The internationally acclaimed and award-winning journal Resurgence & Ecologist illustrates Joanna Macy’s HEARING THE CALL with Pat Silbert’s paintings Soul of the Whole and The Heart of Silence.

Earth in Beauty Dressed – new paintings by Pat Silbert

In this arresting new series, Pat Silbert portrays some very old trees in the Irish landscape just as they begin to leaf out…radiating energy. She surrounds them with ancient Buddhist symbology in iconographic compositions.

Inspired by her travels in 2011 to the Irish countryside and to Buddhist caves in the Gobi Desert, Silbert was deeply moved by the beauty and sacred aspects she encountered. These elegant paintings illustrate a cri de coeur for our civilization to hold the natural world in greater esteem and to value and save the world’s forests and trees. Buddhist philosophy and symbols seem for the artist to facilitate a perspective from the past to the future, intensifying our connection to the present moment.

The paintings are acrylic, layered extensively, some with handmade paper collaged to the canvas. The wrap-around canvas gives them an added three dimensional element as the sides are painted in detail with gold leaf highlighting ancient designs reminiscent of Tibetan tankas.

This is Silbert’s second solo show at the gallery. She has exhibited widely in the Washington area and New England and shows regularly at The Waverly Street Gallery.

November 22, 2012 by Mark Jenkings

One common attribute of Washington artists is that they’re well-traveled, and not just to the usual places. The paintings in Pat Silbert’s Waverly Street Gallery show, “Earth in Beauty Dressed,” are partially inspired by grand old trees seen in Ireland. With titles derived from William Butler Yeats’s verse, and gold-leaf embellishment to give the impressionist pictures a medieval aspect, the paintings evoke bygone European traditions. But that’s not all.
Silbert has also visited cave temples along the Silk Road in Western China and mixes the foliage of rainy Ireland with Buddhist and desert imagery. The artist flanks her watercolor-like acrylics of trees with dozens of tiny Buddhas, and in one, she surrounds a picture of a stork at a pond with 12 Buddhas interspersed with four small trees. (She also continues the decorative motifs on the sides of the canvases.) The repeated figures are typical of Buddhist art and give an Asian aspect to work dominated by the conventions of Western landscape painting. The most striking pieces, such as “The Wings of Wisdom and Compassion,” find a balance between wet and dry, blue and red, East and West. They transport the viewer to a place only Silbert has seen.

Earth in Beauty Dressed
on view through Dec. 1 at Waverly Street Gallery, 4600 East-West Hwy., Bethesda; 301-951-9441; waverlystreetgallery.com.

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