from Burt:

An Overview of My Aesthetic Concerns

            Throughout my painting life I have often been asked to explain or elaborate on my interest in specific subject matter or whether I preferred one medium above another. While these are not uninteresting questions -and they can yield some  insights as to the artist’s passions or obsessions, they miss the point about picture making in a broader sense. What seems more relevant to me is that often there is no single key to understanding the drive toward making a painting. Certainly the art of painting has been a a significant form of human expression and communication from almost the beginning of human social organization. Yet compared to language  -and certainly the more abstract language of math and physics-it is rather a primitive communicative mode. So why does it remain so paramount in our cultural lives? I cannot answer for that need, nor can I fully explain my lifelong desire to convert the observable visual world into a painted representation of it. Perhaps it is my way of preserving what seems often- and lately even more so- the transient nature of experience…These are subjective threads to what might also be called consciousness.  And if  art can become a source of heightened  awareness that maximizes our conscious life then it adds a dimension to our existence that is both life enhancing and extremely pleasurable  .

Some Generalities About What I Respond to in Art.

            First off I think I ask for an underlying draughtsman ship- an ability to draw selectively and evocatively. This sets the stage for a parallel requirement that the image be about something more than simple verisimilitude -of just making the subject appear “lifelike”. I believe there is a difference between an image that is photographically correct and one that is “alive”. I have, perhaps, an esoteric view of realism, that it be an act of discovery and of illumination of both the inside and outside of the subject matter. This refers to all kinds of subject matter and covers all mediums but is particularly relevant for painting a portrait.

 My Subject Matter

            Very early on in my life, I fell in love with the landscape of the human face, where all the emotional states of life are to be found, and that love affair has not faltered. I react to images of everyday life, but often those aspects that present some ambiguous or contradictory moral equation. I am particularly affected by images -  of the unspectacular and the unheralded – of  people who have, for many years now,  been left out of the loop.  This often means portrait like paintings   in which the specific (person) can also become the paradigm for the general.- In a world adumbrated by the sensational -shock and celebrity, -the immediate texture of our lives needs to be seen again for the “beauty” it can provide. ( I will try to elaborate on that problematic word “beauty”)

Realism in the Century of Modernism

            In the last 50 years the art of painting has reached something of a crisis. The great “revolution” which started in the last few years of the 19th century, signaled by James Abbot McNeil Whistler’s exercises in “art for art’s sake”, seems unable to progress much further -at least not with painting as sanctioned by the official art world.  Indeed, quite recently it has been averred that “painting is dead.”  Despite some notable exceptions, it would almost seem so because the formal experimentation unleashed after the dissolution of the Salon exhibitions of the late 19th century has consumed itself. This can be seen in the dominant role now played by objects, randomly reassembled, or put into idiosyncratic environments to convey a variety of subjective narratives known only to its creators, and divined perhaps coincidentally, but not necessarily accurately, by critics and curators. This age of the object has also seen the emergence of still and moving photographic arts leading to the exclusion of traditional narrative and realist paintings from the aesthetic dialogue of picture making.

            Art changed significantly in the 20^th century. A change in thinking about art emerged and spawned a century of essentially decorative imagery, in which form and content were decisively separated.  Art lost its consensual meaning and was evaluated primarily as a sensory experience.  Style, the way paint is applied, became the dominant mode of evaluation. And subjectivity was the dominating mode of appreciation.

            In my life’s work, I have tried to reunite form (color and composition) with content (realistic and narrative imagery) to arrive at some kind of synthesis of 20th century formalism with 20th century sensibilities. I don’t believe I am unique in this process. There has been, and continues to be, a flourishing of art that calls itself “realist” but it is pluralistic and diverse in its picture making skills.

