SICA Calendar Artists, Part III

Assembled by Fayra Teeters

Here is another grouping of our amazing 2027 SICA Calendar Artists, each with an interesting story or two to share:

Roberta Hoffman

Calendar Designer

Roberta Hoffman is a graphic designer and web designer based in Baltimore, Maryland, and a member of the SICA-USA Board of Directors. Her professional work includes visual identity, print and promotional design, and website design and development, with a particular interest in working with artists, writers, cultural organizations, and nonprofits.

For the 2027 SICA-USA fundraising calendar, Roberta volunteered her graphic design services, working with the submitted artwork to develop the calendar’s overall visual design and layout and prepare the final files for professional printing. The finished calendar brings together work by Subud artists while helping raise funds for SICA-USA.

To learn more about Roberta’s design work, visit robertahoffman.com.

Anna Schroeder

Dreams of Wild Horses Design

I’m honored to have my images on the mugs now available as gift-rewards for folks donating to SICA. I hope you enjoy the images as much as I enjoyed painting them.

For quite some time, I’ve been into creating little drawings and paintings as a form of journaling. My horse series emerged at a time when I’d just learned that my father has a brain tumor and my husband had liver cancer. They both needed a lot of care. I’d been home schooling my children and soon realized I had to get my kids into brick-and-mortar schools. This also meant scaling back my art career to the point of not showing my art at that time.

Horses became the symbol of my drive. Horses in a dust storm sum up the feeling of reorienting my efforts. Horses in the snow represent how I needed to drive forward no matter what obstacles I would be facing.

The scene in the forest is the place I walked to every day, usually at dawn, to help me plan my day. The sun rose and played on the leaves of the undergrowth. The tracks were made by my husband driving through the woods on his tractor to gather firewood. I gave this painting to my dad for his birthday to put in his room. He was in the habit of asking me daily what new plants I’d found, or what animal I might have seen. “How are those salamanders?” he’d ask. I thought my painting would remind him of how my daily trek might look.

Michael Barber

Recording Artist / Photographer

Although I submitted a photograph to be included in the 2027 SICA Calendar, photography is my hobby. I’m a songwriter in my late 70s now. For the last couple of years, I have been restoring and re-mixing old recordings of my songs and building a website which I refer to as my “Autobiography”.

The restoration process is a foray into an aspect of music new to me, quite a learning curve, including mixing and mastering, compression, dynamic EQ; psychoacoustics. My goal has been to make the recordings feel good since, otherwise “a tree falls in the forest. . .” It’s devilishly difficult, especially since most people listen to music now on their phones out of those scratchy, no bass speakers.

Damon Hyldreth

Sculptor

A few weeks after I was opened, I felt like my whole being was being turned inside out, so I bought clay to relax and spent a couple hours each evening carving it. A week later I had a clay sculpture that seemed perfect to me. An artist friend suggested that I cast it in bronze. A month later after polishing the bronze sculpture to a mirror finish, a Subud friend asked to take it back home with him to Chicago and show it to some people. He called me two days later to tell me that my sculpture was now in the best gallery in Chicago. I realized that the Latihan had created a clear channel for creation from my deep inner self.

After years of making sculpture part time while working full time in software, I did some testing at a Menucha gathering. The testing was: “What did you promise God before you were born?” I received clearly that I’d promised to become a world-famous sculptor. I didn’t see a path forward for this, but I got a push a couple of years later when the dotcom meltdown occurred. I was out of work and jobs in software became nonexistent. I tested again “What do I need to do to realize my promise to God?” and received to go back to college and study sculpture. I spent the next few years at the San Francisco Art Institute. After graduation, my work changed, it freed up and opened, and I started getting large commissions and new gallery representation.

On occasion if I feel stuck or that things aren’t flowing, I test two things: