Bernadette Ash trained at the Camberwell School of Arts in the 1970s, specializing in painting. Painting full-time since then her work has been exhibited at the Royal Academy, New Contemporaries, Thackeray Gallery and the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol. Always painting en plein air, much of her current work concentrates on scenes of Exmoor National Park where she now lives and Norfolk.

She has held regular one-man exhibitions in England and the Netherlands including at the Scottish Houses Museum, Vere N.L. (1989), Leighton House, London (1990), and Dillington House, Somerset (2001).