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Geoff Bernstein
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Geoff Bernstein
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Geoff Bernstein's education as an artist
began early in classes at the Rhode Island School of Design and
continued steadily over a dozen years. Between 1959 and 1962, he
apprenticed to the painter Eugene Massin at the University of Miami,
learning not only the fundamentals of art but honing skills in drawing
and painting, working from live figures, and cultivating the skill of
ambidextrous drawing. Following his apprenticeship, he traveled to
Italy, working at the Academias dei Belli Arte in both Rome and
Florence.
He returned to New York in 1964, where he participated in the Art
Students' League, further sophisticating his skills in life-drawing and
learning etching techniques. Two years later, Bernstein moved to France
and lived there for the next six years; at the Academie des Beaux Arts
he acquired the skill of serigraph printing; and in 1968 worked on
posters in support of the powerful student uprising. During his time in
France he worked and traveled widely, visiting museums throughout the
country and making his way to Spain, the Balearics, and Morocco, all of
whose influences would manifest in subsequent work. in 1971, he studied
etching at the Atelier La Couriere-Frelaut in Paris.
Travel has remained an important facet of Bernstein's working life,
influencing profoundly his evolution as an artist. His interest in
prehistoric art deepened when on his way to California in 1971 he
visited sites of the pictographs and petroglyphs of the American
Southwest, and those motifs have appeared in his work ever since.
Bernstein has traveled extensively through Europe, North and South
America, Indonesia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and the South Pacific,
working intensively in each place.
His work has appeared in exhibitions in the U.S., in England, and in
France. In 1999, a portfolio of his ink-brush drawings was featured in
the literary magazine, Barnabe Mountain Review, whose archives are now
owned by UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library. Bernstein's work can be found
in many permanent collections, including the National Foundation for
the Arts in Washington D.C., various corporate offices, and many
private collections.
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