Amber DeSilva

Across centuries, women who lived too boldly, too fiercely, or too strangely were branded with names meant to contain them: witch, saint, hysteric. These portraits reclaim those words and turn them into fuel. Each painting is a love letter to an unflinching women who refused to be made small. They are reverent, irreverent, and a little uncanny in their celebration of strength and vulnerability. Together, they honor the truth that survival is at once fierce and tender.

The idea for this series had been percolating for years but snapped into focus as I watched my own government escalate its attacks on women’s autonomy and agency. At the same time, a cancer diagnosis put me face to face with my mortality, challenging me to meet my changing body with compassion. Out of this collision of the personal and the political came Witches, Saints, and Hysterics. These paintings were made slowly, with patience and defiance, asking viewers to consider the power we grant to names and the truths that always slip beyond them.

The women featured have all kinds of different stories. Some are women in my life, like my cousin Kelly and my daughter Eli. Marie sent me her photo after I put out a call for source material online, inviting submissions from women who resonated with the vision of this work. Others are drawn from history – a few are famous for rejecting the oppressive norms of their time, while others are anonymous women photographed in institutions where they were restrained and silenced. Their lives differ, but they are bound by a common courage: the audacity to be fully themselves in a world that demands compliance. To me, they each are all of us.

Amber DeSilva creates psychologically layered portraits and figurative paintings that seek to disrupt cycles of shame and repression that result from cultural narratives designed to contain women. She is inspired by memories of being misunderstood as a child who felt emotions very deeply and the resulting patterns of shame, anger, and addiction that she experienced later in life.

Her most recent body of work, Witches, Saints, and Hysterics, was created as DeSilva underwent cancer treatment. She notes, “I was struggling to be compassionate to myself, to not see my body changing and flinch or look away. So I painted unflinching women as a way to surround myself in their strength.” To date, the series consists of seven portraits of historic and contemporary women that embody a spirit of rebellion—against the gaze, against silencing, against the social forces that seek to keep them small. Each subject is paired with an animal, a symbol of the primal force, intuition, and resilience that endure even under constraint. The series channels DeSilva’s own confrontation with vulnerability, mortality, and identity into images that are as much acts of resistance as they are works of art.

Since 2020, DeSilva’s paintings have been exhibited at the Petaluma Arts Center, Artworks Downtown, San Francisco Women Artists Gallery, and the De Young Museum.