Solo Exhibition “Light” by Painter and Educator Silvija Ausma Jākobsone
On December 6, the Ogre History and Art Museum opened the exhibition “Light”, introducing visitors to the painting of artist and educator Silvija Ausma Jākobsone. This exhibition is the first retrospective of the artist’s works of such scale, with most of them being exhibited for the first time. The works span the period from 1966 […]
On December 6, the Ogre History and Art Museum opened the exhibition “Light”, introducing visitors to the painting of artist and educator Silvija Ausma Jākobsone.
This exhibition is the first retrospective of the artist’s works of such scale, with most of them being exhibited for the first time. The works span the period from 1966 to the present day. Silvija Ausma Jākobsone’s painting style has been influenced by her studies with old masters such as Konrāds Ubāns, Boriss Bērziņš, Imants Vecozols, and Eduards Kalniņš. A significant aspect of Silvija Ausma Jākobsone’s art over the last thirty years has been the sacred. Her altarpiece painted for the Jumprava Lutheran Church is noteworthy. Silvija Jākobsone has worked as an educator for over thirty years and believes she has invested more in her students than in her own creative work. For the past eight years, she has lived and painted in Ogre, passionately continuing to perfect her professional skills.
The exhibition “Light” at the Ogre History and Art Museum was on view from December 6, 2024, until December 21, 2025. February
“I like all painting styles, including abstractionism and contemporary art, absolutely everything, but I lean more towards the old masters. One could say my style is realism. Realism in various manifestations, quite lively and joyful. I enjoy painting absolutely everything: portraits, genres, nature, everything.”
Silvija Ausma Jākobsone has always sensitively encouraged her students to develop creativity, experiment, and seek the best option for their unique expression, which is why her painting classes were among the most anticipated subjects for many. Her students have included many well-known personalities: Ainars Mielavs, Aivars Vilipsōns, Inese Brants, Guntars Sietiņš, Vilis Daudziņš, and others.
Silvija Ausma Jākobsone was born in Riga in 1945. She graduated from Jānis Rozentāls Art High School and studied at the Painting Department of the Art Academy of Latvia (LMA). 2003. In 2003, she obtained a Master’s degree in Humanities. She worked as a painting lecturer at the Riga College of Applied Arts (1974–2002) and the Latvian Christian Academy (1997–2002). In both educational institutions, she developed teaching methodologies and curricula. 2003. In 2003, she was elected associate professor at a meeting of the LMA Council of Professors. She has been a member of the Artists’ Union of Latvia since 1975 and has participated in exhibitions since 1970. Her works are held in the Ministry of Culture of Latvia, as well as in private collections in Latvia, Austria, Great Britain, France, the USA, and elsewhere.
Exhibition curator: Elīna Cērpa, exhibition scenographer: Ineta Sipunova.
Beyond Time
Author: Artist, researcher Ph.D. Rita Broka, Ikšķile 2025
The exhibition Light, organized at the Ogre History and Art Museum, stands out as a significant event not only on the region’s cultural map. It also holds special significance in the life of its author, painter and art educator Silvija Ausma Jākobsone, as it is her first full-scale solo exhibition. The path to this exhibition has spanned an entire creative lifetime, revealing itself to the viewer simultaneously as a retrospective portrayal of professional achievement and a diary of an era filled with personal experiences, offering a momentary glimpse into a carefully collected and preserved, unique story of individual experience. It is important to note that this is not a narrative of dramatic shifts that provoke empathetic anxiety, abrupt changes in style, or relentless searches for new expressions. Instead, it is a testament to the perfection of painting, nurtured over many years and polished to a golden sheen, whose true value is revealed only in the undivided entirety of time’s fragments. Within it, scenes of both older and newer events unfold, imbued with picturesque light and embodied in the harmoniously pulsating vibrancy of the artist’s brushstrokes. It also reveals the blossoming, eternally new and resonant face of the future, shimmering in the bloom of sky-blue bells.
