Bernard Bortnick
Bernard Bortnick was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the third of four children. His father worked for the Associated Press for forty years, and job transfers took the family from Milwaukee to Chicago and finally to Kansas City, where Bernard was raised. He gravitated toward art early, drawing constantly and drawing inspiration from the Nelson Art Gallery, and after Paseo High School he enrolled at the Kansas City Art Institute. His studies were interrupted by the Korean War, when he joined the Navy and spent four years in Korean and Japanese waters. While in Japan he was deeply impressed by Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel, which set him on a path toward architecture.
After the Navy, Bortnick studied architecture at Washington University in St. Louis, graduating in 1960. That same year he married his wife, a chemist and scholar of Judeo-Espanol, in her hometown of Izmir, Turkey. He then worked for an architectural firm in Rotterdam for two years before the couple moved to Israel, where he worked for various architects. Returning to the United States, they raised their two children in Kansas City and then St. Louis, where Bernard taught briefly at Washington University and worked many years for the firm HOK. Later moves took the family to the Oakland area before an offer from the firm HDR brought him to Dallas, where he has lived for about 31 years.
In Dallas, Bortnick designed a home and, after retiring in 2008, added a studio where he paints in acrylic and watercolor. His work centers on social commentary, addressing subjects such as tangled freeways, poverty, and inequality, and he counts Goya and Daumier among his artistic heroes. He is a member of the Southwest Watercolor Society and participates in the North Dallas Artist Studio Tour, showing work at venues such as the Oak Cliff Cultural Center. Though not religious, he has begun paintings on the theme of Nazi oppression, moved by the murder of his grandmother, grandfather, and aunt in Auschwitz and his grandfather's death in Paris, and hopes to donate related works to the Holocaust center.
Full Transcript
i was born in milwaukee wisconsin uh however i didn't live there very long uh i'm um i'm the um third of four children that my parents had my i was preceded by an older brother and a sister my older brother has passed away but my sister is living in saint louis now in any case i also have a younger brother who is a physician he's a retired physician he lives in kansas city and that's where i was raised i was raised in kansas city after my father who worked for the associated press for 40 years as he was transferred from milwaukee to chicago and hence
after a couple of years in chicago when i was a child we ended up in kansas city and so i was really raised in kansas city and that's where my uh early youth uh my uh that's where i was raised having had a um a a primary school education high school education and after high school um i uh i attended the kansas city art institute which is a pretty well-known institution that has very good facilities it's now part of the university of missouri uh at kansas city and uh have extensive uh grounds there and facilities in any case not having been a uh a very
good student scholastically in high school i uh gravitated toward the to the arts actually really very early on and um uh spent a lot of time drawing and uh drawing uh all kinds of as children do are very often weird things but i also had had some exposure to the to the nelson art gallery which is a major art institution in the midwest and in kansas city and i didn't go there for lessons as some children did i have a very good friend who recently died who used to go there for for art lessons and he became a famous painter and uh i have been
in touch with him for many years robert morris in any case i attended uh the grade school and then high school paseo high school and uh then the casualty art institute however my art ambitions were interrupted by the uh korean war and uh rather than uh as i often have pointed out uh draft boards were interested in getting artists into foxholes and i was determined not to end up that way so i joined the navy and that was a fortuous condition because the north koreans had no navy at all so he had no conflict or combat with them and so i ended up in korean
and japanese waters for a whole tour of duty that consisted of four years of of being being back and forth between the united states san diego and uh and japan and uh during that time of course i had no time to uh pursue my art interests uh however on one occasion when i was in san diego i did attend the coronado school of fine arts for a very brief period and at that time they had happened to have a competition for the for an annual officer's ball at the hotel del coronado and they had a competition for for an advertisement for that ball and i
participated and i won the competition and so my poster and uh was on exhibit there at the uh at the ball and which incidentally i didn't attend i don't know why i probably had i probably was on the ship that had uh duty at that time but in any case i uh i didn't do that and so during my uh tour of uh uh the navy which was a four year length uh four-year period i also uh decided that after having been in japan and visited a famous uh project a frank that frank lloyd wright designed in 1922 the imperial hotel and i was very
