ABOUT
Roberta Sickler is an Abstract painter living and working in the Hudson Valley. She has painted since childhood using any materials at hand to express mystery and delight.
For the past decade, Roberta has exclusively followed her natural intuition to paint, returning to her earliest influences, giving voice to a subconscious impulse, simplifying and pulling out emerging composition.
Her paintings often begin with gestural blind drawings to establish dynamics, perhaps over a neutral wash. After a palette is developed, paint is layered many times, scraped, incised, wiped, and repainted. Fine brush lines, crayon or graphite marks may be incorporated, as a conversation with the painting begins to emerge. Roberta believes that a painting begins to “speak,” as work proceeds, to make visible deeper parts of consciousness.
Roberta studied art at SUNY Buffalo and the Albright Knox Gallery, concentrating in painting and the study of Mid 20th Century art. She worked in theatre as well as studios in painting and drawing. She was accepted for the Experiment in International Living, junior year abroad in Siena Italy. Living in a medieval city while saturated in an itinerary of Renaissance Art, influenced a continued pursuit of Art History.
Following college and travel, Roberta Sickler settled in NYC, where she made drawings for book publications, and wrote illustrated columns for local magazines. Ultimately she published 2 illustrated life style books under her own name: “Ritual of the Hearth” and “Mountain Harvest.”
Coming to the Hudson Valley brought Roberta’s artwork under the influence of the natural environment and the legacy of landscape painting. She enrolled in SUNY New Paltz to further studies of Art History, ceramics and printmaking earning an MFA in Painting in 1991.
In the years that followed she worked teaching art, primarily in the elementary level.
Finally, as her style has evolved, she recognizes how the connection of the many various experiences weave together as her own voice in painting: the freedom and freshness of children’s play with materials, the legacy of art - making through history and how painting carries the hand and is part of its own time, always the subconscious impulse of dreams.
Since that time she has become part of the Woodstock art community, studying with outstanding artists at R&F Encaustics, and at the Woodstock School of Art. She has memberships with the Woodstock Artists Association and Byrdcliff Kleinert Art Center. She also shows regularly at the Emerge Gallery in Saugerties and at other regional venues. Her paintings are in private collections both nationally and internationally.