Very Good Painting

Since retiring as a professor of art education from The Ohio State University in 2016, Sydney has returned to full-time artmaking. During her tenure as a professor, she researched and wrote extensively about the artmaking process, authoring the widely-read text, Teaching Meaning in Artmaking (2000), and, most recently, a work in process, Naming Play for Artmaking. These writings entertain strategies that inform her own artmaking practice, most particularly that of play as it involves chance, nonsense, and experimentation. Through this process, she draws together the disparate to bring forth new ways of thinking such as intertwining a playful aesthetic of oppositions with spiritual seriousness in her most recent work.