Ciel Bergman, Berkeley-born painter and art professor, dies

Ciel Bergman, a Berkeley High School yell leader who once modeled for a Norman Rockwell painting, then later became an acclaimed postmodern landscape painter in Santa Barbara and Santa Fe, has died at 78.

The cause of death was lung cancer, said her daughter, Bridgit Koller.

The gallery had represented Ms. Bergman since a show called “The Last Sunset of the 20th Century,” for which she made a painting of nearly every Santa Fe sunset of 1999.

A human response to the world of nature, said Peter Selz, professor emeritus for the History of Art department at UC Berkeley.

Once a registered nurse who worked in a hospital psychiatric ward, Ms. Bergman was a struggling single mom of two when she couldn’t resist the pull of her art.

Upon graduation, she became a lecturer in painting and drawing at both UC Berkeley and California State University Hayward (now Cal State East Bay).

In 1975, she got a SECA Award in painting from SFMOMA and was also featured in the 1975 Whitney Biennial, an exhibition of contemporary American art hosted every two years at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

Ms. Bergman had been appalled by all the litter on the beach, so she and her students went out and collected enough trash to fill seven garbage bins and installed it at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Art Forum.

While on the faculty at UCSB, Ms. Bergman traveled to China, where she had an epiphany to only make paintings of beauty from that point on.

Ms. Bergman fell in love with the raw landscape and eventually gave up her tenured position at UCSB and bought 280 acres of high desert in the New Mexico wilderness.

In 1956, she graduated from Berkeley High School where she was head varsity yell leader, which led to a brief stint as an art studio model.

“She was warm and enthusiastic about her surroundings, about beauty, about nature,” said her sister, Janice Leiser of Piedmont.

“I have strived to create work that is sensuous, luminous, alive with emotional heat, honest and transcendental,” Ms. Bergman stated on her website, www.cielbergman.com.