The Symptom of a True Calling with Mia Bergeron feat. Justin Daashuur Hopkins | AD 102

Mia Bergeron is a figurative oil painter that oscillates between classical and expressionistic painting. Rooted in her upbringing in New York City with continuous exposure to modern art, her paintings also reveal her choice to study classical painting in Florence, Italy under Charles H. Cecil in her twenties. Heavily influenced by historical artists such as Diego Velázquez, Titian, Anthony van Dyck and John Singer Sargent, her paintings are also shaped by current artists such as Alex Kanevsky, Ann Gale, and Adrian Ghenie.

Mia's education was rooted in formal portraiture from life- she spent thousands of hours painting people and watching tweaks in eyebrows, mouths that shifted with fatigue, shoulders that grew heavy. These changes were minuscule, and yet were the markings and delineations of time. She is enamored with the nuance, variation, and subtlety that observation provides. Although narrative has been an undercurrent in Mia's work for years, it is only recently, after being consumed with the purely visual tools she continues to discovered, that she has made it her focus.

Mia has been published numerous times in international magazines. Her paintings have placed repeatedly in both national and international competitions, notably in The Portrait Society of America's International Portrait Competition (2013, 2015). She has participated in the traveling museum show "Women Painting Women". She has also tried her hand as curator for the successful show "Unfurl" at Gallery 1261 in Denver in 2015. She has served as advanced painting adjunct professor at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, and is a continuing instructor through Townsend Atelier, also in Chattanooga, where she resides.

Topics Discussed In This Episode:

• How Justin and Mia met
• Death of a Coworker
• The currency of respect
• How Mia got into figurative painting
• Mia growing up in NYC
• Introverted vs. extroverted tendencies
• How Mia got into oil painting
• An artist vs. a painter's mindset
• Painting as a meditative practice
• Quitting painting then returning to it years later with a fresh perspective
• The necessity for a compulsion to create art
• The symptom of a true calling
• Work-a-holism and obsession
• "The Pool Filter Analogy"
• Addressing fear
• Transcending grief and fear

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