Matthew Silverberg

My art has evolved over the past ten years, starting with painting and drawing as I learned the rigors of artistic creation by apprenticing with painters (Stan Goldstein and Larry Robinson) and drawing instructors (Michael Markowitz and Sharon Pearson). I did this during my time working in a Silicon Valley start-up--Legato Systems, Inc. I found this method of learning art to be a solid foundation--partcularly since I had no inclination to return to full time student work in an MFA program. Along with these studies, I began to show my artwork culminating in my doing an artist professionalism seminar (Taking The Leap art practicum) in the Fall of 2001 and Spring of 2002--an experience that I consider my finishing school in terms of artistic identity. Most recently, I have branched out into digital (and traditional) printmaking, as well as video production and web design--by studying new art forms at Berkeley City College’s Multimedia Arts Department--where I now teach.

Art hisorically, my art has evolved as well. I began painting with an interest in the artistry of the Renaissance--beginning with Leonardo and Botticelli but more particularly the mid-17th century Dutch artists Vermeer, Rembrandt, deHooch, terBosch, and Steen--attempting to replicate their beautiful still lifes and interiors in an effort to learn paining skills. I moved through a succession of styles, exploriong the impressionists Cezanne, Manet, and Hiroshoge, and later I painted canvases influenced by post-Impressionist modernists such as Gauguin, Kirchner, Matisse, Redon, Morandi and Picabia. More recently I have been learning from the Abstractionists deKooning, Rothko, Kline, and Joan Mitchell, as well late 20th century neo-Expressionists Clemente, Basquiat, Kiefer, and Polke. In 2006, I have been creating work influenced by contemporary artists such as the new Japanese masters--Murakami and Aoshima, Minimalists Dan Flavin and Donald Judd, and the light wall sculptures of Jennifer Steinkamp. I’m also reading works by my pantheon of art information theoreticians Edward Tufte, Margaret Livingstone, and Dan Margulis. I still regularly create what I consider to be Meditations, by painting still lifes and outdoor scenes in a representational fashion. My more minimalist, expressionist and abstract pieces are done digitally, and are output to a variety of media including web designs, videos, and large format prints on paper and canvas.

One example of a current series is the one I premiered in New York this spring. It is a cross-media series of paintings, drawings, prints and motion graphics on the theme of cultural misinterpretation and anomie. There are twelve images repeated in the triptych, include elements such as fire, grass, fingerprints and as well as digital patterns mimicing silk weaves, tatami mats, tiles, kaleidoscopes, painted vignettes and simple drawn marks. Traditional painting subjects including birds and cows, plants and landscapes, cities and people are combined with an imagined sense about another country—Japan, in this case, a country with a strong cultural presence in California, but one that to me still has an aura of the distant and exotic. This series of prints is my deliberate reinterpretation of Japanese culture. The images begin from my daily walks in the Berkeley Hills, where most of the photographic elements were shot. My Japan, an interpretation, is an imagined country of elegent artistic tradition, refined culture and technical expertise that is facing the dark sides of modernism: social rigidity, anomie, environmental degradation, sterility and corruption. The counter-themes of refinement and dark oddity are part of a long tradition of a fascination with orientalism. I have never been to Japan but have thought a lot about it. In fact, my experiences living in areas of great cultural diversity and rapid social transformation—New York in the 1980s and California during the dotcom years, have a distinct Japanese sensibility—particularly in terms of change and the individual’s response to it.