Since 2012, Bernard has lived and painted in his studio and garden at "Upper Trail" in the Monterey Bay region of California. Built in 1946, the original owner was J.O. Handley, a lumber merchant and builder who opened his lumberyard in Carmel in 1941. The property sits on 1.6 acres of Franciscan Sedimentary Shale that overlooks the Pacific Ocean and Point Lobos, with mountain views clear to the Santa Lucia mountain range. While the original property consisted of a main residence and a guest house, Bernard added two art studios in 2017. The home and studio, views and gardens flow together and offer Bernard endless artistic inspiration that he seamlessly weaves into his creative life.

Trained as a landscape architect and designer, Bernard’s home garden serves not only as inspiration for creativity, but as a laboratory for species experimentation. Using no automated irrigation systems, He hand waters young plants until they can thrive reliant only on natural rainfall. His overall design vision is informed by plant durability and resilience, genetic variations and climate, and his research continually tests and pushes the boundaries in each of these categories, creating opportunities to learn from both successes and struggles.

The same sense of experimentation and boundary pushing can be found in Bernard’s paintings. They are contemplative, meditative, and introspective. An observation of land where the edges are blurred and the struggle for survival is embraced with curiosity. The paintings are about crevices, edges, margins, and transitions. The work is connected to the surrounding landscape, but not in any literal way - there is only a sense of elemental vocabulary and pattern that unifies them with the land, struggle and reconciliation. However while architecture and landscape design are about the control and function required for human need to collaborate with nature, painting is about expression – a place where Bernard can be liberated from the constraints and formalism that landscape design imposes.