Silvija Ausma Jākobsone was born, grew up, and spent most of her life in Riga. From early childhood, drawing was her most engaging activity, and thanks to an admission announcement noticed by her parents in time, she successfully passed the competition and began her art education at Jānis Rozentāls Art School after the fourth grade. The artist remembers this period of study as an oasis of an intellectually free world, protected by a circle of like-minded individuals interested in professional growth, where the surrounding socialist reality became merely an insignificant, neutrally inert background. Her further education led her to the Art Academy of Latvia, where she studied painting for six years under the guidance of the most prominent art figures of that time. Among the artists who influenced her are such important names in Latvian art as Boriss Bērziņš, Konrāds Ubāns, Leonīds Breikšs, Indulis Zariņš, Edgars Iltners, Arvīds Egle. In terms of artistic expression, the author is drawn to the Italian Quattrocento period, French painting of all eras, Dutch masters — Jan van Eyck, Vermeer van Delft — as well as Latvian old masters. All these artists from different eras have, each in their own way, influenced the artist’s growth, the direction of her creative thought, and her search for imaginative expression. It is likely that they also served as examples in Jākobsone’s pedagogical work, to which the artist dedicated a full thirty-eight years of her life, patiently, demandingly, and at the same time wisely and supportively introducing several generations of young artists to the art of painting at the Riga Design and Art Secondary School, as well as the Latvian Christian Academy. The artist has made a significant contribution to the development of sacred art, creating altarpieces for the altars of the Jumprava and Ārlava Evangelical Lutheran churches.
Among the significant circumstances in the formation of her creative path, it should be noted that at the beginning of her professional career, the artist had already become a mother. Therefore, this crucial aspect of a woman’s life inevitably and naturally emerged as a deeply engaging theme, filled with personal feelings, in her painting as well. As an ever-present and inseparable thread of her perception of existence, it is revealed in portraits, landscape motifs, and themes inspired by everyday events. All of them are united by the unmistakably accurate and artistically valuable capture of a moment snatched from endless daily worries. The composition In the Water (1979) is a full embodiment of such a warm moment, permeated with the joy of summer carelessness. The painting depicts a scene often observed on the seashore, when city children, having finally seen the long-awaited, infinitely vast blue of the water, rush into the shallow waves of the beach. The children’s warm, sun-drenched, color-infused bodies, the white-golden splashes of water, and the clear, resonant bursts of laughter unmistakably ignite a feeling of sparkling joy and freedom in the viewer. Perhaps very similar to what the female artist experiences when, breaking away from the intense flow of family life, she finds fulfillment in moments of her long-deferred aspirations.
Turning to the exhibition’s content, the artist’s painted portraits are worth examining first, especially her self-portraits. The earliest of these was painted in 1966, at the beginning of her studies at the Art Academy of Latvia. The background of a snow-covered winter landscape expressively illuminates the youthful girl’s face, turned in profile. Her concentrated gaze, with conscious seriousness, is fixed on a specific point of thought, responsibly striving to maintain the expression required for the portrait’s intention. Interestingly, there is no trace of girlish frivolity or mischief, which we often see in the faces of young people who have just reached adulthood. Completely different is the self-portrait the artist painted seventeen years later. The woman, seated in a sideways position, appears reserved, concentrated, quiet, and introspective: now it is the face of an adult woman shaped by the burden of worries, having experienced joys and sorrows. The carefully twisted hair bun highlights the slender line of her neck and the stubbornly unyielding, stately posture of her body. The shimmering golden background, as if borrowed from an icon, prevents the gaze from dispersing into the depths of the color field and insistently draws the eye to follow the details of the painted figure’s floral fabric attire, the white falling folds, and the restrained line of the hand. This hand, resting against the edge of the valuable frame with the lightness of a heavenly dove’s feather, seems poised to rise in a sanctifying gesture. Different — warmly alive and femininely tangible — is the self-portrait Evening Sun (1985), painted a few years later: turned towards the viewer, allowing a glimpse of the woman’s face, yet the gaze beneath the lowered eyelids is hidden and inaccessibly quiet. With a miraculous touch, the evening sun’s palpable, golden-russet rays revive the shy figure, illuminating the freely falling hairline, igniting the crimson-clad contours of the body, and sensitively and thoughtfully revealing new paths of reflection in the language of painted expression.
