Abra Bergen
Hamilton, ON
Abra Bergen is an emerging artist living and working in Hamilton, Ontario, capturing nature, big and small, ‘out there’ and on the urban margins.
Message
Abra Bergen is an emerging artist whose favourite media are pen and ink, watercolour, and pastels. Her favourite subject matter is nature, big and small, ‘out there’ and on the urban margins. She is largely self-taught. She was always a doodler, and for more than a decade now, a professional art model and thus surrounded by art, but only really immersed herself in learning and creating art through the challenges and opportunities the recent pandemic lockdowns provided. She grew up as the youngest child in a large family of Mennonite heritage in the Chihuahuan Desert of Northern Mexico. She now makes her home, with her partner, in Hamilton, Ontario.
Statement
Abra's favourite memories of childhood are of wanderings in nature, through wildflower fields, along shallow creeks and river banks, and in the mountains. These wanderings in nature were formative and deeply meaningful, and though she now lives in another country, she still loves to wander. As an avid hiker, hiking year round for exercise and for nature medicine, she is very much attuned to her environment and regularly spots a scene that moves her, stopping briefly to snap a photo -- a landscape with big woods, water, or sky, the early morning or golden hour sun filtering through the foliage, the stark beauty of ice and snow, wild animals and birds pausing for a moment, wildflowers adding splashes of colour, a bee on a flower, an insect on a branch, or a snail in a curled leaf. These scenes can quite take her breath away or move her to tears. It is in nature, and especially in the company of trees, that she feels a sense of spiritual awe. She hopes, through her art, to convey some of the curiosity, wonder, and awe that she feels. Also, acutely aware of looming catastrophic climate change, there is an urgency to the soaking up of nature and immense gratitude for what we still have. Her art is based almost exclusively on her own references, her own wanderings in nature.