About

Chava Silverman - Expressionist Artist of brilliant color still lifes, dream landscapes, and fantasy figures.

I grew up in New York City where from a very young age I was constantly exposed to a world exploding with art, music, theater, film, and dance. My art-loving mother filled our home with prints of sun dappled Monet and Renoir landscapes, pulsating Van Gogh figures and portraits, Picasso distortions, and Gaugin’s faraway exotic lands. The works of these artists peopled my home and my imagination and they seemed an integral part of my most intimate family setting. I loved to color and draw from a very young age. I remember myself as a tiny tot lost in my own magical world, decorating endless coloring book pages with brightly colored crayons and covering the surfaces with precise meticulous designs. Later, I compulsively filled every empty space in my schoolbooks and notebooks with hundreds of strange distorted figures out of my imagination which seemed to flow by themselves from my fingers onto the pages. As a teenager, I haunted the interminable rooms and galleries of MOMA and of the Metropolitan, which beckoned me like a second home. I loved the Moderns, but later I also discovered the old masters of the early and late Renaissance and my imagination was kindled by Michelangelo’s extraordinary massive figures crowding the Sistine Chapel. I loved Paul Klee, Miro, Picasso, Matisse, and the Fauves, and the great German Expressionists. When I contemplated these works of art, I found myself composing my own artworks in my imagination and knew that there would be a time when I would give birth to my own creations. I did not study art formally. But in my early adulthood, after I emigrated to Israel, I began to take workshops and classes with well known Jerusalem artists, who encouraged and inspired me to continue my growth as an artist. My earliest works were pen, pencil, and charcoal drawings of figures and still lifes, and later I began to paint semi-abstract still lifes and interiors in oils. For some years, my home and work took precedence over my artistic aspirations, but in the past ten years I have begun to paint again in acrylics while also experimenting with collage, mixed media, printing, and various other techniques. Recently I had a solo exhibition of my work in my home town of Omer of a series of collages and acrylic landscapes painted in vibrant expressionist color and form.

Art for me is the universe of my imagination and my interior world. I dwell in a world where passionate color and dynamic powerful composition form the core of my most innermost being. I strive for art which is intense, powerfully expressive, composed of brilliant color and striking dynamic form.