Art Critic Reviews:

"...in her unfashionable search for beauty in art, Bergman renounced what she considers the mainstream of modern art as exemplified by Duchamp's denigration of painting and set out to oppose this trend with an intimate relationship to the beauty of nature. She discovered, however, that the basic elements of air, earth and water had been poisoned. The title of her ongoing series of paintings, "Antidotes," signifies her deep concern about the destruction of the planet and her belief in art's potential as a healing agent.

Bergman's semi-abstract paintings can be read as allegories of a gentler world. Swimming through soft veils of light and a luminous ether, the images which she often introduces into the picture space can suggest shells, leaves, stalks of grass, flowers and their petals. When these forms become too well-defined, however, the paintings lose a bit of their elusive mystery. In some of the finest works, Bergman deploys dark rectilinear bars that locate the surface of the painting, giving a sense of pictorial structure to her lyrical compositions."

-- Peter Selz, Art in America

"...the dark, seductive, moody and potentially violent flowers of Ciel Bergman reveals areas of the female psyche that I've heard about but I have never before experienced. Her landscapes...with or without flowers--are memorable for their fluid pastel colors and strong composition... Here is an artist on a spiritual journey, which we're invited to join if we care to."

-- Edwin Goldman, Art Talk

"[Ciel Bergman] Cheryl Bowers has clearly taken her place with such established California painters as William Wiley, Fred Marin, Jay de Feo, Allan, Brown, Smith, Hudson."

-- Charles Shere, Oakland Tribune

"These are paintings of hope, celebrating the world's beauty while confronting its darkness. There are wounds here, laid bare so that they might be healed, but there is also peace, resolution... Flowers, specifically the iris, have been growing in Bergman's garden of imagery for some time now. But never have they been painted with such force, positioned so unashamedly and given such prominence. Bergman's irises flirt with botanical accuracy, a tendency she quickly undermines with a gestural brush stroke here, and absent detail there. With this latest copy of irises, Bergman forsakes a forced personal iconography for the multiple historical and spiritual sources which have charged this flower for millennia. As the feminine counterpart to the ancient God of the FAX (Mercury), the iris takes center stage because it must; its very presence heralds the arrival of news of great importance, although sometimes it speaks in tongues.

By bathing us in the light of these beautiful canvases, Bergman assures us that forgetfulness, at least, will be eliminated from our long list of excuses if and when nature is finally and irreversibly compromised. The work is a gentle but firm warning, turning our black and white world on its ear. It's a simple decision, really: life or death."

-- Ben Marks, Artweek

"Ciel Bergman makes unabashedly beautiful paintings. Over the last decade, Bergman (formerly Cheryl Bowers) has come to be known on the West Coast as a painter's painter, an artist who relishes the medium, its lushness, liquid color and luminescence. Her penchant for coming up with surprising spacial oppositions, simultaneous views not linked in reality but in the mind, allows for shifting perceptions within one painting. Yet it is the gestalt of this that counts.

What Bergman chooses to paint is fueled by her commitment to a dialogue on critical ecological matters. This is not art about art, fashion, or entertainment. Her sources lie within the surrealist's dream, the romantic's intuition and dynamism, the classicist's sense of order and primarily the spiritualist's openness to forces that supersede individual fate.

In most of these recent paintings, collectively titled "Good Wild Sacred" (borrowed from poet Gary Snyder), the heroine is a flower, the iris, not unfamiliar in Bergman's previous work but here used with a full-blown force of personality. Bergman pulls it off because the choice is not based on the flower's decorative aspects but on its ancient metaphorical power as goddess, restorer of hope, antidote to madness.

The chameleon-like iris takes on several roles. In one painting, the blossom appears courageous, central, frontal, unfurling its petals like a proud ballerina poised before the dance of death--part enchantress, part priestess. In another work, the iris is a bud still wound tightly around itself, encasing its full promise, trembling and expectant.

In A Single Flower in the Ocean, we look at the iris with its ripples of light and peach-pink vapor. Here is nature teetering on the edge of losing its equilibrium. Two small orbs, one black, one white, hovering at either side of the blossom as though it were poised between destruction and discovery--and we ask, is this the last flower, the last of its kind? We take a deep breath and see ourselves inside this process that Bergman has spelled out for us, and we know that the earth cannot be pillaged without also destroying us."

-- Pamela Hammond, ARTnews