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| Self portrait of the artist in 1987 |
Sylvia Eliason Needel was born with artistic genes, handed
down from her great-grandfather, her grandmother and her father. She discovered
an aptitude for drawing during a period of caring for an elderly relative in
the 1980s. She has studied with independent teachers in Framingham, Mass., and
in the Fayetteville-Manlius area, as well as with faculty at Cazenovia College. She earned an Associate in Applied Sciences
degree in graphic arts, concentrating on Illustration, from Onondaga Community
College in 1991, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in liberal studies from
Cazenovia College in 2004. She continues to take studio art classes at
Cazenovia College, working toward a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.
She writes, "I love landscape painting. Sometimes
I wonder why I feel the need to paint when it’s so much easier to take a
photograph as a keepsake of a lovely moment in nature. I speculate that I have
a strong need to internalize beauty by taking it in through my eyes and
reinterpreting it through my hands, putting myself and people with whom I
shared happy moments, firmly, if invisibly, within every scene I paint. I’ve
used nearly every medium there is to transfer images from eye to brain to
paper, and my first love is watercolor. But if you don’t practice watercolor
often, the skills necessary tend to evaporate.
"Pastel, on the other hand, can deliver the same kind of
feeling as watercolor, or the vibrancy of an oil or acrylic painting, but with
such ease of manipulation that I find it irresistible. I most often work from
photographs, (the Glen Canyon, Colorado paintings), but have recently been
doing more plein aire sketching (Beach Umbrellas), which gives me a sense of
freedom that I don’t find when working inside."
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