impressed with that building and suddenly i had the inspiration that i was going to be an architect and so my i developed another mindset architecture being a related related art to painting and drawing and so on i thought that i would excel in that profession so i was determined to become an architect and in order to do so i uh having always been very poor in mathematics i decided that i better brush up and uh get a course in algebra which i i uh took at the uh while i was on on the ship and it was a correspondence course out of the university of
wisconsin in any case i became an accomplished expert in algebra and by the time i was discharged four years after i had joined i am determined to become an architect i went back to kansas city and applied to various architectural schools well among those that accepted me was the washington university in st louis and so that's where i ended up getting my architectural education so i became i graduated in 1960 and also got married in the same year my wife is from turkey and we were married in izmir and she's engaged in her own studies and uh although she's a um a chemist by train
by training academic training she's always been interested in a language and uh specifically and judeo espanol which is an expert at and one of the world leaders in that language in any case uh i spend a lot of time here in my studio with either watercolor or acrylic painting i don't do sculpture although i had a sculpture teacher at in kansas city when i was attending who was determined that i should be become a sculptor ross winter thought that i would be a great sculptor and so i but that as i said that was all abruptly cut short after two years when i had to
uh join when i joined the navy and so uh i ended up becoming an architect i graduated in 1960 i was i excelled in drawing which happened to be a big bonus and in uh so my studies in art school didn't go entirely to waste and that supplemented my abilities in architecture and after my graduation i had a professor of architecture who was from holland he had a large firm in holland and he taught at the school for uh for six months and i after i was very impressed with him and his name was bakama jacob bakuma and uh he had a firm fondant brook
and bakama in rotterdam and i asked if i could become a member of that firm and he agreed to that and after some negotiations uh and after our marriage my marriage and uh with my wife and incidentally we were married in izmir turkey uh that's her hometown so i met her entire family and uh we stayed there for a couple of months until after we were married and then i went to holland and i worked there for two years doing architectural projects for not only in holland but also in europe primarily housing projects but along with the development of those projects i did a lot
of drawing and i have many sketches of the of uh my uh having supplemented the work that i was doing there with drawings that accompany that and i was greatly appreciated by my employers there in uh in rotterdam and uh so after two years in holland we decided that we were going to move to israel and that's where that's what we did uh my wife was very strongly in favor of doing that and so in 1962 we moved to israel and we lived in israel for a couple of years and i worked for various architects in israel doing various kinds of projects and uh one
of which was uh published in the architecture dodged week a french magazine and but after two years i we decided to come back to the united states and so we ended up again in kansas city and by this time we had two children and so we uh we began to raise them in and then i got an offer to teach at washington university and so that's precisely what i did i took up a teaching position so we moved to st louis and we lived there for 17 years however i only taught for two years and then i continued working for an architectural show in the
architectural profession uh for helmets about casabam also known as hok i worked for them for 17 years and did uh any number of all kinds of projects all of which were supplemented by drawings that i had uh that i was very uh committed to and and uh accompanying the projects that i did so um i uh continued working for hlk and then i got an offer from uh guillobatta who's the design head of the firm he suggested i that we moved to san francisco for to the firm there so we packed our bags sold her house and moved to san francisco we didn't live in
san francisco we ended up living in oakland so we lived there for six and a half years and i worked for hlk during that period and uh did all kinds of projects and uh i won't go into that but uh uh i then uh got an offer to move to dallas and to work for another architectural firm uh called hdr used to be known as hennings and durham and richardson now just known as hdr it's the large architectural and engineering firm nationwide and has offices in dallas so i ended up uh accepting a position in dallas and that's what brought me to dallas and that's
where we have been for the past 31 years and uh so i uh after i we settled down here i decided i would uh we we bought a lot and built a house i designed a house and and actually a duplex and we live in a half of it and uh and uh i subsequently in 2008 after i retired the year i retired i decided to to build an addition a studio and that's what you see behind me is the studio edition that i added on to our existing hollis and so i spent quite a bit of time here doing acrylic painting and doing uh
watercolor i'm a member of the southwest watercolor society here in dallas and i attend their meetings and exhibitions and i also enter the north dallas artist studio tour which takes place periodically during the pandemic of course has been suspended but it will take place again soon so i'm uh i'm active in different uh art artistic endeavors i currently have a painting at the uh at the uh oak cliff cultural center i periodically get calls to display work and i had an exhibition uh just recently of a lot of quite a few paintings and a one-man show and so i seek opportunities to uh display my
