Bernadette Cali is a southern Low Country Artist who has long held a romance with the sea island landscape. Born in New Jersey in 1952, she grew up in a rural dairy farm setting approximately 20 miles outside of New York City. After studying at Rutgers University she longed to leave the hustle of the metropolitan area. A trip to West Africa left her ripe for a love of the South Carolina sea islands when in 1977 she became a resident of Wadmalaw Island. There she found the same elegant hospitality of places such a Ghana and Sierra Leone. Her original watercolors hang in homes and galleries from the Virgin Islands to New York City.
Bernadette has begun a series of large underwater reef paintings but her first love remains the vanishing life style of her friends and neighbors of the islands. She expresses this lifestyle in three print series now out: Rockville, Turn of the Century, On the Road to Rockville and Out to the Islands.
Bernadette lives on the islands where she teaches art and writes an article for the local newspaper.