By Patricia A. Scheyer
NKyTribune reporter
Michelle Bergman knew that she liked art and crafty things from the time she was little. But a lot of her friends did, too.
It wasn’t until she started high school at Simon Kenton that occasionally people would ask what she wanted to be when she grew up. It started her thinking of the different careers that she could take a look at as a career.
That was when she realized she didn’t want to be a nurse or an accountant or have a retail job somewhere. With each year she was in school she became more sure that she wanted to be an artist.
“I was able to get a full ride scholarship to NKU to study graphic design,” Bergman said. “I worked in that field for a while during the 90’s, and the work fit my schedule.”
Today, Bergman lives in Independence, close to where she went to grade school at St. Cecelia and not far from her high school.
She said she worked in the graphic design field for about 14 years and then did some freelance work, when her kids came along, and now about 25 percent of her creations are commission and 75 percent her own creations. She understood that her graphic design career was not conducive to being a stay-at-home mom.
“I am very much a mixed media artist, so I use a lot of paints and plasters, but then I incorporate things like vintage papers, fibers, and hand stitching, and I emboss patterns into my pieces,” she explained. “So they have definite texture and depth to them. And they’re more representative, not realistic.”
She said when she was in high school her dad put her in private lessons with a teacher in Walton who took her into her adult classes, and she said that started her on a path to becoming more serious about realizing an artist’s career, and creating her own works. The teacher was a German immigrant and taught a very traditional style of oil painting.
From there, Bergman picked up other styles of art, everything she thought could be part of the pieces she creates that tell the story she wants to tell. She realizes that she is very eclectic in her pieces but that is what makes her work unique, and represents what is uniquely her.
Bergman is one of the artists who were accepted into the Kentucky Crafted Market, the Kentucky Arts council’s signature arts marketplace which will take place at the Kentucky Horse Park’s Alltech Arena in Lexington on March 6, 7 and 8.
She is the only Northern Kentuckian selected to be part of the council’s Kentucky Crafted Program in 2025 and was invited to participate in the Market as a juried participant.
“For more than 40 years artists in the Kentucky Crafted Program have represented the best of the Commonwealth’s art and craft production on local, state, national and international stages,” said Chris Cathers, arts council executive director. “Kentucky crafted artists contribute mightily to the Commonwealth’s global association with artistic excellence and quality craftsmanship.”
He said that Bergman has owned Michelle Bergman studio for more than 30 years, working as a classic oil painter, graphic designer and decorative finisher, and now focusing her work to combine all these styles into her work on canvas and wood panels. Due to her varied backgrounds, he said that Michelle considers herself a mixed media artist and enjoys working with a wide selection of media, including acrylics, textural plasters, charcoal, vintage and hand-painted papers, fibers and unusual tools. Bergman is participating in The Market for the first time.
Bergman decided to apply to the Kentucky Crafted program because she was really interested, for one thing, in meeting other artists and getting connected.
“I am kind of changing my focus of my work,” she said. “So I wanted to start meeting other artists who were doing similar things and then be a part of a professional group that would help promote what I am doing and just add validity to what I do, I guess. Because when I was a professional faux finisher, I was a part of a professional group that did trainings, and, you know, just being part of that helps you make connections with other people in the same career.”
She learned how to do faux finishing, which she said was very popular during the ‘90’s and early 2000’s, so she learned how to work her schedule around her family’s schedule and work in people’s homes. She was doing mural painting, and specialty plasters, like Venetian plasters. She has worked in houses all across the tri-state area doing special finishes on their walls.
She did murals, too, some of them murals for nurseries, and others landscape pieces, all very difficult – things that take a special eye to reduce the piece in her mind’s eye so that the finished product would come together on a huge canvas like a wall with cathedral ceilings.
“Sometimes they would want something specific, like Winnie the Pooh, or sometimes just a storybook theme,” she explained. “Recently I did a whole mural for a home in the Indian Hill area that was the classic Winnie the Pooh look. I think of myself as a chameleon because I am usually able to replicate whatever style they’re looking for.”
Sometimes it required being up on a scaffold, recently a two story scaffolding, with an additional ladder, and she said her husband would hold the ladder so she wouldn’t fall, and she acknowledged that it was a real challenge, but she was always proud of the piece when it was finished. One of her favorite pieces was done in a house on Turkeyfoot Road that had a drawbridge.
“It was a big deal,” she said. “It was about 10 to 15 years ago and part of the Cavalcade of Homes, so I had done several rooms in that house. The favorite one was a very traditional look, almost an old European look, I guess. I worked with the designer at the time, and then I worked at the house for probably 6 to 8 weeks and then came back for other rooms. I wasn’t that crazy about being up that high, but I did it.”
She said now she has come around full circle and is trying to retire from a lot of the big faux finishing jobs because they are so physical. She does do some bespoke wallpaper, which is hand painted wallpaper that she can do in her studio, a made over two car garage.
“So I can paint a large mural that would cover 2 to 4 walls, but I do it on blank wallpaper in my studio and then ship it,” Bergman said. “My husband has helped me rig up a way to do several panels of the wallpaper at a time so I can do about 5 panels at a time, and then get them all matching and then do the next section.”
Bergman and her husband have four grown children, and she said one of them is an artist in Chicago. Besides that daughter, she has one who is an engineer, one a physical therapist and the last one who is finishing college to be a psychological therapist.
Bergman said she loves being in an artistic group with other like minded artists, because it is easy to feel a bit isolated when she is doing her pieces, and getting lost in the process of creating.
“Days can go by and you suddenly realize you really haven’t talked to anyone,” she said with a chuckle. So you have to keep those connections. That’s why I wanted to be in the Kentucky Crafted Program, I hope it will help me find those other people that are near by.”
The Kentucky Crafted Market offers buyers from galleries, shops and online retail venues across the nation the opportunity to select products from the elite group of exhibitors. The Market is open exclusively for vendors on March 6 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and open to the public March 7 and 8 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Sunday.
Bergman also has a website
and instagram at https://www.instagram.com/michellebergmanstudio/. She can be reached at Mbergman@fuse.net, and she has a Facebook page.
She is proud of being part of the Kentucky Crafted program. Even though the exhibits have no specific awards connected to them, she says that just being in the program and having her artwork be part of the exhibit is so elite that it is a high accomplishment on its own.
“Just the process of filling out the paperwork for the entry was eye opening in a way, because it was the whole process of showing that you were a professional at this job, and you now, having marketing copy read, having a biography of yourself read, and explaining what your process is for your art and how you learned it,” she said. “It was a great process for me to go through as well because it made me revisit what I do and put it into words instead of just visuals.”