Delving into the narrative lines of Silvija Ausma Jākobsone’s painting, it must be noted that color consistently serves as the primary source for revealing content in the artist’s works. Even in figurative scenes filled with everyday events, it unmistakably concentrates, guides, and defines the theme embedded in the painting. An example of this is the composition Red Flowers (1974). Three young women are depicted in the center of the painting. Their casually composed figures are surrounded by a vast field of blooming tulips, awash in the rich blush of spring. The intensely saturated red color seems to fill every centimeter of the painting’s surface. Waving along with the rows of plant stems outlined by the tulip petals, it creates a mirage of an infinitely vast floral landscape. The distant horizons, fading into multi-voiced purple hues, with magical allure, inspire the search for ever new imaginative paths. These paths, impatiently pushing through the foreground figures of women, strive towards the lands beyond the horizon, filled with unspoken dreams. Observing this composition, one inevitably recalls its year of creation, the sharply stinging red color in its title, and the environment, themes, and unavoidable ideological tributes of the era to which it belonged, which everyone who wished to live an open creative life was forced to fulfill. However, in the artist’s execution, these nuances, which today might provoke a wry grimace, take on the role of a casual passerby or a footnote to be used as needed, having only an indirect connection to the truly enduring values of painting that permeate the depicted environment. Precisely for this reason, even when viewed with today’s eyes, for example, in the painting Dusk (1985), the foreground is dominated by the mood conveyed in the precisely chosen color strokes, the coolness brought by the evening peace instilled within it, and the gently rising scent of the earth, which, like a smoothing veil, covers the prosaic presence of livestock farmers’ field work. The artist’s ability to imbue an everyday moment with a poetic sense of elevation through the painterly power of color is also revealed in the painting Girl in a Room (1982). In the center of the composition, rendered in subdued earthy tones, is the figure of a girl sitting alone in a small apartment room. Her fragile, shyly huddled figure is contrastingly framed against the brown-neutral background of the surrounding environment by the bright blue chair cover, which, like a newly bloomed, long-awaited spring flower amidst a dormant surrounding, unmistakably attracts and holds the viewer’s gaze for as long as possible.
The changing seasons in landscapes, gardens, flowers, and still life are themes that can be described as a persistent, even existentially necessary leitmotif in Jākobsone’s creative work. This is evident in all stages of development and in the painting techniques used. The landscapes exhibited — Winter (1979), Spring in the Garden (1981), Rainy Spring Day (1983) — reveal the artist as a sensitive observer of natural processes, who perceives the phenomena occurring within them and the various states created by changes in lighting as a stimulating impulse for reflection dedicated to light in color. In the artist’s perception, light is the source of life. It is everywhere, it vibrates everywhere. Nature is also wonderful — beautiful in every season and at any time of day. This conviction is clearly revealed in the natural motifs brought to life in her paintings, allowing one to traverse, in the form of a landscape overview, the familiar paths of the small gardens in the Riga-Jūrmala area. Here, ancient apple trees, closely clustered like groups of like-minded individuals, raise their faded noble, time-hardened forms. One can also witness, with genuine surprise, courtyard trees transformed overnight into strange fairy-tale giants, covered in heavy snowdrifts, and the early rush of city dwellers awakened by the rain of a brightly green spring day. In turn, the artist’s still life compositions offer a deeply intimate insight into her personal relationship with her garden and the material environment of her home. This series of paintings traces a dialogue initiated by the artist with the world of objects perceived through various senses, an attempt to highlight existing thematic elements worthy of conversation, organically integrating them into a unified, color-illuminated circle of reflection. The reason for such domestic mise-en-scènes could be freshly cut, juicy, transparent green rhubarb stalks, bundled together and resting alongside the well-used kitchenware in the painting Still Life with Rhubarb (1983). It could be a pair of pumpkins, warmed by the low autumn sun and brought from the home garden, resting on a white, light-filled windowsill, accompanied by a bowl of golden-transparent apples and a bouquet of russet dahlias in the composition Still Life (2015), or a collection of closely related colored objects united in the honeyed glow of August light in the painting Light in August (2023). Within the quiet co-existence and conversation of green world beings, two brightly resonant spring flower compositions are revealed: In the Spring Sun (2014) and May (2022). In both cases, the windowsill, bathed in the bright light of May, acts as a close, long-awaited meeting place where, arranged by the artist’s hand, long-unseen pairs of flowering plants — lilies of the valley, tulips, and blue snowdrops — have come together. Gently resonating the dazzling, light-infused canvas with the sky-blue joy of suddenly revived spring colors and anticipated growth, these, alongside many other images created by the artist, undoubtedly transport the painted moment into an infinite future space filled with peace and human values.
“Light is the source of life. It is everywhere, it vibrates everywhere. Nature around us is wonderful. Beautiful in every season and at any time of day. It is beautiful even now — on a late, rainy November evening. Only it is almost impossible to paint. Every daily walk from Pārogre to Ogre is like a pilgrimage, because no two days are ever the same. It is important for me to show light, illumination, which evokes various emotions. When the outstanding Latvian painter Eduards Kalniņš was asked which artists influenced his works, he replied — Latvian nature.” Silvija Auma Jākobsone
