FACES & PLACES
THE ARTS APRIL 2006

Val Sivilli
by Marilyn Bullock

Several months ago, two days after the newest New Hope Arts exhibit opened at Triumph Restaurant in New Hope, George and I were having a burger. I asked George to look around the room at the artwork and let me know if there was any piece he particularly liked. (Unbeknownst to him, I had already selected a painting that I really felt drawn to.)

George looked around for a couple of minutes and then said, “I like that fish over there.” Amazing - THAT was the piece I had picked. After some discussion and a look at our finances, we decided to purchase the artwork and a little red dot went up next to it marking it as “sold.”

At the time, I had never heard the name Val Sivilli, the fish painting artist. I contacted her and invited her to visit our home so she could see the painting hanging in our home. I soon discovered that the artist is as colorful and interesting as her painting!

She lived in Brooklyn, NY until she was seven and her family moved to Long Island. As a child Val was interested in both art and music. She and her brother were talented musicians (Val played the piano and the guitar) but, because her brother could write music as well as play it, she considered him to be the REAL musician and so moved her focus to the visual arts. She studied print making and ceramics at SUNY Purchase and got her undergraduate degree from Alfred University. She moved back to Brooklyn and became a studio assistant for Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, two well known New York artists, while working towards her Master’s Degree in printmaking and painting at Rutgers.

Val got married while finishing her post graduate degree. Not long afterwards her son was born. Val and her husband loved to canoe on the Delaware near Frenchtown and the couple purchased a “country home” there. They lived in the city during the week and in Frenchtown on weekends.

One day, coming home from the grocery store, Val had an “epiphany.” She realized that carrying a 20 pound squirming one-year-old and a 10 pound bag of bulky groceries up two flights of stairs at the same time was just NOT going to work. The family soon moved out of New York to Frenchtown full-time.

Wherever she lived Val set up an art studio. Even with two small children (daughter Ripley is now 13 and son Jack is 14) she managed to modify her artwork around diaper changes, naps, and school. She worked with what was at hand and what was easy to start and stop at a moment’s notice. She switched to painting in oils because oil paints do not dry as quickly as water based paints and she could leave a project for hours, even days, and still come back to work on it.

Living in a country setting also had the effect of lending Val’s artwork a more organic feel to it. Her work took her from bird images to fish to winged creatures and, finally, to the human body.

Basing her work on an ancient Japanese custom of fish printing called gyotaku, Val used dead fish to create her paintings. Val believes that we are all “attracted to things for a reason and that we should let these things lead and guide us.” During the time Val was doing fish pieces, her children were very small - totally non verbal for years. And, because she was a recent transplant from New York, she was virtually alone all of the time. At some point she realized that she was spending most of her time without anyone who spoke English. While tending to the needs of her children and household chores, there was a constant internal dialogue running through her head. Yet no outlet, no one to talk to! The Fish became (as the Christ image in Christianity) "THE WORD.” Many of the pieces show the fish as the container of "THE WORD", some have the fish actually orating - preaching. The painting George and I purchased came from her fish series.

Val’s body paintings came from a desire to paint the human body – to “evoke the body, not describe it.” She got the idea of body painting after visiting a chapel in Lodi, NJ where a life sized reproduction of the Shroud of Turin was on display.

Print-making on clothes came about almost by accident when she realized that she didn’t need a press if she printed on canvas instead of on paper. Eventually she moved her printing to shirts and now sells a full line of hand printed shirts at t Alchemy Clothing in Frenchtown. Selling shirts became a very practical way to sell her artwork.

Val continues to explore and grow as an artist. She is currently exploring the concept of letting go of judgments about herself so she can allow herself to explore obsessions she had as a young student.

Interestingly, she has also reconnected with her musical roots and has formed a 5 member rock band.

Contact Val through www.civilianbasics.com.