AD 102 | Mia Bergeron x JDH
“The Symptom Of A True Calling”
“The Symptom Of A True Calling”

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.

Show Notes:
- 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

www.miabergeron.com