by John de la Vega

Burt Silverman's is a life in art. With a talent for drawing and painting since early childhood, he attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan and graduated from Columbia University in 1946 with a major in Art History. During his college years he spent afternoons at the Art Students League, taking courses and working from live models. His artistic fate was sealed with "a bolt of lightening" at the 1939 New York's World Fair on his first encounter "in the flesh" with paintings by Sargent, Eakins, Homer and some of the Grand Old Masters. It was almost too much for the still very young boy to bear: "I couldn't believe that it was possible for anyone to really paint those pictures," writes Burt, describing his own formative process in his book Painting People (Watson-Guptill, 1977).

After his more formal education, he set out to make a living as an artist, keeping his commissioned illustrations and his more creative personal work in different areas of his studio. There was never any conflict. As a commercial artist he pioneered a highly artistic, loose style that mirrored his more personal painting. Among his many magazine assignments were the portraits done from life of famous personalities for The New Yorker and Time magazine covers.

During the late '40s and '50s, in the early years of what was to become a distinguished career, realism as a style seemed to have no place in the century's Zeitgeist. In New York, it was definitely on the way out. The critics and the art establishment totally ignored shows of realistic painting. Keeping a glorious tradition alive and growing was no longer considered significant in an environment where abstract expressionism was quickly becoming the only game in town. Burton Silverman, Aaron Shikler, David Levine, Harvey Dinnerstein, Daniel Schwartz and other quite talented realistic painters suddenly became outsiders to the big world of art before they could really enter it. Even today, with Silverman represented in the collection of the Philadelphia, Brooklyn and other prestigious museums, and the newly accepted variety of styles in the so-called post-modern era, he still can be considered an outsider. His people paintings, more fresh and vital than ever, are largely outside the highbrow world of art - the same art establishment that has canonized blown-up cartoons as 20th century icons. The myopia and cultural idiocy of certain powerful "arbiters of what's significant," still rule the big-city art establishment. Through it all, Burt Silverman has stuck to what he loves - producing truth and beauty totally independent of stylistic fads, developing a highly responsive circle of admirers and patrons in the process.

Last fall he had a very successful one-person show at the Gerold Wunderlich Gallery in Manhattan, the most recent of many solo and group exhibitions. Burt's work and his ideas live beyond gallery and museum walls: on eight Time magazine covers, two published books, the already mentioned Painting People (1977) and Breaking the Rules of Watercolor (also Watson-Guptill, 1983), in numerous book and magazine illustrations, published articles and essays, as well as in his teaching. A book on Burton Silverman's artistic output of the last 20 years will be published in conjunction with a retrospective to be held at the Butler Institute in 1999.

Burt's classes at his Manhattan brownstone's top floor studio are sold out, and his workshops around the country are avidly sought by artists looking for not only greater technical and artistic skills, but a deeper understanding of what it really means to draw and paint the human form.

Burt Silverman has always had a specific interest in portraits. It originates in a "lifelong fascination with the human face and its capacity to convey complex emotions that can be clearly observed, yet remain somehow ambiguous and elusive." His psychological insight is backed by a great technical mastery, acquired early and built upon over many years of constant study and practice from life. Burt remembers a particular image from his early years (he could not have been more than 12 at the time), a painting called "The Music Lesson" that he copied from a book, one of many early attempts to teach himself how to paint. This particular painting depicted an elderly teacher hovering over a sweet-face girl at the piano. He remembers it so clearly to this day because he both loved it and hated it. He loved the feeling conveyed by the scene, but, attempting to copy it, found rendering the "dark brown and umber shadows" quite difficult, still unsure of how to manipulate the paint to his satisfaction. He nevertheless succeeded in recreating the mood and three-dimensionality of the picture, which meant a huge leap upwards from the comic book imagery he also had chosen as part of his early self-training. Since then, a fascination with emotion as facial expression came to define more and more his artistic vocation. As he puts it, it was "the landscape of the human face I was subtly drawn to, which remains a powerful impulse in my current painting."

Burt Silverman's psychological insight gives his non-commissioned drawings and paintings their portrait-like characteristics. As an artist dealing with of a vast range of human situations and activities, Burt feels a need to constantly discover the special qualities of that "landscape." Whether depicted as solitary figures in a room, in the middle of nature or a highway, or as people engaged in various activities or trades, Burt's subjects are never types. They are human beings whose images reveal particular physical and emotional qualities. That is what makes "The Italian Cyclist" (shown opposite) a painting of an individual instead of a symbol of the men and women who frantically ride in bicycle races throughout the land in the hot Italian summer. It is precisely that "portrait" quality that gives the painting its true human dimension. Here is a person we can relate to, somebody whose image might even embody anonymous athletes struggling against great odds, but nevertheless the image of a recognizable individual.

