We all have to start some place……

Gregg Silvis

My artistic career path has included several twists and turns along the way. I graduated from college with undergraduate and graduate degrees in music performance, and I then played French horn professionally for a number of years. Moving to California after my performing career, I enrolled in library school and worked as an academic librarian for the ensuing 30 years. I began to pursue my long-dormant artistic impulses and realized that this was what I really wanted and needed to do full-time. So at the age of 61 I retired as a librarian in order to pursue my artistic career full-time, a return to the right side of my brain as it were..

As a librarian surrounded by over two million books every day at work, I was initially drawn to incorporating these physical objects into my work.. In my first series, Great Expectations: de/reconstructed, I explored various ways of reimagining this text. My later works, on a larger scale and employing multiple, disparate volumes, evolved from this initial series.

As this “book phase” came to an end, I explored working in other media, including stained glass, gold leaf, with a bit of ceramics thrown in. Having been so involved in music performance, I was intrigued with the idea of musical scores and their realization.  This resulted in a series of 32 small-scale works based on J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

I think of the current state of my work in terms of “organic precision.” I come from a very long line of farmers on one side of the family and a long line of craftsmen on the other side. I have always been fascinated by nature as well as the fabrication process, with a dash of perfectionism thrown in for good measure. Structure has been an important component of my work, even if it may not always be readily apparent to the viewer. The underlying structure is often organic in nature but generally very precisely controlled. Having been a classically-trained musician greatly influenced my artistic sensibilities; 30 years as an academic librarian, probably not so much.