Born in Philadelphia, Toni Silber-Delerive graduated from Philadelphia College of Art with a major in painting. Establishing herself as a graphic designer, and the rewarding career that followed working in the creative departments of major New York design studios, led Silber-Delerive to ultimately form her own marketing communications firm, ToniDesign. Today, while she still does work for selected clients, she has switched her main focus to painting.
The colorful and bold aerial landscapes Toni creates show the world from a different perspective and by flattening the picture plane reduce details to strong graphic images. Working through the lens of the camera her paintings capture the moment, and let the image tell a universal story about a place or experience. The strong shadows hint at a certain time of day, at the same time creating the feeling of a familiar but distant landscape.
Realistic in my perception and approach, I paint aerial views that represent the diverse places and spaces of the contemporary landscape. Pursuing this novel approach to picture making, one discovers in the aerial vantage-point, a modern perspective and fresh visual vocabulary. It offers a viewpoint of reduced depth and a different perspective, creating less predictable detail and more abstract shapes while retaining the essence of the area. Drawing from the elevated position of high-rise buildings and commercial jets, I produce images of cities and towns, factories and farmlands, power plants, pastures, and woodlands.More than just a recording of the contemporary landscape, it is my interpretation and vision. The paintings combine elements of abstraction and representation, pattern and grid, surface and illusion, as well as observation, imagination, and memory. Whether hovering vertiginously above city streets and highways, floating serenely over the countryside, or soaring above towns, harbors, and monuments, I examine the relationships between the man-made and the natural, urban and rural, agrarian and industrial, and the worlds of power, labor, and leisure.
Over the course of my career, I have produced works that pursue directness and entice by their color, light, and brushstroke. My compositions take risks with perspective and employ devices such as rotation, repetition, and reversal, yet remain believable. I love paradoxes and ironies and exploit them in my work. To achieve this goal I embraces a variety of contradictory tendencies my art is sophisticated and childlike, earthbound and heavenly, comic and grave, and ordinary and heroic. Careful scrutiny of the paintings reveals several layers of interpretation. My people paintings are also commentaries. In the portraits, which are often from old photographs, I pursue a stylized impression of another era. Tastes and fashions may change, but the most basic of human needs, desires, and dreams are timeless and universal. Working from the lens of the camera, I capture the moment, but beyond the picture, the image tells a universal story about people or places, allowing viewers to fill in their own insight. … Read More