Bette was born in 1932 in the town of Woodmere, played baseball and in high school discovered her

calling as an artist while contemplating El Greco's “View of Toledo” at the Metropolitan museum.

She lived many different lives in her 94 years. She married Richard Berger and son David was born in

1953, while her husband was serving overseas in the Korean War. Daughter Julie was born two and half

years later. The family lived in Valley Stream, Long Island and later Stamford, Connecticut. Bette was a

beautiful middle-class woman who painted in the basement, studied karate and spent some summers in

Provincetown pursuing her art.

Bette and Richard divorced around 1970 as David went off to college and Julie to boarding school. Those

were dark years for Bette and her art reflected it. In her late 30s she moved to Manhattan and embraced an

alternative downtown life. She met Michael Pavlik, a Czech immigrant, and backpacked with him in South

America. That was way before the internet connected the world. She disappeared for half a year and had

many extreme adventures. She and Michael hiked to Machu Picchu and slept there in tents. They saw a

UFO in the Andes. They went to the Galapagos Islands hitching a ride on an Ecuadorean military plane.

Bette took a potion of Datura tea in the jungle looking for a vision and nearly died over a three-day ordeal.

After their return they bought a loft and helped pioneer Soho, which was emerging as a hotbed of artistic

invention. Bette had several major art shows. Later she and Michael married, moved out of Manhattan and

established themselves in the cow-adorned hills of the Catskills. They built studios in a 100-year-old barn.

Michael was a glass blower just as glass was becoming fashionable. Bette taught art at Hartwick College.

Some years later this second marriage dissolved, leaving Bette once again to reinvent herself. She lived in

Baltimore, studied paper making and took an extended solo trip to Papua New Guinea, a trip she said was

like “going back in time.” That encounter with indigenous cultures led to a master's degree on the origins

of creativity, and nourished a desire for life and art based on deeper bedrock.

In this period she also began exploring her spirituality through silent Buddhist retreats with Insight

Meditation Society, including one that lasted three months. She discovered the Japanese bamboo flute, the

shakuhachi, which became a steady companion. She moved back to Manhattan, again pioneering a

neighborhood by settling in a loft building on West 27th

Street in Chelsea, then strictly an area for wholesale flowers and electronics. She painted, made sculpture and drew from the nude model at Minerva's Drawing Studio. Her loft became the place where master shakuhachi player Ralph Samuelson

taught once a week. Bette continued to spend summers in her upstate home/studio where she cherished a

close-knit community of friends. She had two additional long-term relationships in New York, with Saul

Galen, a professor, and Bob Newman, a writer, both now deceased. All the while she loved her

grandchildren and great grandchild.

In Manhattan Bette also did volunteer work, teaching art in homeless shelters and training to be an

emergency responder. She earned the Mayor's award for service twice. She took regular classes to study

Judaism, her birth religion, and literature, for example “Remembrance of Things Past.”

Her diverse art career and far-ranging, independent life are profiled in the book “The Music in Us.” Art

making was always her calling and lodestone. Her early abstractions gave way to figurative work as she

strove to add more meaning. Bette was deeply empathetic. The travails of society weighed on her and she

incorporated those feelings into her art. Overlooked older women, the plight of elephants, and the

Holocaust were some of her subjects, but also, more cheerfully, especially when upstate, ordinary people

dancing and colorful landscapes. She also explored imagery that nodded toward religion, for example

with her paintings of the Ethiopian Christian festival of Timkat, and the lost rural Jewish synagogues of

Europe that she recreated from research and imagination.

Bette had a command of color and textures. They were her secret weapons as an artist. She often used oil

sticks in her work, fat crayons of color that spread smoothly as warm butter. She then worked the rich

surfaces with tools and fingers. She loved the immediacy of that process. The past two years Bette lived in

a senior living facility with one bedroom turned into a studio, and until just a few weeks ago was still

picking up pencil, charcoal and crayons and dirtying her hands.

We, Bette's children, like many others, are full of memories and stories. A few words or even a few

thousand could not begin to contain them. Bette was a great mom and a generous and kind person. As one

admirer said, “Bette always felt to me like a gentle ray of sunshine.” To know Bette was to know her good

heart, humble demeanor and generous soul.

Thank you for being part of Bette's life.

With love,

David and Julie