“EARLY BERNIES”
From the early 1970s to about 2000, Bernard Marks painted just for fun. He wasn’t represented by any gallery, much less a fine gallery in Santa Fe, one of the busiest and best art markets in the world. And he didn’t have any good reason to expect that he ever would be represented by a fine gallery in Santa Fe. He was a Chicago-based businessman, after all… a guy who painted on weekends and vacation trips for the joy of it and happily sold his paintings each summer at outdoor art fairs around the ‘burbs.
The common element in all of those “Early Bernies” is that they were watercolors, a highly portable medium that was easy to set up and take down when he and Martha traveled. And it didn’t hurt that the skill required to produce good watercolors offered plenty of challenges while also giving him a lot of satisfaction. He framed and hung many of them in our home at one time or other.
Bernie’s brother says that from a very early age, Bernie had a knack for turning a quick pencil sketch into a recognizable figure or portrait. Throughout the ’90s, he perfected that natural talent by taking workshops in figure and portrait painting. Usually, he was the only one in the class working in watercolors.
You can see the results of that training on this page and all over this website — be it a single human or animal figure or dozens, expertly set into an oil, acrylic, or watercolor painting.
In the two other watercolor-specific sections of this website you’ll find wonderful originals and prints of many sizes and subjects, including some identified as “Early Bernies.”
But here they are all together in our store… with an “EARLY BERNIE” 25% discount off every piece.
Click each image to see its own page. To get this special discount price, buy directly from that page.