work and my the gist of my work is primarily uh focused on um social commentary i would put i would put it that way so behind you you see a number of things would suggest that and uh so this is what i do uh i have a a website uh it's a simple uh to access www.bernardportnik.com and uh for those who are interested and i also display now and then so i do watercolor and acrylic i like the water media because it's simple easy cleanup and uh the uh very uh it's very uh effective and uh acrylic paint dries immediately as opposed to watercolor which
takes forever to dry and you have to keep working into it so frankly i haven't done an oil since 1962 i have one oil painting that's left for years at the kansas city art institute and that's hanging in our house but other than that um that is about uh my that gives you an overview of what i've been doing art is a medium of expression and it depends upon what you have and bouncing around in your in your head as to what you want to express some people are uh inclined to a more romantic vision i am not i have a critical outlook on the
uh social scene and so my work tends to be uh to dwell on that aspect of our lives and on the condition of of the country and of people and so you can um now for example this painting that i have here uh what does that suggest to you well it's pretty clear that it's a tangled network of uh freeway and uh that these are abominations these freeways and the whole as far as i'm concerned the whole auto thing is an abomination um and uh so i look at the uh at the automobile industry and as much as we all need one or two we
happen to have two as a a very negative aspect of human life and so to emphasize that the freeways that we that we have are really weird and uh the one that i have i'm making a painting of shows just exactly how tangled and idiotic they can be and uh this is just taken for granted by a lot of people they use them i use them but uh they're terrifying and uh there is a famous renaissance perspectivist painter or he wasn't really a painter he was a a graphic extremely accomplished graphic artist his name was piranesi and he did some extremely elaborate uh drawings he
always did drawings on on plates and publish these things he did the these drawings on copper plates and then made prints from them they were very popular with the english nobility who uh who made trips to europe and to especially into italy so he made a good living out of selling these prints of uh dilapidated images of rome of ancient rome the ruins of rome and uh the uh the english and other sources in europe the aristocracy loved these images because they were very nostalgic and and uh gabe and i gave an impression of uh a sort of a romantic idea of how things were
but in any case uh the the uh piranesi uh would love the our scrambled uh highway systems and overpasses and so on is that just the kind of thing he excelled in making drawings and things like that in any case i'm also intrigued by that the the images and the forms that are that come about as a result of the automobile so i have a few paintings on the automobile thesis and um so i don't think that these were could be considered beautiful paintings or necessarily the painting can be beautiful but the subject is not particularly beautiful and so it's an ugly subject beautifully rendered
uh that's my aspiration in any case so my style is um i once described it as um uh how would it be described well i don't recall what the the descriptive term i used um there is a lot of i do a lot of figurative uh work and it's somewhat stylized uh and uh i had a term for it that was um but i don't recall in any case i do a lot of figurative work yes and with a uh emphasis on social aspects of of life so that's basically as close as i can get describing my style um some of my heroes in painting
are are damier and goya goya is the greatest and he had he was a he was a great painter but other than his painting works his his graphic work was really very compelling and very good a commentary about his times and about not only his times but about the human condition and so what style would you describe it if it was it couldn't be exactly called realism but it was a figurative work that uh described social conditions and so if you're familiar with goya's work uh he was he was great another another great is damier who was a french artist he was also primarily a
graphic artist although he did some oil paintings and but he lived after his um mature development took place after goya and he was a frenchman um and uh so i do watercolors as well watercolor is a different kind of medium of course than than acrylic acrylic is is you can you can go over it again and again and correct things and and it's opaque watercolor is a very has to be very spontaneous as i see it although some people who are watercolors are labor over their watercolors and do it very carefully and but that's not the way i view watercolor i'm more of a supporter
of john marin who develops a very spontaneous used to develop very spontaneous work very fresh once it's down once it's put down on the paper he leaves it and goes on to the next to the next stroke brush stroke and so it's very uh definite and very definitive in any case that's primarily um what i do in in watercolor is uh and i have some of those now i'll have those i do uh quite a few landscape works in watercolor and watercolor is very amenable for landscape painting much more so than say um acrylic although you can do acrylic paintings i have done uh landscape
