Born into a family steeped in the arts and raised in Chicago, Illinois, Berger was accepted to study at the prestigious School of the Art Institute there. He attended painting classes taught by Boris Anisfeld and Paul Wieghardt and pictorial composition and color theory taught by his uncle, Edgar Rupprecht. He also received training from Isabel McKinnon and Leroy Niemann.
Following service in the U.S. Military, Berger continued studies leading to a B.F.A. degree in Fine Arts and a teaching certificate in Art. He then worked for several years at a high-end retail store’s advertising department, Marshall Field & Co., then shifted to teaching art in Glencoe, a northern suburb of Chicago, for nine years. He was then exhibiting paintings at the Deerpath Art Gallery in Lake Forest where he lived, and established a reputation for his pen and ink studies of Chicago scenes selling in galleries there.
In 1968 the Berger family of five moved to Canada, to a ranch in the British Columbia interior, where he painted scenes of the Cariboo and Chilcotin. Here he began exhibinting at the Alex Fraser Gallery in Vancouver.
Don now lives in Kelowna, British Columbia and spends most of his time growing and photographing flower blossoms.The majority of his works are now oil paintings of his own flowers.His work is easily identified.He paints larger than life blossoms choosing this format to draw the viewer in and see details not visible on a smaller scale.

Don Berger: Artistic Process

Growing a variety of perennials and annuals and photographing them in his Kelowna gardens, Berger saw the possibilities for them as paintings. Noting the blossoms’ structure and the broad spectrum of values when sunlight came into play gave the artist an entirely new avenue of expression. And, because he felt somewhat restricted in palette when executing his landscapes and harbor scenes, the “riot” of color presenting itself in the garden served to satisfy a keen desire to use otherwise unused intense color in his oils.

After the first dozen or so of these paintings that he labelled “Openings” he found more affinity with his subject if he enlarged it dramatically, and this led him to paint large canvases and to focus closer and closer in to his subjects. This had the unanticipated result of presenting possibilities of abstract painting with a single blossom as subject matter. He will be exploring the potential of this development in days to come. As for now, Berger prefers to work with multi-petalled flowers or groupings of them for his inspiration, such as roses, begonias, peonies, irises, etc. He says they provide him with more opportunity for selection of elements for his composition and for a broader value scale of lights and darks.

In 1998 Berger traveled to Europe seeking fresh subject matter, touring numerous botanical gardens with camera in hand. At Oxford he visited the oldest botanical garden in England where he was moved to paint the vibrant roses.