About Painting
American artist Maggie Siner paints exclusively from life. In this way she directly confronts her subjects, sensing their three-dimensionality, their particular light and their potential movement. Siner's work is classically derived yet strikingly contemporary freely handled yet powerfully structured. Beginning from a strict foundation of drawing and traditional media, through her contemporary influences of abstract expressionism, to long experience living in China, Siner's painting reveals a mysterious synthesis of eastern and western sensibilities.
She finds beauty in unexpected corners of the everyday world. Her evocative still-lives offer odd groupings of common or strangely juxtaposed objects, simple yet surprising, often unsettling, whimsical or macabre. With such arrangements and interconnections Siner make us see as if for the first time ordinary objects never before noticed as sources of beauty or meaning. Through the play of light and shadow and her emphasis on the momentary nature of vision itself, she involves us in an engaging experience of the world.
For Siner, as for all painters, light is critical. In the studio she rejoices in the perfect white light of an overcast day. Outside in the landscape it is the angled afternoon sun that most brilliantly reveals color, space and form. Her mastery of color relationships, the subtle middle tones as well as the bright splashes of primary red, enable her to create an unusually vibrant, clear and finely tuned sense of light.
Her figure painting and portraits are perhaps her most important contribution to contemporary painting. Leaving behind any trace of photographic seeing, her figure paintings are a genuine direct response to living character as revealed through form and gesture. She is a master of anatomy. Always her figures seem to be loosely handled and alive in action, while they also achieve an exact likeness of the individual and their mood. The same can be said of her still-lives. They are perfectly 'like', but never still. Siner describes painting from perception as "....a form of discovery and praise."
About Life
Born in 1951, in Rhode Island, Siner studied painting at Boston University and was a student of Robert D'Arista at American University before moving to Europe. She has lived for extended periods in France and The People's Republic of China. Her paintings are in hundreds of private collections around the world.
She has been a visiting professor at Xiamen University in China, artist in residence at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Dean of the Washington Studio School, on the faculty of l'Institute d'Université Américaines and the Lacoste School of Art in France (Cleveland Institute of Art). Her work is exhibited in America and Europe and she is a frequent juror, guest artist, workshop instructor and speaker much appreciated for her lectures on painting. She makes her home in Hamilton, Virginia and Lacoste, France.