Rebecca Silvers
Oakland, California
bright colors, organic shapes, bold, painterly strokes with texture and movement - abstract expressionist/ transcendental
Message
Rebecca was born and raised in the Bay Area and lives in Oakland, California. She has a bachelor's degree in Painting and Printmaking from University of California at Santa Cruz, and has studied at San Francisco Art Institute, California College of Arts and Crafts, Parsons School of Design and Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. Between 2005 and 2022, in addition to fine art, Silvers worked in graphic art, design, and animation as a designer and freelance artist. She has worked in textiles, printmaking, illustration, children's book design, mural painting and film. She now focuses on self-directed painting. Please see the website link to her virtual solo exhibition at 2727 California Street Gallery in Berkeley, California - available pieces on view there may be purchased through the gallery in addition to the inquiry form here.
Rebecca's art has been shown at Fraenkel Gallery, Ciel Creative Space, 2727 California Street Gallery, East Bay Open Studios, Artist Studio In The Foothills, Firehouse Art Collective, Launch Pad Gallery, Becket Arts Center, Hanback Gallery, A.Okay Official, The Art Students League, The Society of Illustrators, and U.C. Santa Cruz.
Statement
This recent series is abstract work I've created since moving to the Lake Merritt area in the fall of 2025. I have been focused on expressing my experience of living, working and creating in this unique, lively environment just blocks from the lake. I find it inspiring that Lake Merritt is actually a tidal lagoon where salt water from the Bay mixes with fresh water from nearby estuaries. This also seems symbolic of the mixing of cultures, wildlife, and activities that exist there. I previously took a decade-long hiatus from painting in oils, and decided to return to it now that I had a workspace that better supports that process and those materials. The higher viscosity of oil paint and the process of applying it straight to wooden panels is a welcome change from water based media I had previously been using.
Paintings completed between 2015 and 2025 were an exercise in turning inward. Much of my internal struggle has been about the feeling of restriction and pressure (only exacerbated by Covid). Where my life or psyche constricts, this painterly voice finds leverage, the force to push against it. Emotional, mental, and physical tension is an inherent part of my existence, and the need to unravel it is a visceral part of why I paint, a unique valve through which intensity can be released. I applied techniques for layering and masking developed while working in other media: silk painting with dye and wax resists, motion design and animated film. Bringing these style preferences to that work with ink, pencil and pastel on wooden panels was a sort of synthesis. The interplay between opposing forces: hard edges with soft gradients, cool and warm color groups, light and dark spaces, became a language to address intricacies of relationship - nuances of resistance, boundaries, containment, love and pain.