Jane Slivka

By Rob Urban

Move the house ↓   Make the first mark ↓   Begin another painting ↓

Nearly twenty years after making a painting, Jane Slivka had a reason to return to it. As the description of her March 2026 video explains, a commission called for the older image. Vase, Light & Lemon brought that return into her public teaching practice.

It is an interesting situation for a working artist: meet the painting you made years ago with the hand and judgment you have now. The subject may be familiar, but the intervening years have happened. Returning to earlier work can make that distance visible.

Slivka’s gallery and teaching studio is in Mount Dora, where her paintings and classes have become part of the town’s creative life. She works in acrylics, often at a generous scale, and shares a method associated with loose movement, strong color, and an openness to changing what a reference image provides.

The appeal goes beyond the finished coastal scene or arrangement of flowers. She lets other people into the process. Viewers can encounter the artist making decisions, and students can try making decisions of their own.

Slivka’s notes about individual paintings offer a direct view into how she uses references. Sea Side House began with a house in Michigan that she relocated to an imagined beach. Island Boats grew from a friend’s photograph of Greece. Flowers in the Dune drew on a Tarpon Springs beach photograph, while Sea Side Living came from an imagined coastal village.

Those are different starting conditions. Sometimes the place supplies the scene. Sometimes the artist borrows an element and gives it another setting. Sometimes the place has to be invented.

That freedom is worth noticing because many people approach a reference photograph as an assignment with a correct answer. Slivka’s descriptions suggest another relationship: the photograph offers material, and the painter can decide what to do with it. A house can move. A remembered atmosphere can enter. A scene can become a combination rather than a transcription.

The pleasure of that approach is available to a viewer, too. Recognizing a boat or a house can be the beginning of looking, while the arrangement and color carry the eye somewhere less literal.

Her downloadable classes include the lesson video, a supply list, and a reference image. She also provides a free introduction to preparing the canvas. The format allows students to return to a demonstration and work at their own pace.

That repeatability is useful. In a live demonstration, the moment someone needs explained may pass while they are finding the right brush. A recording lets the learner pause and revisit it. Watching a decision twice can be more helpful than hearing a long explanation of what confidence is supposed to feel like.

The canvas-preparation material is another welcoming detail. Experienced makers sometimes forget how many small uncertainties stand between a beginner and the first mark. Someone may be willing to paint but unsure how to set up the surface. Removing that uncertainty helps the lesson begin.

Slivka also keeps sharing new subjects through her public video channel. Flowers, coastal settings, people, and studio concerns sit alongside one another. The continued output makes the teaching part of an active practice, with new paintings providing fresh occasions to explain and demonstrate.

For a student, that can change the scale of the undertaking. Painting becomes something a person returns to, with another subject available after the current attempt. One canvas does not have to carry the burden of proving whether they are an artist forever.

Christopher Still approaches Florida painting through a different kind of sustained investigation, with research and closely observed detail central to his work. Slivka offers a useful companion in this series: an artist who makes room for invention, changes of setting, and the energy of handling paint. A region’s art grows richer when its artists do not all see or teach in the same way.

What I admire is the room Slivka leaves for a person to develop. She can return to an old subject with a changed technique, move a house to another coast, and invite a student to begin with the materials in front of them. There is experience here, but there is also permission to remain curious about what the next painting might become.

Her Mount Dora studio gives the practice a local home, while classes and demonstrations open it to people elsewhere. A viewer can enjoy the finished work, then pick up a brush and begin finding out what they might change.