Silje Høidal
Portrait painting - Silje Høidal
Biography
Life and education
Silje Høidal was born in 1984 and grew up on Nordstrand in Oslo. As a child she enjoyed painting and drawing, and showed a great talent for both shape and colors at an early age.
After studying drawing, shape and color at Elvebakken school, she spent two years working in a privat studio in the culturehouse Hausmania.
In 2005 she had her first child and took a break from her studiowork.
After this she studied for two years at NISS- Oslo kunstfagskole.
Here she mainly worked with large paintings and experimented with different materials and tecniques.
In spring 2008 she had a daughter. She began her studies at Christiania Friakademi the following autumn.
This is a school who teaches the classical prinsipials in art the way the old masters used them.
As well as form and volume, dynamics and monumentality is higly valued in the students works.
This is a comprehensive prosses of study and gives a thorough knowledge of both drawing and painting.
Silje has from this school aquired a solid competence within the classical arts.
In 2011 she was able to start studying at NKF directly on their second year due to her background from other schools. Here she studied illustration 50% for two years while she continued her studies at Christiania Friakademi. She have therefore a unique ability when it comes to working with projects and coustomer orders.
Synesthesia
The reason why Silje has chosen portraits as her main focus in her art, is that she has a relatively high degree of synesthesia.
This is a condition where the experience of senses are slightly mixed up.
The most common form of it is that a person experiences a color simultaneously to a letter or number. An A can for example be red, while an E can be green.
Thera are numerous forms an variations of this condition, and research are being preformed on the area. Still no one knows for sure why some people experience this or what it means for the individual.
About 20% of the worlds population experince some form of synesteshia.
It is not an illness or a handicap, and most people feel greatful for their condition.
What is special about Silje is that she has several forms of synesteshia simultaneously.
One of them makes her experience people as different colors.
This gives her a rare ability to depict the individual persons caracter in her paintings, and to use colors in a way that frees her from the naturalistic copy of reality.
Since she is also interested in psycology and the essence of being human, painting portraits was a natural choice for her to make.
Dancing
In addition to painting, Silje also works as a dancer.
Together with Benedicte Rasch, she runs Mad moonrise hoop dance. Here she dances with hula hoops, gives workshops and makes hoops for sale.
Since 2010 Silje has also danced in Oslo magedans studio. On several occations she has also preformed with the studios own bellydance group called "Bellystars".
Videos from some of Siljes preformances can be seen on youtube.