Last month on our way back from Wisconsin, Steve and I included Tulsa, Oklahoma, on our route south, so that I could see Burton Silverman's retrospective show at the Sherwin Miller Museum of Jewish Art. I first heard about Burt Silverman when I was a freshman in college. At that time, I was searching for purpose and direction in my work, and I felt greatly inspired by Silverman's artist's statement, which describes his work as a love affair with "the landscape of the human face, where it seemed all the emotional states of life could be found." Silverman says he is "particuarly affected by the faces...of the ordinary and the unheralded, of those people who have been left out of the loop, who exist below the radar of celebrity." I absolutely love this statement, as it expresses a love for capturing something deeper that perhaps would have gone unnoticed forever had it not been for his depiction on canvas.
I'm sharing a few pictures here - they don't do the originals justice, of course, but I hope you enjoy them.
Look at those hands! Such perfection in the modeling of the lights; such simplicity in the shadows.
Every one of his pieces makes me wonder what the model is thinking.
