This series of drawings entitled thoughts, marks a new direction for Madeline Silber’s work which previously focused primarily on painting. She started this series during the pandemic as a way to more quickly and unconsciously create imagery. She is enjoying the fluidity and directness of drawing with pen to develop forms, spaces and movement in these pieces. These could be viewed as magnifications of the way things work, and/or conceptual still lives of body parts in motion generating their own life force energy. Each drawing becomes its own thought, as well as being part of the larger constellation of images.
In Madeline Silber’s work she attempts to depict the complex subtleties of connection and separation in our contemporary relationships. The drawings and paintings merge elements of illusionistic realism with components of abstraction, raising questions about the dreamlike realm these images inhabit. These small intimate works exist somewhere in between biomorphic abstraction, surrealism and narrative representation, maintaining their existence on the edge of contemporary discourse.
Drawings are 6” x 6” unframed, 16” x 16” framed.
Below is Madeline Silber’s Drawing Thoughts Catalog on issuu. This project was made possible with public funds from the Statewide Community Regrants Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and administered by The Earlville Opera House. A grant from SUNY Oneonta Faculty Research & Creative Activity Grant Program also provided funding for this project. Drawing Thoughts, a series of small drawings took place at the Huntington Memorial Library, Oneonta, NY, February 15–March 22, 2024.
Special thanks to Mary Murray, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Munson Museum, for contributing her insightful essay Pas De Deux, a dance of line and space, and to Tina Winstead, Director, Huntington Memorial Library, for graciously supporting the SCR grant and hosting the exhibit.
All Drawings © Madeline Silber 2021–2023 Catalog Design by M Silber Design © 2024
Paintings are oil on linen and range in size from 10” x 10” to 20” x 16”. Whisper is in the Collection of Munson Museum of Art