Emily Silver
My paintings are composed of flows and aggregates of watercolor, pigments, salts, and sediments laid over cartographic skeletons. They embody an effort to identify and map the emotional and poetic qualities of place. My practice is driven by what Belden Lane, in The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, calls “acute, personal longing for fierce terrain”. Raised in a family of geologists and artists whose ancestors took part in the settling and mapping of the West, my affinity is for desert backcountry both threatened and becoming ever fiercer.
As vertical entities with “feet on the ground and head in the clouds,” our experience of place occurs between the rock-solid materiality beneath us and the ephemeral atmosphere of our perceptions. In my paintings geometric elements such as grids, linear horizons, the measured rhythm of footfalls, or Islamic patterns–serve as foils for the organic aspects of land and represent human presence.
I work closely with intuitive as well as printed or digital maps, and, lately, satellite photos. Stimulating our intelligence and teasing up our senses, these provide the illusion of running our hands over landforms. The deepest part of me is engaged and mesmerized by the miraculous ability of paint to afford this sensation.
“The physical act of painting is itself mysterious, profoundly disorienting,” said Darren Waterston. A painting evolves during a sequential process of unfolding revelations and recognition. I’m forever amazed by the physical ability of sediment suspended in water to describe place using the same elemental forces that sculpt land.
For more information about the artist, please visit her website.