+ Sylvia Talks About Painting “Home”

My husband promised to build me a she-shed and I drew up some nice little pencil sketches as studies for how the final shed might look. One of the sketches really caught my fancy and I decided to do a painting of a little village of small houses to up my chances of getting a she-shed. 

This is one of those painting ideas that took on a life of its own, and there’s a secret in this painting, if you look at the windows of the front cottage you’ll see the outline of a word. Home indeed!

Some paintings I labor over, but this one just felt intuitive to me and I think it conveys the mood and theme I was after. There is no place like home. The original home painting was done in acrylic and immediately sold. I’m now doing a series of them in oils on a birch backing. Each one is unique in it’s own special way. 

+ Sylvia Talks About Painting “Lost”

This painting started with me searching around thrift shops and yard sales for a painting of a desert-scape scene. I wanted a painting that had the classic desert look, a painting like you might see in the house of a 1960’s movie villain. My idea was to paint dinosaurs as an addition to the original work. I love the artist Wayne White and what he does with adding words to paintings, and I love to do the same thing, but with dinosaurs. 

This was one of those canvases where I kept going and going, adjusting so many small things to get the look I was after. I wasn’t particularly thrilled with the canvas when it was done, and I hung it on the wall for months, but never mentioned it publicly. One day I pulled it down and gave it wash- a painting technique that improves the overall tone of the piece. The painting was transformed into what it is now, a buoyant blend of classic western Americana art, blended with a paleo-futuristic parallel timeline. 

Why do I paint dinosaurs on hotel room art? Because it’s fun and I love unusual things, and the end result is delicious.

+ Sylvia Talks About Painting “Science”

For this painting I wanted to do something that was visually interesting, somewhat confusing, factually inaccurate that included one of my fantasy beasts. In this case the HippoGiraffaMoose. 

I also threw in Marie Curie and George Washington Carver archetypes and other odd references to radiation, weird chemistry and DNA manipulation. These themes don’t really match up. But together they tell the possible story of the imaginary beast. 

My husband suspects I was drinking cough syrup when I dreamed up this painting, but the truth is that I have a creative imagination and love to paint weird stuff.