Starting this weekend, SICA-USA will be honoring four major artists who are contributing their work to the First Annual Online Silent Auction launching on June 17th and running through July 17th. Our purpose is two-fold: to raise money to expand our SICA Grants Program which benefits Subud Cultural Projects, and to showcase the amazing spectrum of the Subud Cultural/Artistic Community. This week we’re featuring four contributors:

Anthony Lo Schiavo
Mr. Lo Schiavo is a nationally known painter and portrait artist. A professional artist since 1970, Lo Schiavo owned and operated Faces West Portrait Studio and Gallery on historic Cannery Row for eleven years. Here he established a national reputation for his pastel and oil portraits. He works in oil, pastel, and watercolor media. His paintings have been juried into exhibitions with the Pastel Society of America, at the National Art Club in New York City, the Monterey Museum of Art, and the Plein Air Painting Competition of the Carmel Art Festival. He has a reputation for sensitive paintings of beautiful light and effect, which collectors worldwide enjoy. Anthony is offering an enchanting seascape, Dancing Cypress, from his original oil painting created in 2020. This limited-edition print on canvas measures 18” x 24” and is ready for hanging,

Robert Mertens
Mr. Mertens is a nationally recognized artist and has accumulated twenty years of experience, making and marketing digital art. SICA-USA is proud to feature Mertens’ latest mosaic piece on the SICA Banner, created in the fall of 2022 for Menucha. For the SICA-USA Online Auction, Robert is offering two different mosaic creations each in two sizes:
Mosaic Pattern: Large: 42” x 42” for $500 and Small: 20” x 20” for $100
Hypercube Time Machine – Large 42” x 42” and Small 20” x 20”

Lawrence Pevec
Mr. Pevec has been an artist and designer his entire life and has worked professionally in graphic arts, exhibitry, and film/television design for over fifty years. He recently retired from doing design/build projects to focus his creative time on fine art and video. Since the 1990s Lawrence has explored encaustic medium. Encaustic (burn-in) is painting with pigmented wax which is manipulated by heat. Encaustic is both fast and satisfying as seemingly endless variations are possible. Many of his pieces are mixed media incorporating photography, found objects, collage materials, as well as dry media. His journey is to keep searching for that singular unique combination of form and content that defines him as it simultaneously defines his art! All of the pieces he has submitted to the SICA-USA Online Silent Auction are exploratory and made between 2021 and 2023:

In the Air #1 and #2: Due to its proximity to the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains, the Boulder sky displays an enormous variety of atmospheric colors and shapes. This series is inspired by those changes. Campfire: Encaustic with graphite on illustration board. Characters: An encaustic collage of some of the face doodles Lawrence has done over the years while attending tedious meetings.

Creation Myth #1 and #2: Separating light from darkness is a sketch for a seven-piece series. The idea that God created the earth and its inhabitants in seven increments is a fascinating concept, clearly an anthropomorphism of the Creator. All creation stories are similar and open for interpretation by the artist. Falling Angels #2: Samara (helicopter seeds) have always fascinated the artist; here he uses them embedded in beeswax to represent the spiral flight of souls and angels.

Memento Mori #1, #2, and #3: Momento Mori is Latin for “remember you have to die” and is an artistic or symbolic trope in Western art, a reminder of the inevitability of death. The concept has its roots in philosophers of classical antiquity and appeared in funerary art from the medieval period onward. October Series #5: The pieces in this series are an attempt to represent the nature and feeling of October in Colorado, addressing the overlaps between the natural organic world and the spontaneous randomness of abstract imagery rendered by heat and the human hand. Palms at Prambanan: the artist visited the Hindu Prambanan Temple near Jogjakarta in 2018 when the temple and surrounding gardens were spotlit after dark. He photographed the three palm trees and collaged a print onto corrugated board.
Pillow #1 and #2, Diptych: Encaustic with photo: two small photo prints of my pillow, shot with different filters and worked over with wax and dry media. Red Sky #1: is a loose landscape conceived with an unlikely sky over a forest of evergreens. Road Glyph: reflects the artist’s fascination with unintentional graphic expression and communication. The photos are asphalt crack repairs that may be seen as a script from the unconscious, speaking to us in a language weare yet to learn. Source Energy: an abstract process piece suggesting the macro/micro dichotomy in nature. Is it a creature in pond water escaping scrutiny or an astronomical accumulation of gas clouds and stars?

Priscilla (Andrea) Maynard
Priscilla Maynard was a beloved Northwest Sumi artist, poet, and old soul who showed her work at the Foster White Galleries. She was a member of Women Painters of Washington, Puget Sound Sumi Artists, and NW Watercolor Society. She taught for over 30 years at Bellevue Community College, Lake Washington Adult Education, and for Telos. She received her BFA from the Wesleyan Art Conservatory and an MFA from the University of Iowa. She met her husband of 57 years, Dr. Robert Maynard, on a plane to Europe in 1950. Her artistic legacy is represented in the SICA-USA Online Silent Auction by The Newborn, a pen and ink drawing on watercolor paper executed in 1987, donated by Alexa Wichert.

The SICA-USA Board is really excited about showing more than a hundred works by Subud creatives across the country in one place, the first time this has been done. Remember the site launches on June 17 th . We encourage everyone to have a look, register to bid, find the pieces you would like to own, and bid away! Next week we will feature five more artists who have offered their work for this showcase.

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