We were lucky to catch up with Emily Silver recently and have shared our conversation below.

Emily, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

I’ve been an artist since I was very little. The summer I turned 5 years old my family was vacationing in Cape Cod when the Swedish ship “Stockholm” ran into the Italian “Andrea Doria” just off Nantucket, and, after witnessing people being brought to shore on lifeboats, I collaged an artwork describing the scene. I think it was obvious to everyone but me that I was already an artist, and luckily my parents constantly rewarded and encouraged me.

I went through wanting to be a nurse, an actress, then an architect, before I became a teenager, But reading “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “In Cold Blood,” especially, I developed a fascination with criminal psychology. I began a correspondence with an actual prison psychologist and set my sights on a similar career, entering college as a freshman majoring in Psychology. I really loved it! My parents, however, weren’t as enthusiastic––my father, a professor of geology, chastised me that “psychology is not real science.” Luckily, as a sophomore at Stanford, to satisfy my Humanities requirement, I took a Basic Design course from professor Matt Kahn. That was the end of my career vision as a psychologist! I felt so much more comfortable and at home in the world of Design than I had in the scientific world of clinical psychology! It was a real awakening! Art making and crafting had already been a huge part of my life, and suddenly I saw that I could move FORWARD in the world of the Design Process so much more comfortably and naturally in terms of the abilities I was born with. I changed my major to Visual Design and never looked back. . . until much, much later in my life when I found I could still work in the prisons–– teaching Art––which I did for twelve years.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My painting practice is driven by what Belden Lane, in The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, calls “acute, personal longing for fierce terrain”. Raised in a family of geologists and artists whose ancestors took part in the settling and mapping of the West, I’ve always felt a profound affinity for flat plains, high mountains, and desert. As a child I fantasized about being able to run my hands over landforms, to stroke the surface of Earth. This tactile, emotional impulse remains central to my work.

My paintings examine and map the emotional qualities of specific, desolate places. Painting serves to magnify and articulate the elemental forces that sculpt land. I experience great joy recognizing in aggregates of pigments, salts, and sediments flowed over cartographic skeletons the tactile, and, for me, poetic qualities of the surface of our Earth.

For years I’ve worked closely with intuitive as well as data-driven maps. Lately I’ve been completely captivated by traveling vicariously to inaccessible places through satellite photos. I imagine cruising quietly above Earth with the dreamlike sensation of being able reach out and touch these distant geologies.

I’m currently developing three series of paintings, two derived from satellite images, and one investigating ways to sample and incorporate my collection of raw pigment and sediment into abstract painting structures.

In all three series geometric elements such as grids, evaporation ponds, doorways, rhythms, roads, or map symbology–representing our human mark on (and destruction of) the surface of Earth–serve as visual counterpoints for the organic shapes of landforms. Through these perspectives I invite viewers to examine their own landscapes physical and emotional, their own relationship with Earth.

“The physical act of painting is itself mysterious, profoundly disorienting,” said Darren Waterston. A painting evolves during a sequential process of unfolding revelations and recognition within which I continue to be deeply engaged.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

WELCOME, REJECTION!
You need to have a thick skin when you’re an artist. I suffer constantly from ebbs and flows of doubt. In our culture “acceptance” and “love” are measured in money, and when people don’t buy your art, when you can barely eke out a living selling or teaching art, things can feel very discouraging.

The best way to handle this (once you’ve snared a “day job”) is to acclimatize yourself to rejection. Invest in your belief in yourself. Apply for every possible opportunity (many opportunities you’ll hear about are free, or involve making a cold call). Let folks know you’re there! Hit them repeatedly with your images to build familiarity, to build your “brand.” But brace yourself for hundreds of rejections!.

I honed my ability to suffer rejections as an independent graphic designer before I put my actual soul out there through my painting.

Some people joke about rejections, binding them into a book, for example, or papering their bathroom walls with them! The file I kept eventually burst at the seams. Gradually, you get so those rejections just roll off your back. You begin to feel very smug that you can predict them–”Ah yes, of course, another rejection!” And occasionally, statistically, you’ll have a nibble–you’ll be included in a group show. You’ll be accepted for an artist residency. Some gallery will agree to have your work in their flat file. You’ll be invited to give a summer workshop on your special technique. As your ability to accommodate rejections improves, so will your understanding of where your work and your style are most likely to fit, and you’ll quit wasting time applying to opportunities not in sync with your goals.

There’s nothing like rejections to test your resolve, test your strength of purpose. Those doubts are like fertilizer that help you grow, lead you to try out new angles, creative problem solve, invent a new twist.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

I have always loved pictures. I think of them as windows into something otherwise inaccessible.

As I mentioned before, I still nurture a childhood fantasy of running my hands over landforms. An undulating sheet of paper seems like topography in miniature.

I love paper and the history of paper, and the methodologies for making paper.

I also love paint, the history of paint, the quality it builds on a surface, the many different ways it responds to dilution, gravity, and heat, for example. Painterly effects such as “butteriness” or “luminosity” or blooms of color colliding with each other feel like they speak to my soul.

It all seems so miraculous! I can pull all these loves together by painting–it’s like saying, “see what I mean?”

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.emilysilver.com
• Instagram: @emilysilverearthart
• Facebook: Emily Silver, Emily Silver Studio
• Linkedin: Emily Silver
• Other: https://www.cohart.com/emilysilver

Image Credits

All photos by Emily Silver