Featured Artist for March - May 2001

Featured GiveAway by Ciel Bergman Antidote #12 (Mitochondria) , 1996, Oil On Canvas, 8" x 16" Valued at $1700

Glenn Maziar Glendora, CA

Ciel Bergman

Ciel Bergman was born in Berkeley, California on September 11th, 1938. She considers her family to be of the working class. She has many hereditary roots in the arts on both her paternal and maternal side. In fact, Ciel legally changed her name in 1988 on her 50th birthday in honor of her maternal grandmother. Emma Bergman arrived from Sweden to the United States in 1887 as a poet who hoped to create the life of a writer in her new country. She did not realize her dream. Ciel had the good fortune, unlike her grandmother, to be educated and have the financial means to pursue her call as a painter.

Changing her name from Cheryl Bowers was purely a spiritual decision and nothing more. She chose the name Ciel which means sky or heaven in French because all of her life, the first thing she does each morning is gaze at the sky which she believes to be the most direct canvas indicating environmental health of the planet. She kept the same initials: COB, in order not to go too far from her given name Cheryl, maiden name Olsen and her married name Bowers. Some of her collectors became very upset over this name change since she had built her career from her original name. She naively had no idea the upheaval it would cause her collectors who have now, hopefully come to understand her spiritual decision.

Ciel has been environmentally active as far back as she can remember. Over the 50 years she lived in California, she's watched the skies become polluted. She derived a method where she counted on her horizontal fingers the smog levels rising in the Santa Barbara Channel due to the introduction of many oil wells over the years.

Red Light on the Chase Board, Acrylic on unstretched linen, 84" x 144", 1974 $20,000

She has produced images all her life but did not make the determination to give her life to painting until 1967 when she was 27. Married, a mother of two children, she divorced when she determined she'd "live by painting or die!" She is 62 years old now and has been painting seriously for 35 years. All her work on paper is signed with initials on the front. All her paintings carry both signatures on verso for the first twelve years after changing her name and presently signs only Ciel Bergman on the back of the work.

Ciel is largely self-taught. She spent hours in The Brundage Collection of Asian Art at the De Young Museum in San Francisco during her formative years. She is influenced largely by Asian aesthetics rather than the conventional European perspective. She drew every night through nursing school where she received an R.N. in Psychiatry at Santa Rosa School of Nursing in the late 1950’s. She also lived in Europe in the 1960's, during which time she visited all the major paintings that comprise patriarchal art history in London, Berlin, Florence, Rome and Paris. She then returned to California to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree with honors from the San Francisco Art Institute under Fred Martin in 1973.

The Last Sunset of the 20th Century Oil on canvas 48" x 84", 1999 $16,000

There are 2 artists who were important to her development. Peter Blos, a German Jewish man living in Berkeley, who painted the portraits of the University of California Berkeley Chancellors. He also journeyed into the Southwest desert each year during the 40's & 50's to paint portraits of Hopi people. Interestingly enough, the desert is where Ciel calls home now. Also Vincent Perez of the California College of Arts and Crafts with whom she studied privately.

Bergman has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at major galleries and museums in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, Brussels, Belgium and London, England. Her work is in a number of public and private collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Oakland Museum of Art, The San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, The Santa Barbara Museum and Orange County Museum of Art. In addition, Ciel's work is also in several corporate collections including, The Gap, The Capitol Group, Banco di Roma and Atlantic Richfield.

Ciel is the recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in Painting, The Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art (SECA) from the San Francisco Museum and was included in the 1975 Whitney Biennial of American Art. Bergman has also received fellowships from the Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque and the Vermont Art Colony and School. In 1987, she was invited to submit for an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award.

Having taught at several institutions of higher learning, including the University of California Berkeley, in 1976, she joined the Department of Art Studio, Painting and Drawing Faculty at the University of California Santa Barbara where she became a tenured Full Professor of Art. After 18 years of teaching, Bergman resigned her appointment early to become a full-time painter and has moved to the quiet wilderness of Northern New Mexico.

Rose Petal and Ash Oil On Linen On Panel 16" x 22", 2000 $3000

Ciel's work has been discussed in several books: including, "The Reenchantment Of Art", by Suzi Gablik; "The Once And Future Goddess" by Elinor Gaddon; "Yesterday And Tomorrow" and "California Women Artists" by Sylvia Moore and "California Painters" by Henry Hopkins. She is also listed in Who’s Who Of American Women and has delivered lectures throughout the United States.

Ciel loves relationships in collaboration, beauty, taking responsibility, being deeply responsive, and showing and feeling gratitude for the connectedness of all species. She values humility and listening. The natural world is her eternal teacher. Afterall, she lives in the high desert where she comes across ancient seabed rocks, lizards, tarantulas and rattlesnakes. She dislikes the negative aspects of "culture" versus "nature" which produces mediocrity, cynicism, insensitivity, irony, waste, shame, blame and any dogmas that imprison and suppress original thinking. She has written numerous papers on this subject and is very concerned about the direction of an overpopulated, corporately driven society.

Here There Is Rock and No Water Oil on canvas 72" X 96", circa 1989 $ 18,000

Ciel works because she is driven to do so. She sees it as just her job as a painter and indicates "I am only one witness and I can only, it seems, do it in paint. I am a painter, it is that simple."

She reads voraciously and broadly. She hikes, climb mountains and swims in wild lakes. She sacredly and tenderly holds her long term friendships as she grows older and wants every moment to "count" for something. Ciel does have diversionary needs and gardens but retains her purposes for such. She does not seem to have any time for hobbies but is learning to drum on an Ethiopian jembe and wants to learn to blow a didgeridoo.

Antidote #40 Oil on Canvas 48" x 84", 2000 $15,000

Bergman's work comes across with emotion akin to ecstasy and pain. Her paint is liquid matter; therefore the only limitation on its use is her imagination. She's fundamentally interested in what paint, wielded as it has been for centuries, is still able to communicate. She utilizes traditional materials and techniques like oil paint, linseed oil, wax, turpentine and various other additives such as underpainting, building and glazing. Her need to paint is a life force and "an essential expression for the intensity of the awe (beauty) and the terror (horror) of being alive."

What drives her vision seems to be a need to locate a particular psychological or spiritual orientation of perception, a ‘genetically felt’ space in which a simultaneous multiplicity of disparate realities coexists. Ciel is drawn to work which engages compassion and wants her work to pulse with "Psyche and Soul."

ARTIST STATEMENT

I would like my work to give honor to the viewer so they feel the fragility of all relationships in the web of life. How fragile and intricate it all is and have the courage to break through the illusion of the superiority of homo sapiens so we may find some peace and courage to embrace THE WHOLE. I am driven by a vision. Not my own ego. It is a Given. It is a Gift. I surrender. ~ Ciel Bergman