WHITEFISH FALLS—It’s a long road from drawing rabbits in the dirt with a stick at a Communist concentration camp in Tito’s Yugoslavia to featured artist at one of Northern Ontario’s premier juried art exhibits, but for Peter Bering it has been a very rewarding journey.
Mr. Bering was born in Molin, Yugoslavia to a prosperous family of Schwabian farmers and his first memories of drawing were as a precocious four-year-old child drawing pictures on the ground for the other children in the camp.
Soon Mr. Bering would be holding his mother’s and grandmother’s hand as they made their way across the rough and wild Yugoslav wilderness to slip into Austria as refugees, finally making their way to Canada in 1941.
“I remember the art teacher in my school had gotten a watercolour set and when the other children went outside to play baseball he asked if anyone wanted to try their hand at art,” recalled Mr. Bering. “When the teacher saw what I had drawn he asked where I had studied art. He didn’t believe me when I told him I never had.”
The teacher took Mr. Bering’s artwork and, using his own money for the entry fee, put it in a local art competition. “That is how I won my first prize, I had come first in the West Lorne Fair of 1953,” he said. He has never looked back.
He went on to become an arts educator himself, teaching for 34 years with the Windsor Board of Education after attending university at Windsor, Wayne State in Michigan and the Ontario College of Art And Design. He has also taught drawing and painting at the Art Gallery of Windsor as well as prospective art teachers at the Windsor faculty and the Ministry of Education. But through it all, he has continued to pursue his own love of the canvas and his works hang in private and public galleries across North America and Europe.
“I just completed my 599th work,” he said.
But over the next few days, Mr. Bering will have to set aside his brushes as he fulfills his role as chair of the LaCloche Art Show selection jury.
As this year’s featured artist, Mr. Bering will also be teaching a workshop on Friday, June 29 at 4:30 pm for all artists that have entered the show.
Within the show, Mr. Bering’s work will be featured on two walls, while one of his works will be raffled as a fundraiser for the show.
His work often contains a little whimsical surprise hiding among the elements in his work.
“My expressions often contain realistic imagery,” he notes in his art’s statement, “but never to just imitate a camera. Rather, recognizable elements are used to symbolically evoke and exemplify a mood, thought, spirit, sensation, experience, energy or atmosphere. Sometimes the symbolic evolutions are meant to reveal a lesson or story to the receptive mind’s eye. Because every human has taken a different life’s journey, the uniqueness of good art is that every viewer takes a different ‘mind’s eye journey’.”
“I am very honoured to be selected as the featured artist this year,” said Mr. Bering, who added that he is looking forward to his role on the jury and sharing what he has learned over his lifelong pursuit of his passion. He has been a regular contributor to the show himself since 2006.
The LaCloche Juried Art Show will take place from June 30 to Sunday, July 8 from 11 am until 5 pm daily and there is no admission fee.
