Pasted Together

BECKY ENABNIT SILVER

“You’re the god of your painting,” says Becky Enabnit Silver, “so you can change anything. You can move that tree.” Her voice changes when she talks about her work. At first, she is shy, quiet and careful, pausing before she speaks in low but smiling terms. But standing before the soft edges of her art, she becomes bright and the shyness falls away; her volume soars and laughter lays an echoing period on every sentence she speaks. After nine years as a teacher, a lifetime raising two sons and more than twenty years as an art instructor, she is now the opener, owner, and curator of the Aar River Gallery.

The gallery rests in the quiet heart of the Westminster Arts District. It takes its name from the Aar River in Switzerland, paying homage to the etymology of her maiden name—now her middle—and to her grandfather who knowingly, or not, paved the way for her life as an artist.

“My grandfather did pinups during World War Two, and commercial art,” Silver says. “He did ads for Miller Beer and Coca Cola … Since [he] was actually making a living as an artist, it wasn’t something that people thought of as ‘this is just going to be a hobby.’ They were always really supportive of it.”

Passing through the small storefront, Westminster disappears amid walls crowded with watercolor pastoral scenes, shelves with hand-thrown pottery, cases of beaded jewelry, and reproductions of her grandfather’s art. Silver assembled this collection herself—an amalgam of family works and artists she’s hand-selected from her deep Rolodex of 30 years in the Colorado art community.

“You have to really think about what you’re doing,” she says. “Before I even start the watercolor painting I’ve thought through the whole process because you have to save the lights.” If she were to compose an art piece with dark colors, the warmer tones might be prevented. “There’s no undoing it.”

That final part is most true: there is no undoing it. It’s this reason that Silver finds herself moving beyond the boundaries of watercolor, and experimenting instead with collage, acrylic and gouache to cover and redeem the work that simply doesn’t work.

On the walls of the gallery, adjacent to her landscapes, are the pieces that do not seem to fit: abstractions with strangely harmonious warring colors, hard lines unusually natural, subjects discernible only in some deep part of the imagination. At first there’s little you can understand, but if you are patient—or ask her to show you—your eye begins to find the small parcels of paper so well-blended you almost can’t believe they aren’t painted on.
Her process is odd and disjointed, and often she finds herself with jarring spread clippings and half-finished pieces filling the tables in the back room where she teaches some evenings. But from the mess she is always able to create order. Fixated on form, devoted to composition, her experience and passion are self-evident as her work catches your eye and seems to change right before you, shifting focus, drawing your attention here and there, and your mind always back to her work again.

Once upon a time, the Aar River Gallery was a bike shop. Then it was a warehouse left in neglect. But today, Becky Enabnit Silver has transformed it into something else, just as her work transforms into fantastic abstractions, and as she helps transform 73rd Street into a destination for art. And in that, without paint or paper, she may really have completed her greatest work of all.