Award-winning artist Mia Bergeron loves her work – except that most children do not like to sit very long when she is painting their portraits.
But the former New Yorker has had no trouble wanting to stay in Chattanooga awhile to pursue her career.
In fact, although she came here on somewhat of a whim just last year, she has found the city ideal for her young career both in amount of work and encouragement.
“I love Chattanooga,” she said. “I’m really impressed and I keep getting more impressed. Progressively the community seems like it makes art a priority, which is unusual for a smaller town. When you live in a big city, you live almost anonymously.”
The daughter of French Canadians, who formerly ran a graphic design firm in New York, Ms. Bergeron first began following her calling to be an artist professionally in 1998. That year, she began attending the Rhode Island School of Design.
Someone who loved to draw since the age of three and a descendant of a long line of artists, she later attended the Charles H. Cecil Studio in Florence, Italy.
While living with her mother in Atlanta last year, she happened to read about the 4 Bridges Arts Festival in Chattanooga and its program for developing artists. She had visited the Tennessee Aquarium as a child, but had never spent much time here.
Through the Association of Visual Artists, she was able to get a free booth during the festival, received some complimentary business cards and had her work critiqued by an art jury.
During the festival, the general public ended up giving her pretty high marks as an unofficial art jury.
“It fared so well that I got some commissions to do some portraits,” she said.
She began leasing a studio in the Chattanooga Bank Building and moved up last June.
Besides commissions, she has also received some recognition. Every month, the online version of American Artist magazine selects an artist and features his or her work. Ms. Bergeron received the honor in January.
More recently, she won an even more prestigious honor. The magazine also does a competition every year to have an artist’s work appear on the cover of its regular magazine. Although her work was not chosen for the cover, she was one of only a small number of the thousands of entrants named as a finalist.
“I didn’t get the cover but I got featured in the magazine,” she excitedly said.
Ms. Bergeron’s work, which is usually oil on linen, seems to have a classic look reflective of some of the European masters of old. She calls her style classic naturalism.
“You try to get certain effects that happen when you paint from life rather than from photographs,” she said.
She said that she generally tries to get people to pose for her in person for her portraits. But with children, especially, getting them to pose for long is sometimes difficult. So, she usually takes pictures after painting an initial layout.
Ms. Bergeron, whose first language is French, also does a lot of what she calls figurative landscape paintings, which feature a person or persons in a natural setting.
She also occasionally does charcoal drawings, smaller oil sketches and busts.
A typical workday is also fairly eclectic. She said she usually begins around 9 a.m. by looking at art books for ideas and inspiration. If she does not have a model coming to her studio, she works on some uncompleted commissioned portraits.
In the afternoon, she works on some of her own paintings, often using friends as models. “I am lucky I can paint all day,” she said.
She said that her time in Chattanooga has probably been the most productive eight or nine months of her life, including when she was a student in Italy.
Despite all the work and encouragement she has found in Chattanooga – as well as the early spring she has enjoyed – she has still felt a pull to return eventually to New York, where most of her family is.
Although she is still deciding on her permanent place of residence, she is certain about continuing as an artist.
“Through painting, I find that other parts of my life are explained,” she said. “When I am painting a portrait, there will be something in it that finds its way into my life – a little magnifying glass into what is out there.”
(Ms. Bergeron’s website is www.miabergeron.com).
John Shearer
jcshearer2@comcast.net