Ernest Silva
Artist’s Statement: 2009

Painting is often considered taboo. It has faced challenges from successive generations of artists, photography and the new digital technologies. Painting is still able to generatively represent experience and to actually utilize its current condition and disfavor.

My work emphasizes the representation of what needs to be present to trigger speculation. Primary relationships between artist and subject - such as direct observation - are replaced by the use of secondary sources – photographs, art historical references, and images drawn from existing aesthetic and social conventions.

Over several decades my paintings and sculpture have involved - at times singular images of nature, landscape and the figure and at other times - hybrids - images displaced from their usual contexts, distilled and condensed. The common denominator is the handmade, the emotive, and the sense that they may have been imagined, or recalled from memory. They are characterized by a number of references: the interiors of houses, boats, water, deer, men and women, full moons, lighthouses and images drawn from the art of the Renaissance, European and American sources, as well as ads and story book covers from the 1940s and 1950s. They can be read literally but easily move to metaphor - something is always suggesting something else. The natural world is represented as promise and as having a potential for loss. This ambiguity is staged with images that re-play themselves in multiple forms and guises. The works evoke psychological moments by using the familiar and drawing the viewer in for prolonged consideration. Images of landscape, seascape and interior are represented not only as place but also as actor, and as signs of internal psychological territory.

My work is constructed visually, based on personal experience, though not autobiographical. Images from various sources are used to form non-linear narratives that invite commentary. Some works can be read as representations of nature or others as allegories: the deer suggesting unspoiled nature, the family photograph - society, the cover of a Basic Reader - education and social conditioning. This layering of references allows me to utilize a number of styles and art historical references - realism, expressionism and the vernacular - as means and subject matter. The history of painting is embraced, quoted and contradicted to question its agendas, those projected by its audience, and its dismissal as “old”.

My work is a personal view, assembled to invite a consideration of human nature. Not the sum of objective descriptions but the combining of subjective experience and perceptions of the objective world. They invite speculation and multiple commentaries.

Ernest Silva

Professor of Visual Art
University of CA, San Diego
9500 Gilman Dr. 0084
La Jolla, CA 92093-0084
tel. 858-534-4587
www.ernestsilva.org