Painting by local artist included in FCA exhibition and competition
By Rachel Fraser
“Packsaddle Traverse”, by local artist Jean Ann Berkenpas is being featured in the Federation of Canadian Artists (FCA) 2025 Calendar Exhibition and Competition this month. The online exhibition opened June 1st and runs for the month. Pieces accepted to the exhibition were chosen by jury and of those, 14 will be chosen to be featured in the 2026 FCA calendar.
The 24 x 36 in acrylic on canvas painting immortalizes a day in December years ago, when Berkepas went with her second cousin, Karen McKirdy, to shovel out the Swift Creek and Dave Henry cabins, which are operated by McKirdy and her family.
“It’s from kind of a lousy iPhone photo I took,” Berkenpas said, which shows McKirdy skiing across the traverse behind Packsaddle Mountain from the Swift Creek cabins to Dave Henry, when the sun came out and lit everything up.
“The light was really cool, you know how you’re up in the clouds and they’re kind of moving around you, and then it just opened up behind her and just lit up the back of the mountains there.”
An older photo, from the 80s or possibly older, which McKirdy’s father took of Berkenpas’s father skiing, informed the painting’s stylised colouring.
“A lot of the wintertime photos from that era of photography are really kind of purple-blue toned, so I was inspired by that old photo too.”
She says she’s always done art as a hobby but rediscovered it as her kids got a bit more independent, and more recently has spent more time developing her skill and putting her work out there. She applied last winter to the Jasper Artist’s Guild and the Federation and was accepted to both.
This is the second painting she’s had accepted for exhibition at the Federation Gallery; Dusk Shadows on the Rockies, a watercolour on cotton paper, was exhibited in person, and sold, as part of the Gallery’s 2025 Works on Paper exhibition, which ran from April 29th to May 11th of this year.
Berkenpas’s route to exhibiting artist has been a winding one – she’s been a competitive mountain bike racer, a teacher, a farmer and a mom – her education is in biology rather than fine art. She said, though, that her biology studies required a lot of drawing, and as such, her art does utilise her biology education.
Though she has no formal art education, art is part of her family culture.
“My stepdad Dave Pilcher is an incredible artist, and he really encouraged and helped my siblings and I to engage with the visual arts.”
She said he’s done some of the public art projects around Valemount including the duck signboard at the Cranberry Marsh, and the painted portion of the Community Theatre sponsors’ mural at the high school.
“I still get together with Dave and my sisters regularly to paint and visit. We learn from each other and inspire each other.”
She spends a significant amount of time outdoors and says that’s her primary inspiration. “I feel like kind of a focus of my art is connecting with nature and trying to like help other people connect with nature too.”
Most of her paintings originate from reference photos she takes when she’s outside.
“The beauty of painting is that you can kind of create the composition that may be hard to get in a photograph… Often the photo is maybe not printable quality but there’s something about it you love so you can pick those pieces out.”
She says that usually she’s too busy in the summer to do her painting so in the winter she goes through all her photos for artwork and gets to re-experience those moments.
“It’s been good for me to tune into the seasons a bit more,” she said, in contrast to an ongoing nine-to-five type of work schedule that she’s done in the past. “If you have the privilege to be able to adjust your life a little bit around the seasons, I feel like it’s so much healthier to just enjoy that rest time in the winter and do more creative things. It’s been one of the side benefits of having that creative artistic outlet in the winter.”
Paintings by Berkenpas are on display at Vale Coffee and the Valemount Information Centre, as well as art cards at Infinity. She will also have some pieces exhibited at the Jasper Artist Guild Gallery, likely mid summer.
Berkenpas found it hard at first to share and promote her art. She said she struggles a bit with imposter syndrome, but notes that the result is her art has really improved.
“There is something about that that spurs growth,” she said. “In the last year, I’ve had a bit more recognition outside of the community, just with getting into other bigger arts communities, but I feel very much like a newbie, and like I don’t really know my way around. Definitely on the “emerging” side of the arts world, but it’s cool to be there.”
