Delicato by Susan Sinyai
Miya Gallery Features Susan Meyer Sinyai
Weaverville’s Miya Gallery invites the public to meet artist Susan Meyer Sinyai and preview her work on Friday, October 28, from 5–8 p.m. The gallery will be open during the Weaverville Art Safari on Saturday and Sunday, October 29–30, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sinyai’s work will be exhibited through November.
A painter in oils and pastels, Sinyai was one of 50 artists to work with Tucker Cooke, founder of University of North Carolina Asheville’s art department, on the life-sized reproduction of Raphael’s School of Athens in the student union of her alma mater. She contributed two canvases to the 40-by-37-foot mural and was with the project from beginning to end.
“What an experience it was,” she says, “working with so many different artists, similar, I am sure, to working in a Renaissance atelier.” In 2001, she was “honored,” she says, to be commissioned for a portrait of former UNCA Chancellor Samuel Shuman.
Although she began her full-time art career as a portrait artist, Sinyai says that she has found more freedom through the years in painting landscapes, believing they are more open to interpretation and give her the chance “to explore and learn as it seems every scene can offer something new to contemplate.”
Some of her latest works are small landscapes done in oils on wooden panels. “The brilliance and luminosity of pastels, however,” she says, “is hard for me to ignore for long and I always come back to it.”
In Asheville since 1980, Sinyai finds a sense of community among artists in the area. “I love that the art scene is so vibrant and offers such an array of art and craft.”
Miya Gallery is located at 20 North Main Street in Weaverville and is open Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Learn more at miyagallery.com.
