Maggie Siner
Maggie Siner is an American artist whose paintings are shown in Paris, Venice, London, New York, Washington DC, and in hundreds of collections around the world. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, she began her studies at the Art Students League of New York, graduated from Boston University (BFA) and American University (MFA) where she studied with Robert D’Arista. During her long artistic career she has lived for extended periods in France, China and Italy. Siner’s work is classically derived and highly structured while also being gesturally expressive. She works directly from visual perception, trying to catch vision ‘in the act’,focusing on light and the everyday world of objects and transience.
Siner is also a devoted teacher who has influenced a generation of painters. She has been on the faculty of l’Institute d’Universités Américaines and Lacoste School of Art in France, visiting professor at Xiamen University in China, artist-in-residence at Savannah College of Art and Design, Dean of Faculty at the Washington Studio School and teaches master classes in the USA and abroad. She is a frequent guest artist and public speaker. In 1976 Siner moved to France, exhibiting her work in Aix-en-Provence and Paris. She followed medical studies at the Faculté de Médicine in Marseille, taught anatomy at Georgetown Medical School in Washington DC, and completed facial reconstructions for law enforcement in Virginia. She is well known for her expertise in artistic anatomy as seen in her figurative sculpture. In 1991 she lectured in the six major art academies in China, and returned several times to teach painting at Xiamen University. Since 2008 she has been in Venice, enamored of that city’s ever-changing surfaces.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I try to translate the eye's fleeting perception of the world around me into the permanence of paint. This is not an imagined or photographic process, it is the actual way the eye catches light in the act, collecting colored shapes and sending them through the nervous system where the mind deciphers and reacts. This is seeing. To paint is to reenact; to choreograph inside the confines of a rectangular frame, to select and simplify from the complexity of stimuli until the lived experience is recreated. Anything may be subject matter. I think of Constable declaring he never saw an ugly thing in his life --"let the form of an object be what it may —light, shade and perspective will make it beautiful." It's all about the way color and shape, line and direction interact and create meaning. In the process, spaces between namable objects become more important than objects themselves. Nothing is invented, rather the goal is the truth of visual response. Painting taps the deepest and most considered resources of its maker, building a model of perception and a poetry of sight in a unique handwriting. With these thoughts I am poised between Cezanne's petit sensation and the immediate touch of brushwork, finding grandeur perhaps in a fold of cloth, or an epic tale in unrelated objects placed together, while propelling a viewers eye on the same intrepid journey as my own.