Layered Memories: the In-Between
Silve created this new body of work after spending five weeks at her family home in northern Provence. The memories of swimming in the gentle Mediterranean, strolling around old-town Nice, hiking through the sublime gorge of Verdon and driving north along the Durance river into the clear sky of the Hautes-Alpes all influenced these new, lush abstractions. Ultimately, all of her memories, surroundings, and interactions inform these works which reveal a unique expression of harmonious color with contemplative and deliberate mark making.
As elegantly described by Peter Frank Associate Editor of Fabrik Magazine and art critic for The Huffington Post Silve takes “cues from Cézanne no less than from De Kooning, from Marin no less than from Mitchell, Silve embraces a history of modernist mark-making in order to respond adequately to a world of colors and volumes and temperatures. Without painting landscapes or still lifes, Silve is still a painter of space and the things it contains. She takes inspiration from the places she inhabits and the objects and events she witnesses to “charge” her art. Her paintings do not describe or even suggest her surroundings so much as taste of them. We come away from Silve’s canvases less with an idea of what the Pacific Northwest or the south of France looks like than with a feel of, and for, northern Oregon and the Mediterranean interior, perhaps in the same painting. ....Silve’s painting, however, is not simply about nature, but is natural, the way Monet’s and Mitchell’s is. Like those imposing predecessors, Silve is not content to reflect, but must embody, observation and sensation in her work.”