             But in placing renewed emphasis on content, on an emotional and intellectual requisite in image making, I, and fellow like-minded artists, hope that it can bridge the world of appearances and the world of insights and thus reconstitute the authenticity of the visual arts and rescue it from triviality; from “sensation” alone. 

from Others:

            A humanist, it is above all in depicting the human form- and especially the face- that Silverman shows us his true mastery of his medium.  Though he is epually adept in painting the male, he appears to prefer the opposite sex and is particularly sensitive to the female visage, his limning of feminine features universally handled with delicacy and insight. We see over and over again- in paintings such as “Claire,” “Woman in a Black Hat,” “Nail Care,” “Park Bench,” “Museum,” “Hanging Out,” “Summer of ’82,” to name a few- more than just a face, but the hints of a deeper humanity, an entire personality “writ large” in not only the facial delineations, but also in the gaze of the eye, the tilt of the head, the cant of the neck and shoulders- physical, idiosyncratic traits that have been built up and that have settled into habitual attitudes and postures over a liftetime of confronting the world.

            Burton Silverman is one of the very few artists that I know who is able to straightforwardly portray himself. To sit before a blank canvas and a mirror simultaneously is a trick that not many portraitists- no matter how skilled- have ever successfully mastered. It takes a state of mind that is both objective and subjective at one and, the same time and, at least in my experience, I have found few artists able to successfully pull it off.

                                        — Raymond J Steiner, Art Times

           The art of Burton Silverman displays the art of a prolific, wide-ranging celebrant of life.  His paintings are about life and living with one’s own skin—and in our time.  It is not about politics or justice or any of the other ideas claimed for typical late-twentieth-century art in the typical contemporary art magazine. Just as music is for hearing, painting is for seeing. For Silverman, the painter’s work is to find those times and places where seeing the thing is the most powerful way to experience it. He undertakes to re-present experience on canvas or paper.

            Silverman’s portraits were never merely illustrations for a text; they were always independent, parallel works of art, vast texts in themselves. In every instance he presented a subtle examination of character and fresh insights into personality. Where words left off, Silverman began. He revealed what could not be described or explained; again and again, he found the essence... How he brought this about, I cannot imagine, but there it was, beyond argument; and it gave me, and continues to give me, joy.

            —William Shawn, former Editor of The New Yorker

            None of us helped Burt Silverman, whose distinctive drawings vividly illuminated the screen as they now do this book. Pay attention to the mood they create of the delegates in debate, dejection, or defiance, and you realize how a work of the imagination grasps reality more poignantly at times than a photograph.

            —Bill Moyers, Introduction to Report from Philadelphia, the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Ballantine Books, NY, 1987

            Apart from the fact that these works are so beautifully composed and constructed as to make one feel at one with Silverman’s vision, the understanding that he has deliberately chosen ordinary settings to create such extraordinary circumstances excites the mind as much as the eye... He’s captured artisans, laborers vacationers and sportsmen—the old and the young. They comprise a repertoire of real people whose existence often transcend the commonplace, representing for the artist larger issues and deeper emotions. The work can be viewed on two planes: as documents of an epoch and recordings of ideas... Silverman’s art is created with intelligence and his commitment to truth and beauty is vivdly clear.

            —Steven Heller, Review of exhibition at Sindin Galleries, NYC, 1983, Arts Magazine, Jan. 1984

            Burton Silverman is an artist of consumate skill. In his recent drawings, pastels and watercolors he demonstrates the draughtsmanship, painterliness and concern for people that have earned his work several prestigious awards and a place in important exhibitions. They add insights and convey perceptions through conventional images that have about them the qualities we associate with art.

                —Malcolm Preston, Newsday, Sept. 1971

            Burt Silverman’s abilities are clear—he’s a master draftsman, superb painter and he designs each picture for maximum understanding and visual excitement. His humanism and intelligence lie deep in every image. The intensity of his perceptions about everyone, from world leaders to garment workers, gives us a truth that is essential.

          —Jill Bossert, “1990 Hall of Fame,” Society of Illustrators

            Burton Silverman’s special gift is the ability to take the viewer into the environment of his subjects; to share the joy, the pain, the expectation, the resignation, the love and the contempt. For the past eight years works by Burton Silverman have been included in each of the Portsmouth Museums American Drawings Exhibitions...and became part of the Center’s permanent collection of Twentieth Century paintings and drawings.

                   —The Portsmouth Museums