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Karen Silve in her Portland Studio. Photo by Lloyd Kimeldorf

“Rejuvenation:  My Bouquet—

Karen Silve at the Confluence of Courage and Hope”

May 2021

            Sometimes beauty alights as gently as dewdrops on the morning grass; other times it has to climb and claw its way up a dark crevasse until against all odds it emerges into the light of day.  That latter brand of tenacious, hard-won beauty is central to the origin story of Rejuvenation:  My Bouquet, Karen Silve’s sumptuous and inspiring new body of work.

            To say that 2020 was challenging for us all is surely an understatement, yet for Karen Silve, the year was especially grueling.  During those twelve months she underwent three surgeries to treat a recurrence of breast cancer (from which she is now fully recovered), with months-long breaks between each surgery to regain her strength before plunging onward to the next operation.  During the COVID-19 lockdown, when her litany of surgeries commenced, she found herself socially isolated at precisely the time she would normally have been cared for by friends and family.  But into that chasm where direct human contact would have been, a different form of sustenance flowed into her daily life in the form of food and flowers arriving at her doorstep, delivered by a network of loved ones dedicated to fortifying her body and spirit as she navigated her series of crucibles.  In a sense, the food and the flowers were linked.  Whenever they depleted, more would arrive on the doorstep as replenishment.  Silve placed the new flowers in a vase with the older ones and witnessed their collective trajectory from full bloom to gentle bowing to the withering and petal-dropping of senescence.  She kept them in the vase long past their prime, for there is beauty too in the shrunken and sere, but at a certain point, as more reinforcements appeared, she removed what was dead and replaced it with new arrivals.  And so the bouquet never ended.  It was a fount of regeneration mirroring Silve’s own cycles of surgeries and recovery.

            Eventually she began painting this bouquet éternel in luscious opulent acrylics on canvas—not literal depictions but composites of visions, memories, photographs, sensations, inhalations of revivifying fragrances borne on air and rising spirits:  hydrangea, peonies, poppies, roses, and a dozen-dozen more, rendered in effulgent gestures that never spilt over into surfeit or indulgence, never overworked, but looser, freer, minimalist, luxuriant but also raw.  The images are poetic, lyrical, narrative, rhythmic with brushstrokes broad and discreet—elegiac like the richness of life itself as it careens from peak to trough and back again.  The flowers are neither feminine nor masculine, but inflected with gray tones that speak to human tenacity, not gendered posturing, like the shades of gray in daily life, bookended by our polarities.

            During this period, taxed though her body and spirit were, Silve remained devoted to her yoga practice, attending classes online.  Her teacher, Julie Lawrence, gave her “homework assignments” to meditate on the phenomena of courage and hope, the dual life rafts that buoyed her through 2020’s annus horribilis.  Simply to get up in the morning, pad into her studio, and paint was a challenge and accomplishment, fueled by hope and grit, requiring not only physical courage but artistic courage, too:  Were these paintings too raw?  Not raw enough?  Were they relevant amid the larger spectre of COVID wreaking global havoc?  Were they honest and true?  The doubts ebbed and flowed.  She kept painting.  Many of her compositions she infused with lavender hues, which seemed to symbolize hope and the fortitude it requires.  The paintings’ contrasts between silky dark passages, soothing grayscale, and bold, resplendent, sun-soaked hues bursting forth from the picture planes work together in dynamic synergy.  In the finished works, execution and concept come together in these paeans to rejuvenation embodied in an inexhaustible parade of flora, a bounty of positivity even during an era of masks, distancing, and fear.  This exhibition celebrates friendship, love, compassion, and commitment.  It admonishes us to summon our strength, stick with the program, and keep moving forward—to endure, to emerge, and finally to flourish.

—Richard Speer is an art critic, author, and curator based in Portland, Oregon.  His most recent book is The Space of Effusion:  Sam Francis in Japan (Scheidegger & Spiess), a companion publication to the forthcoming exhibition Sam Francis and Japan:  Emptiness Overflowing, which he is co-curating with Hollis Goodall and Leslie Jones at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  His essays and reviews have appeared in ARTnews, Art Papers, Artpulse, Visual Art Source, Art Ltd., Salon, Opera News, Newsweek, The Chicago Tribune, and The Los Angeles Times.  For more information, please visit www.richardspeer.com

copyright 2021