She studied painting at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she became part of a group of magical realist painters, including Gertrude Abercrombie, Marshall Glasier, John Wilde, Dudley Huppler, and Karl Priebe. Fein paints exclusively in egg tempera, which she mixes herself. Fein painted from her teenage years through 1973; she then took a break from painting and wrote two books--Heidi's Horse, an analysis of the development of her daughter's drawing throughout childhood, and First drawings: Genesis of Visual Thinking, which is about the basic patterns that appear throughout human art, both historically and during childhood development. Fein began painting again in the early 2000s, and had a retrospective of both her recent and earlier work at Krowswork in 2014. www.sylviafeinpainter.net