Meet artist and swimmer Pamela Silver, whose parents forbade her from participating in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, but whose painting won honors for Israel this summer at the 2008 Beijing games.
By ANDREW TOBINPamela Silver 88 224(photo credit: Courtesy)
For local painter Pamela Silver, showing her artwork at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Fine Art Exhibition was an almost poetic resolution of many of the themes in the narrative of her life.
Silver's story begins in Johannesburg, South Africa, where she was born. When she was two, her father moved her, her mother and her older brother to Bulawayo, Rhodesia, present-day Zimbabwe, to open a wholesale company and factory.
He ran the business successfully, and like his parents, worked as a Zionist leader in the small northern European Jewish community there. Her mother maintained their home with an artist's eye, and volunteered for local organizations. She also taught Silver to paint and write.
When she was 10, Silver won the National Children's Painting prize. However, the adjudicating panel made a disparaging comment about her painting. "They said that I painted with dirty colors, so I stopped doing it. I was kind of blocked," she recalls.
At the age of eight, Silver started swimming competitively. After easily winning a local competition in Rhodesia, her mother took her to a training center. There she developed a passion for "the focused calm of swimming," and committed herself to it with a seriousness that belied her age.
She spent two to three hours a day in the pool. And at 16 was ranked eighth in the world in the butterfly, which is widely considered the most precise and difficult stroke.
But her parents were ambivalent about her swimming career, and when she qualified for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, they did not allow her to make the trip.
Silver remembers them saying, "You are only No. 8. We don't want to let you go on the plane all the way to Tokyo in Japan. We don't know about planes these days."
Although she was devastated, her colonial upbringing dissuaded her from arguing with them. In fact, she told the other girls on her team, "My parents know best."
Despite her deference to her parents, this event had a profound impact on her life afterward.
"It was very difficult for me because I worked my whole childhood to do this, and they stopped it just like that," she recalls. "There was a pattern in my life afterward that I used to stop myself just before I finished things."
After missing the Olympics, Silver swam in and won one more race. She did not swim again for well over a decade, and was never able to bring herself to teach her children to swim.
After high school, Silver returned to South Africa to study history and English at Cape Town University, and then moved to London to get a degree in education at Goldsmiths College.
As part of the program she was required to take art courses, ending an almost two-decade painting hiatus. While she was studying and working with dyslexic children, she married and had her first child.
Silver had always wanted to move to Israel. As a Zionist, she had visited the country many times and had "loved the honesty and simplicity of life there, and the feeling of belonging."
As soon as she graduated from Goldsmiths in 1973, her husband took a job in internal medicine at Hadassah University-Hospital, and they moved to Jerusalem. The actualization of this lifelong desire seemed to catalyze her extrication from many of her childhood inhibitions, and in Israel she was able to more wholly pursue her own interests. She could stop stopping herself.
As she put it: "I opened the bridges over the water again."
Silver, who now lives in Motza, went on to raise three children, and sometimes worked with students with cerebral palsy. At 29, she began swimming regularly again, and over time she became increasingly focused on painting.
"I found in painting a similar meditative calm to that of swimming."
Her paintings, which are intuitive expressions of her momentary states of mind, have a vibrant dream-like quality. "Whatever I feel, I transfer immediately to paper," she says, describing her watercolors, in particular, as "a daily diary of paint and color."
Silver has also studied etching and oil painting. In the supportive atmosphere of the Jerusalem Print Workshop, she was able to use these techniques to create evocative explorations of latent personal issues, such as the anxiety of her youth.
In addition to being cathartic, her work is intended to be didactic. She is "a teacher at heart," and attempts to convey hope even in her darkest paintings.
Silver has spread this message through numerous collaborations, exhibitions and museums both within Israel and abroad. Her work has been displayed at more than 80 exhibitions throughout the world.
Despite her personal and professional success, Silver's preempted trip to the Olympics always remained an unfulfilled dream and a symbol of personal powerlessness that "had been sitting on her for her entire life."
So when she was invited to display her oil painting, "Faces Looking for Peace," at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Fine Art Exhibition this summer, she decided that, despite some reservations, she had to take advantage of the opportunity.
The result was what she described as "one of the most amazing experiences of my whole life."
The work of 300 artists was selected for the exhibition out of nearly 10,000 entries from over 80 countries and regions. "There was a feeling of love amongst all of the artists, regardless of our nationalities," she says.
The creative and personal interactions between them, as well as the hospitality of the Chinese, seemed to trivialize the abstractions of geopolitics. She recalls that an Egyptian artist said to her: "If there were not people above us telling us what to do, peace would already have been made between the people."
At the exhibition opening, important political figures spoke, such as the Chinese minister of culture, and nearly 800 pieces of art were displayed.
"It was truly thrilling to represent Israel, and to see my painting on the wall with such a variety of incredible artwork," says Silver.
The exhibition was initially moved to the Tai Miao Temple in the Forbidden City, and is now on a worldwide tour, including to Shanghai, Hong Kong, Switzerland and America. Afterward it will be housed in a new museum in Beijing
Silver has remained in contact with many of the artists she met in Beijing. She has even had requests to contribute art to galleries in the Middle East, among other places.
Whereas in the past it would have been difficult for Silver to separate from her artwork, donating her painting to the Olympic Fine Art Exhibition has changed her perspective. "I let that work go, and now I feel that I can let all of my art go," she says.
Going to the Beijing Olympics tied together many of the plotlines of Silver's life. However, she does not see the experience as the end of a chapter, but as the opening of a new one. "I feel a sense of peace now, and am ready to move forward without fear."
Silver hopes to continue creating and exhibiting art, and intends to concentrate more on showing in Israel. "I want to share the embrace that I felt in Beijing with everyone, especially the people of this country."
