“Creation is an act of love”
-
Olivia Cyr is an interdisciplinary artist working in multiple mediums including drawing, painting, and collage. She studied at the University of Nevada, Reno and received her B.F.A. in 2017. She has shown her work in group shows and juried exhibitions locally in Northern Nevada.
Born and raised in the Sacramento Valley, she now calls Sparks, Nevada her home. She shares her home with her loving and supportive husband, two young children, and a couple of dogs and cats. When she isn’t working in the studio, she can usually be found out in the garden.
Her recurring themes explore the human lifecycle, focusing on motherhood, death, and our place in the natural world.
-
Creation is an act of love. Whether I’m painting a landscape, an animal, or a person the love for them comes through. My work has evolved through different styles and focuses through the years, but the thread of love ran through it all.
When I got my BFA I did a series of largescale self portraits oil, reflecting on self love and body neutrality.
After a period of burnout I began painting again, this time in watercolors. I did a series of flowers, painting the same flower again and again day after day as it changed. These too were self portraits in a way. I was reflecting on my changing body and changing self perception postpartum. Learning to love myself in every part of metamorphosis.
Not long after I began a series of much more illustrational ink works and collages, focusing mostly on native animals and plants. Now themes of motherhood began to become irrevocably intertwined with my work. Feral animals with their cubs, representations of my own philosophy around motherhood.
Now I have returned to oils, this time inspired by artists such as Morisot, Monet and Frida Kahlo (an unlikely pairing I know). The scenes I paint are fictional imaginings, magical realist in subject matter but impressionist in style.
I see a planet around me in crisis, but I seek to paint a world on the other side of that, where we have learned to find an alternative stasis point. The planet will never forget the scars we have left upon it, but perhaps we can find ways to work together with it.
Strange and Feral Futures: Hope, despair and reciprocity
I stand on the bluff at Cottonwood Park, a little riverside park in the middle of Sparks industrial zone, overlooking the great Truckee river. While I hunt for the best spot to photograph, my son finds his way down the rocks to the river below where the geese are making their nests. “Don’t get too close!” I shout, a premonition of violence flashing through my head as I remember the feral geese of my own childhood.
What if memory was as fluid as the river, encompassing not just the past but the future? The river of memory forks at hope and despair. My ancestors were restless and drove a reckless path here. Now as I overlook the great Truckee river, wind tugging at my hair, I wonder: will my children’s children come here? Will the geese threaten and posture at my family for generations? Grief for the future, the present, the past weighs heavily as I watch helplessly while my cousins destroy the planet, eyes set on other far off rocks. I hope my children’s children can learn to treat this land as though we intend to stay. I hope the river is still here for them to do so.
The beauty of the natural world undoes me. Like the magical realists I am struck by the extra-ordinary in the ordinary. Like the impressionists and the expressionists, I love color and light and paint. In my work the unconventional colors highlight the hazy space between memory and reality. Something happens between the brain, the eye, and the canvas, and the memory of a thousand rivers overtakes this one river.
Let’s build a bridge over the river of memory, from consumption to reciprocity and find a way to give ourselves back to the earth we came from. There must be a way to reclaim stewardship of the land, to act in symbiosis with the world once again. I strive to create something new: a strange and feral future. I hunt for this future on my canvas.
