This biography from the Archives of AskART:
| Dot Bardarson is a contemporary Northwest regionalist painter, noted for her watercolors of Alaska. Her works depict everyday life and objects, as well as images of nature, such as the lights of the aurora borealis.
She graduated with a degree in Art from Lasell College and continued her studies at the University of Washington and the University of Alaska.
Her early career included deck-handing on a work boat and raising her family in locations of remote fish canneries. Bardarson then went on to win awards for her watercolors and also public art commissions.
Bardason favors shapes and movements that are bigger than life, and her Northwest themes are typically exuberant, with colorful and balanced design. One example would be her work Concert in the Park, inspired by the Friday evening summer concerts that she had attended for many years in Juneau's waterfront park. Bardarson said she would sketch while she enjoyed the band and other types of music.
"The actual painting took well over two months to complete. Many of my friends, neighbors and their children were my models but didn't know it, since I don't particularly create a true likeness." Another, entitled Gathering Beach Grass depicts women harvesting the beach grass that grows along the Bering Sea coast and is excellent for basket weaving. "The women of each village seem to have their own styles of basket weaving, and one can readily identify which area a basket comes from. This woman's home is in Buckland but she and most everyone from that village spend their summers at this whaling camp on a Bearing Sea coast bay."
About her work, Winter Fishing, Nome, Bardarson wrote: "Ice fishing comes under the category of "women's work" on King Island in the Bering Sea. Work? Not really. Ice fishing is more of a social activity much loved by young and old. Usually several friends go out together with babies and toddlers and make an afternoon of it. This mother has placed her fish in a semi-circle. When the circle is closed she goes home - an ice fishing custom."
Several years ago Bardarson joined a subsistence family in Chekok on Lake Illiamna, where she did numerous sketches and subsequent paintings. She maintains a cabin in Tenakee, Alaska, where she goes to paint. "Whenever I go to Tenakee for a break from my more or less regular Juneau schedule, my first painting effort usually is inspired by whatever wild flower holds center stage at that time. This year it was daisies. I have no vases in my cabin (it would not be in keeping with my Tenakee life style), hence (I painted them in) the milk can."
Another work depicts simple café life in Tenakee: "An electric cable spool (for a table), a checkered oil cloth (table cloth), plastic chairs and voila, it's Tenakee's sidewalk café, or actually "gravel trail café". Just like Paris; it's fun to sit there with a good cup of coffee and watch the world go by."
She has been an art juror, artist in residence, a theater set designer, as well as a board member of the Alaskan State Council on the Arts.
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