acrylic paintings no it doesn't i don't i don't really have any jewish themes i'm not really interested in i'm not interested in religion uh or any any religion except academically right and only and i own it so i don't i don't believe or i don't have a strong [Music] desire to do anything like that however i have done some things that have to do with the oppression of nazi of the nazis since my grandmother and grandfather and aunt were murdered in auschwitz my grandfather took his own life in paris but i have a strong desire to uh do depictions and i started doing some things
like that on that theme but i can only carry it to a certain point and unless you have been there are artists who have gone through those that horror that horror of the camps and the nazi regime that uh painted and drew depictions of that but i could never measure up to their uh emotional level of uh commitment to to do anything that really had um any strong um in the strong development on that theme i have a couple of paintings that i've done that i wanted to give to the holocaust center but i've shown them to them and i will eventually do that but
uh that's primarily where i'm at on that account don't use color in a naturalistic way i don't think it's uh i do a color as purely an emotional aspect of the painting in other words and compositionally uh as a as an item that that contributes to the message of a painting um the the color i try to in on some of the paintings that i do i try to evoke a mood based upon the weather or the atmosphere that exists at the time and when whatever i'm doing and um without pointing out specifically to something i i can't um i can i can talk to
that but um let's see if i can now here's a painting you can see that uh that man yeah who is indigent sleeping on the steps or trying to sleep on the steps and in a very uncomfortable position well he's a black man and that that where he's sleeping at there is a number on the as though it's an address and the number is 1863. well that's the emancipation proclamation and that's the time of lincoln's emancipation proclamation and so that is a commentary as to where that man is relative to emancipation he's not a he's emancipated to misery and to poverty that was that's his emancipation so i don't have much to say about that one but here's one over here for example let's see i saw this image i saw this when i was in chicago i got on the l and uh there were two women there that were having lunch on the train uh in as much as it said no food on a they were having a mcdonald festive
a festival and the mother was overweight and the daughter was on her way to being overweight and just above there's a sign that says i'm loving it which is a mcdonald's sign and that's actually well that's the kind of thing i do um here's a here's a painting that is nothing more than the image of a window and a fishbowl and so this paintings is more or less and you can see by the colorado the walls are not really blue but i took the liberty of making them that way because i felt that the painting required those that coloration well the fish bowl was like
um see what i call this i call that's actually in new york it's called henry street fishbowl and that's what these apartments many of these apartments are like it's like living in a fish bowl way up on top you'll notice there's a painting of an indigent man who is hustling for handouts and passing cars and so that's called overpass so that's the kind of thing i do um i have you know watercolors that i do here and and i do i i also have uh a watercolors of images nature landscapes well to tell you the truth i haven't given a much thought uh however i
am going to give you a good sample both of the landscape as well as the social commentary and uh specifically uh that's the kind of thing i plan to uh to send over to to you what i'd like to uh for people to take away is the um the notion that there is a there are issues out there that need to be addressed when i say out there i mean in society and and that's what i tried to do in my and uh so that would be my the primary my primary interest um you can't be too literal about these kinds of things um i
have a i have a friend who did who's a internationally known artist he recently died um he did he has a number of books that were published on his work and um they're all different and all have different themes for years he did among other things he what you call mazes or you wander through not exactly know knowing where you're going and panels that are set up and in different ways and uh he has one on the lawn of the nelson art gallery in kansas city it's all glass and you wander through uh through this thing and he could never really explain exactly what his
intent was and so it's entirely up to the to the viewers to what they experience what their experience is and um i think that that very much that is uh that's not my intent though my i i have a specific symbols and and uh clues if you want to call it that that are pretty obvious as to what my work is about and uh and what i'm trying to say in uh in the paint and in the uh painters medium and so um that's what i would what i try to convey art of course is that try to say as a medium of expression and
so what are you expressing while you're expressing your perceptions of what the world is like out there and so that's what that's really what my work i think is all about you