I am a multi-media and collage artist, always exploring new materials

Artist Statement

Alicia Schilder

I began to focus on art as self-expression only after I retired from 37 years of public school teaching. Why wait so long? Because teaching was an all-consuming focus that left little time for anything but necessities.

As a late bloomer in the art world, I have sometimes felt that I need to make up for lost time—maybe work myself into a frenzy to accomplish what I neglected in the first two thirds of my life. But frenzy is very counter-productive, so I have chosen meditative play instead.

I paint intuitively, sometimes having a plan, other times letting the materials unfold their story as I go along. I use many different materials in my collage work, including acrylic paint, texture additives such as glass beads, copper, and sand, molding paste, texture gel, tar gel and crackling paste. I also like to repurpose found objects such as net bagging from fruits and vegetables, old newspaper, phone book paper, and my old paintings. Shopping for papers has become an obsession; I use any kind of tissue paper, wrapping paper, cotton, mulberry, and rice paper among others.

Oil and cold wax is another medium I use that is very tactile, and therefore fascinating. It must be scraped very thinly onto a firm surface, and the colors are built layer upon layer. Very fun!

In fact, texture has become so important to my art, that my artistic expressions sometimes land between 2-D and almost 3-D. I just love playing with “stuff!”