SYDNEY COHEN
Untitled, from the series "Farther Travels from Further Away", acrylic on panel, 24" x 30", 2012

Sydney Cohen received her MA (2000) and MFA (2002) in Painting (with a minor in Printmaking) from the University of Iowa, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow and deeply influenced by her professors and peers.  She has a BFA (1997) from California College of Arts and Crafts.  She has been teaching at the California College of the Arts in Oakland since 2002, winning a teaching commendation in 2009.  Her work has been exhibited in the Bay Area, as well as in Iowa and Chicago.  She lives and works in Berkeley, California.

In the artist's own words:

"I feel the acute embarrassment of trying to untangle my messy consciousness from the world.  Color and shape and paint make sense to me.  My paintings use tactile layers of colored shapes, shuffled and stacked and leaned together, in the service of trying to replicate the feeling of the fluidity of thought.  Color alliances move and migrate, create pathways and rooms and dead-ends.  Disorientation and orientation wrestle, as does the urge to cover up and to expose.  Blocks of color are sensory input packets, and their order and path are circuitous, like the mind trying to organize and build a stable story out of fleeting interpretations of what a day is.  Simultaneously, I can investigate the reverse-- a suspicion that the material world, if it isn't, really should be made up of feelings. 

Painting is full of the daily personal effort to navigate in and around the experienced world; an experience that is filled with the hope that things might just make sense and be beautiful right around a corner, and that NOW is just a series of experiments with the unlikely."

Sydney Cohen's website