Siner, Maggie

Margaret Siner was born in Providence, Rhode Island, into a Jewish family. Her ancestors were emigrants from Russia who moved to the United States in the early 1900s ^[1] . When she was a child, her parents moved to Maplewood, New Jersey. There she graduated from high school, and in 1968-1969 attended drawing courses in the League of Art Students of New York ^[1] . In 1969-1973, she studied at Boston University and in 1974-1976 - at the American University , where she also studied painting ^[1] . During Boston University's summer fine arts program at the Tanglewood Institute, Lenox, Massachusetts (1971), Siner met Robert D'Arista, who subsequently had a great influence on her work. She later studied with him at American University. In 1971, she received a full scholarship at the Tanglewood Institute, where she completed a fine arts program for several years. In 1974, Siner attended courses at the Scowhan School of Painting and Sculpture to study fresco painting ^[2] .

From 1976 to 1980, Siner lived in France, settling in a 17th-century windmill near Fuvo at the foot of Mount Saint-Victoire , a mountain that became iconic thanks to Cezanne's paintings. She taught at the American Institute of Arts in Aix-en-Provence and held her first solo exhibition in Aix-en-Provence at the Friends of Art Gallery. She also became interested in medicine and attended a course at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Marseille. She continued her medical research and after returning to the USA in 1981, studied human anatomy at the Georgetown University School of Medicine in 1986 ^[3] . In the following decades, she often returned to France for long periods of time for the sake of education and for the organization of her exhibitions.

In 1991, Siner first visited China and was invited to teach painting at the art department of Xiamen University in 1992. She also taught there in 1999 and 2004 ^[4] .

Siner visited Venice in 2008 and has been living there for most of the year ^[5] .

Siner is one of the few contemporary artists working exclusively from nature, trying to capture the beauty and meaning of the moment ^[6] .

Her perceptual picture focuses on “how we actually see things, how we react to color and shape physically and emotionally, how our eyes move and move, stop at the edge or jump in contrast, how we react to vertical and horizontal, how one color gives way to another, how forms create weight, movement and direct our eyes along the way ” ^[7] .

In an interview for NashvilleArts magazine, Siner said the following: “I work directly with visual perception, ... I paint colors and shapes created by the light incident on things, but I don’t paint things myself” ^[3] .