As a busy painter of commissioned portraits, Burt Silverman faces the same challenges all of us face, among them to produce paintings that reflect how people see themselves. To this end, the artist does several drawings, usually from life, to test whether the sitter's self-image matches his own. This part of the process may include discussions on clothing, colors or other elements of the painting, on which subject and artist may not always agree. In such circumstances, Burt is outspoken if he believes a particular color or any other aspect is not suitable. Early disagreements may mean a not-too-auspicious beginning to a portrait commission. Silverman says in this regard: "It need not be a confrontational, ego-dependent circumstance. Just the quiet assurance that the artist's vision will ultimately provide a positive presentation of the subject and a good painting as well."

"A good painting as well." Isn't that the ideal we are after? To paint a portrait that is not just a faithful image of a person, but that rare outcome we call a work of art? The process may involve some difficult artistic and technical decisions. No one knows this better than Burt Silverman. He is not afraid of making changes even after a painting is apparently complete. "No part of the picture is sacred if it doesn't do the job. There shouldn't be any "holding on' or "defending your investment,' so to speak." This is where his great drawing skills come in. His advice to painters of all levels is the same: "Drawing is an essential beginning of what we do in painting. You can't paint well without drawing very well. We can look at drawing as a way of conceptualizing the issues of the painting, freeing us for the best execution. It's like championship tennis: the players are not concentrating on the mechanics of hitting the ball, but on the strategy, on where the ball is going to go." Or, in the immortal words of the Duchess of Windsor: "You can never be too thin or draw too well."

The painting process itself is, ideally, for Burt, a joyous, intense dialog between paint, form and the rhythms generated, the interrelation and integration of "dollops of color on top of dollops of color in successive layers." He applies these layers in a largely intuitive, often erratic, but definitely exciting process that leaves no doubt that a bold, decisive (and joyous) painter is in command. Rapidly applying and removing paint with a feathery touch, often doing a great deal of not-so-feathery scumbling (as a result of which a lot of his brushes appear to have seen better days), Burt develops an image of richer and richer quality in often surprising turns. Currently working primarily in oils, he uses much the same technique with watercolors and pastels, always mindful of the tendencies of each medium to produce particular qualities.

For Burt Silverman, great portraits have a psychological dimension that continues to grow the longer we look at them. The road to arrive at such depth, fraught with difficulties, is always brilliantly articulated in his teaching. He is not afraid to call on psychology, philosophy, art history and other disciplines while demonstrating or working with groups or individuals. In his instructional video Painting the Figure, Teresa, Burt identifies as extremely important the need for "seeing something that's slightly different each time we look, augmenting, enriching the image with greater observation." It is "a process of discovery and re-definition of the experience of the model. From one moment to the next, things are different. We are not a camera eye, but human beings reacting to things having to do with light, the way somebody rearranges himself or herself in a slightly different way." These changing events, far from being obstacles or distractions, can be used to improve the dynamics of the painting, especially when working from life.

Drawing and painting from live models give Silverman much greater freedom when working from photographs, which he treats "as much as possible as the reality of working from life." But he stresses the importance of "the subtle interactions that evolve from sitting with a live person" to make a painting successful. For Burt, the preliminary drawings and other studies from life "form the platform for arriving at that point where the photographs can become useful." He reminds us that many great painters used the camera, including Degas, and that we know Vermeer brought real images onto the canvas using the camera oscura.

Another very important painting issue that goes beyond the merely technical for Burt is the need for simplification and clarity. Speaking about clothing, for instance, simplification means only including what will contribute to the gestural quality of the painting when treating folds, values, etc. The clarity and forcefulness of the image depend on such a process of simplifying and selecting. That is the way good paintings are created, by careful and economic orchestration of their components toward clarity and harmony. Looking at Burt's paintings, one has the feeling of an abundance of right choices. His images are clear and expressive. Textural and painterly passages are never an end in themselves. Reality is simultaneously respected and exalted, never merely copied. Music often is heard, and to this observer, his people definitely sing.

These are rare qualities in a painter of any period, past or present. Burt Silverman has painted and continues to paint many aspects of nature, always reaching upward, without a hint of artistic complacency. Through his portraits and paintings of people, he constantly explores the vast topography of the human landscape and the depths of the soul. An artist's path, however, lies only in further discovery. Burt puts it best when he says, after discussing issues of artistic growth and search for a personal language, in his book Breaking the Rules of Watercolor:

"It's also taken me a long time to understand that there is no perfect solution. That is, there is no permanent solution. The means of paintings - the brush strokes and the lovely passage - will change again as the artist experiences new expressive needs. There will always be new problems. And there will be new solutions somewhere out there on the horizon."

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John de la Vega, painter, poet, author, teacher, came to America in 1961 to fulfill a childhood dream. At age fifteen, while still in his native Argentina, he launched a distinguished career in portrait painting that continues to this day. He has painted many famous personalities, including Elizabeth Taylor with Richard Burton, President Ronald Reagan and CEOs from some of the nation's top corporations. In 1993, John de la Vega received the Distinguished Achievement in Portraiture Award at John Howard Sanden's National Portrait Seminar in Atlanta.