now I embrace it, and I find my true passion in exploring the beauty of the human person in my art.