by JONATHAN YORK
The bike ride from Congress Avenue and Slaughter Lane to East MLK Jr. Boulevard is 10 miles in the bright sun. After an hour your eyes long for anything like the colors of water.
How relieving, then, to look at turquoise, sea foam and cool gray.
The fiber artwork of Oscar Silva occurs in such colors. While these are not the limits of his palette – there are also maize and goldenrod, Indian paintbrush and black – the blue-greens seem essential. The others are details.
Many of his pieces are woven hangings in which a color pattern repeats across a neutral field. In “at the water’s edge,” for instance, dyed shells have been stitched into woven strips of pellon. The shells are almost cerulean, and against the flat gray wall, the dark ceiling, and the white fluorescent bulbs, they draw the immediate glance of anyone who walks in.
Silva walked toward that piece in torn jeans and a long untucked shirt. He was short and thin. The nearer he came to the hanging, the more his shirt matched the dye.
“I love that color blue,” he said, smiling. “It’s kind of my favorite thing.”
Surely it helped that the bluest pieces – “at the water’s edge,” another hanging called “ebb tide” and the shadow-box “blue grotto” – were all at one end of the room. We were looking at these works on Friday in the Flatbed Press building, an Austin Art Center since 1989. Tina Weitz had hung them for a forthcoming show in her small gallery here, which is her working studio the rest of the time.
Weitz had moved in so recently that the track lights had not yet shown up. When the lighting is proper, she said, “I love how the ceiling just disappears.” At this point, though, the ceiling was quite evident, with exposed pipes and vents that brought a jagged and random pattern into contrast with Silva’s cool and even lines.
She pointed at “study in white,” another hanging, in which small triangular boxes emerge from the background.
“We could light this one so that the shadows are going all these different ways,” she said. “I’ve worked with a lot of interior designers, and I love how his pieces, his three-dimensional pieces, kind of play in the light.”
People are constantly sending him boxes of treasure: Texas seed pods, California shells, brown paper bags that he uses to make his own paper. And Silva has always combined discarded matter into something attractive and marketable: When he was a boy in Gary, Ind., he would fashion little magnets in the shape of mice. He managed to sell quite a few.
Silva lives in Staples, southeast of San Marcos, where gently repeating patterns come close to his door. “I have cornfields and wheatfields and all kind of fields outside my house,” he said. “The stuff around me inspires me, the fields, I’ve got pieces I call, like, ‘harvest.’”
