  | The Art Department salutes artist Ernest Silva '71 with an exhibit of his paintings and sculptures. | ||||||||||||||
LighthouseBy John Pantalone '71 This summer visitors to the Fine Arts Center's Main Gallery can enjoy Silva's work as the Art Department salutes one of its own with an exhibit that is rare for an alumnus. "Lighthouse," a series of paintings and sculptures incorporating Silva's fascination with images of the ocean and voyages as metaphors for the exploration of life, will be shown through September. Its grand kickoff on June 2 coincided with Alumni Weekend when Silva, a professor of art at the University of California, San Diego, lectured on his work and offered a limited edition print made this spring in conjunction with Art Professor Barbara Pagh and master printer Jeff Bertwell. Proceeds from print sales will benefit gallery exhibitions and programs. An essay by Leah Ollman, who writes for Art in America and The Los Angeles Times, accompanies the show. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Painting, Silva did his graduate work at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. He has had over 45 one-person exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe; this year his evocative works have been shown in New York and Los Angeles. Over a dozen museums include Silva's work in their permanent collections, with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art adding a work of his earlier this year. And he has fulfilled several public art commissions in the San Diego/Tijuana region, including permanent installations at the Children's Museum in San Diego and at the Centro Cultural Tijuana. In 1995 Silva created an exhibition for Denmark's Contemporary Art Museum in Roskilde and served as artist in residence at the Danish National Workshops of Arts and Crafts in Copenhagen. This fall he will have a similar residency and exhibition at the Longhi Foundation in Ravenna, Italy. As he prepared for the exhibit, Silva recalled his years at URI. "I realize how many opportunities became possible for me," he says. "During my time here, I found what is for me a labor of love--I discovered that the arts are a geography of the human mind." Indeed, Silva's art reflects that joy in lyrical yet mysterious images that seem able to incorporate elements of Expressionism and Impressionism with interesting little doses of Surrealistic motifs. In a series of sketches that preceded "Lighthouse," Silva created a number of sumi ink drawings of invented seascapes in which a lone man carries a lantern at the edge of the shore as symbolic, lithe women appear in the distance. Each figure in these sweeping scenes casts a shadow that is potentially playful and ominous, creating a metaphorical duality for the mystery and contradictions of life. "I've always gravitated between painting and sculpture. The sculpture, for me, is another way to connect with my past, since so many members of my family worked with their hands as carpenters. Some of my early work became part domestic space, part stage set with painted furniture. I think I was recreating the feelings of family gatherings from my youth." "I like the idea of being able to have a conversation between the paintings and drawings and the sculptures. The sculpted basswood figures in my recent series relate directly to figures in my paintings. I see all of the parts of an exhibition as creating a conversation that the viewer gets to be part of." Silva, who entered URI as a business major uncertain of where he was going, recalls that studying with Art Professors Richard Calabro, Robert Rohm, Gary Richman, Richard Fraenkel, David Ketner, and William Leete, combined with exposure to contemporary exhibitions and artists from outside the University, "gave me the sense that being an artist was possible. "I took a two-dimensional design class with Richard Calabro in my junior year. After that I was hooked. I knew this was what I was looking for all along. A lot of my early work incorporated furniture as a way to connect my work to my family's history. It has evolved from there, but I think I'm still trying to recapture elements of my roots--the warmth of family celebrations and the landscape of New England." "My family was a typical, tightly knit, blended ethnic working class family," he says. "My grandfather and uncles built the house we lived in, and I always thought I would end up working with my hands, but I was also always interested in poetry, language, psychology. Over the years my work has become a mixture of stories, memories, and objects, like a chair that you have used for reading so many times that all those pages have become part of the wood." Richard Calabro recalls the first class that Silva took with him. "Ernest's talent was obvious," says Calabro, who helped arrange for Silva's URI exhibit. "Ernest formulated his ideas here, then carried them to graduate school. His work was always provocative, even the early work when he was doing abstraction. His work has always had an edge to it." With influences ranging from the Impressionists to Mexican folk artists, Silva has gone on his journey as an artist and teacher, filling his work with brilliant colors and lyrical movement. In his paintings you can isolate elements of abstraction and Expressionism as well as folk art and touches of such masters as Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Monet. Taken together, however, the work clearly speaks in Silva's language. "Lighthouse" continues Silva's explorations as he recreates what he calls "the character of my observations." His body of work, in his words, "eludes singular, fixed meanings in favor of observations and qualities that form a visual poetry, a web of associations for the viewer to walk through. "The arts are, in some sense, a perfect place for a conversation about all of our questions and discoveries concerning our lives and the world we live in," says Silva. "Going back and forth between the isolation of the studio and the chance to show what you make has always been a joy and privilege for me." "It's exciting to be working with Judith Tolnick and an honor to have this exhibit at my University, even though I didn't realize until we were arranging it that it was my 30th reunion year. It's forcing me to think about the past by allowing me to revisit my roots and re-examine who I am." u A lecturer in the URI Journalism Department and a classmate of Ernest Silva, John Pantalone is also celebrating his 30th reunion this year. |
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