| Dennis Bertram was born in Valkenburg, the Netherlands, in 1948. He emigrated with his parents and brother to the United States in 1957 where they settled in Evansville, Indiana. He showed an interest in art at an early age, creating drawings for the school newspaper, painting stage sets for a high school play, and garnishing first prize in the only art competition his high school held while he was in attendance. Neither his grade school nor high school provided any art education. The influential persons in his life, his family and teachers, did not encourage a career in art. Rather, science and mathematics were the prized disciplines. He graduated co-valedictorian of his high school class, and because of his aptitude for science, he majored in zoology at Indiana University. While at Indiana University he did manage to enroll in a figure drawing course, without taking any of the usual prerequisites. Following college he attended Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, graduating with his Doctor of Medicine degree in 1974. From there he went to Johns Hopkins University graduating with a Master of Public Health degree in 1975 and a Doctor of Science degree in 1979.
His first employment following graduation from Johns Hopkins University was working on research grants with faculty at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health developing measures of severity of illness and methods for calculating hospital payments. He eventually joined the faculty as an assistant professor. His interest in physician education and quality of care, however, led him to take a position as the Assistant Vice President for Professional Education at the national office of the American Cancer Society in New York City, a position he held from 1982 to 1986. He left the American Cancer Society to return to academia, this time at the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo. He has been on the faculty at the University at Buffalo ever since, currently at the School of Public Health and Health Professions, with the exception of the years 1995 to 1997. During those exception years, for two years he directed a health care technology assessment program for The HMO Group, a national association of health maintenance organizations, and for a year was self-employed as a consultant in health care technology assessment.
It was during the year when he was self-employed and the year thereafter when he was part-time at the University at Buffalo, that he took the time to take undergraduate studio classes in drawing and painting at Buffalo State College. He was now taking the prerequisites he skipped while at Indiana University. He began entering shows in 1997 and among his early coups were being accepted into an international art show, achieving first place in the oil category at a Hilton Head Art League’s national show, and being a finalist in the The Artist’s Magazine’s Annual Art Competition in 2002. His interest in figure and portrait painting also led him to take instruction with Steve Carpenter in Rochester, New York. However, it was while painting naturalistic landscapes that he began to simplify his paintings, looking for the major shapes in what he was seeing. This led to a simplification that evolved into his current landscape paintings.
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