Friday, November 13, 2009

Koe Sylwester

Artist's Statement

I have been making things since childhood. Since 1976, I have been calling “making things” Art.

My “making things” is a journey inward that expresses my thinking and what I have to say. The journey takes place in visual images, both pictures and sculptures.

My work is a visual diary of my life and what I have learned. Although my images express my personal view of things, my themes are universal: motherhood, childhood, life stages, the inner child, emotions, culture, and what is feminine.

I work in different mediums. Usually, an idea will demand its own form of expression to best communicate itself. I draw in pencil or ink, paint with watercolor or acrylic, pyrograph and oil paint on wood, and assemble collage as needed. Or I make sculpture with painted wood, papier-mache, and needlepoint. The medium enhances the message.

Biography:

I was born in 1954 in Seward, Nebraska.

My brother and I made up my nickname “Koe” during our childhood. I began using that name publicly as a teenager.

I have been married to Steven Sylwester since late 1975. We have lived in Eugene, Oregon, since early 1976. We have two daughters.

Professional Resume:

I was a known artist in the mid-1980s with a growing regional and national reputation.

By age 28, I had three major one-person shows of my work: in the Focus Gallery at the University of Oregon Art Museum in 1979, in Koenig Gallery at Concordia University in Nebraska in 1980, and in the main gallery at Maude Kerns Art Center in Eugene in 1982. Additionally, I had been in several group shows at the UO Art Museum and in an art gallery in Eugene that is now defunct. Visual Arts Resources (affiliated with the UO Art Museum) had toured my work throughout the Northwest for two years from 1982 to 1984 in a two-person exhibition.

For years, I had been regularly published regionally in the Willamette Valley Observer (now defunct) as a cartoonist and illustrator, including cover art. Also, I had been published nationally several times in Mother Jones magazine and in High Country News as a cartoonist and illustrator.

Then my husband became terribly sick for two years before having successful major surgery in spring 1986. My oldest daughter was born in summer 1986, and my youngest daughter was born in early 1989.

I began making gallery Art again in 2005.

E-mail: KSylwester@aol.com

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