Interview with Sydney Licht
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Interview with Sydney Licht
by Neil Plotkin
Sydney Licht is a painter based in New York. Ms. Licht studied at Smith College and received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is represented by Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in New York and is also a member of the still life group Zeuxis.
This past summer, Ms Licht had a solo show at Kathryn Markel and was included in two group shows which opened in December, the Small Packages show at Cumberland Gallery in Nashville, TN and The Common Object at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She will be included in the upcoming Zeuxis show Reflections, which opens at Linwood University in Missouri in February 2012.
There is also a video interview with Sydney Licht in her studio at the end of this interview.
I would like to thank Sydney very much for her time for this interview.
Neil Plotkin The classic artist story, the one here in America, is very often that a young artist moves to New York, struggles, builds a career and then moves and sets up life elsewhere. And you’ve done the exact opposite. You’ve built a career. You’ve lived around the country. You’ve raised your children. Once that was done, you moved to New York. How do you think this has benefitted you as an artist and how does living in New York now help you as an artist?
Sydney Licht I went to a liberal arts college on the East Coast as an undergraduate. The great benefit of not staying on the East Coast for grad school was that I was exposed to a different perspective at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which is where I went to grad school for painting. Living in Chicago was a revelation, permitting me to move past the European canon of art history.
I don’t know if you are familiar with the Art Institute of Chicago or the school there, but the professors I studied with were so open to influences outside of the European painting tradition (which I had, had a lot of as an undergraduate). I was exposed to the Field Museum of Natural History, Outsider art, Chicago Imagist paintings and art inspired by popular culture, comic books, etc.
It was eye-opening and I realized that I didn’t have to follow all those “rules” I was given as an undergrad. I could do any kind of painting I wanted. I could define my interests in a very personal way. Having this opportunity in Chicago and not going to New York right away right away helped to shape me as an artist.
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