Pet Projects : Work: With her advertising business spotty, Silke Schreiber has become a specialist in dog and cat portraiture.

The way she’s going, Silke Schreiber will either become the Renoir of the flea collar set or wind up eating out of dog food cans herself.

Unleashed by a recession that took a huge bite out of her advertising business, she returned several months ago to her first love, painting. In a dozen pet shops around the San Fernando Valley, she posted flyers offering impressionist portraits of a dog or cat for $600, two pets for $900, and a person and a pet for $1,500--which she believes is very fair considering the monthlong investment of time and effort she puts into each painting.

“This is not something you go to a park and buy,” she said.

Indeed, Schreiber considers herself a serious artist who happens to be working with wet noses rather than bluenoses.

Although she says she wants to please her clients, she will not allow them to influence her portrayal of the feline or canine personality.

“My compromise will not go as far as to accommodate the buyer to a point where I have to give up my feeling about the painting, or lose my integrity,” she said.

Lorraine Strieby, a former president of the San Fernando Valley Art Club and an artist who does pet portraits herself, said she knows of no one else in the area interpreting pets on canvas. “I think it’s great,” she said. “The people I paint for usually want it as realistic as possible.”

People who say a true pet lover is blind to the cost of coddling a furry companion may be mistaken. Schreiber is having trouble making ends meet.

“I’m struggling month to month,” said Schreiber, 50, a slight, blond woman who still carries the trace of a German accent after 25 years in America. She has been forced to move to a less expensive apartment in Calabasas, no longer takes vacations to Africa, and relies on her family in Germany to help pay the bills.

Find a niche and fill it, that’s what business school professors advise students. But impressionist paintings of Spot and Puff? Dick and Jane could not have imagined it.

The encyclopedia identifies Impressionism as a school of art popular in the 19th Century that allowed artists to go beyond reality and portray their own subjective interpretations of what they see.

“I can do it like a photo, but it’s not enough. Impressionism is a feeling,” Schreiber said.

But why pets?

“They are beings on this planet,” she said. Also, her apartment house does not allow pets, so this is one way for her to feel that she has a pet without dealing with cat boxes or barking in the middle of the night.

Exploiting America’s love of pets may sound like a good idea--the U.S. government counted 126.5 million dogs, cats, birds and horses in 1987, which doesn’t even include the odd iguana or tarantula--but the competition can be fierce. One of Schreiber’s flyers at the Chatsworth Pet Center competed with photographs lining the walls of puppies crawling in an old work boot with a tiny American flag stuck in the toe. A policeman takes the photos in his spare time and may soon be producing calendars, said owner Dora Lefevre.

Then there is the local poet, who just sold this verse to the shop for $50:

Some brand-new friends await you at a groom and pet boutique;

There’s a playpen full of puppies and exotic birds that speak . . . .

So come into a wonderland where creatures great and small

Are at your bark and call.”

Schreiber is engaged in a classic contest between the need to make art and the need to eat. So far, she is eating, but not much more. Friends advise coolly that she will look back on this experience as a necessary part of her growth as a late-blooming artist. “That’s easy for them to say because they don’t know how much my rent is, or my car payment,” she said.

Born in Hamburg, Germany, Schreiber is the product of an artistic family. Her grandfather and uncle were painters. She showed promise early, painting a scene out of Hansel and Gretel with professional skill at age 4.

As a young woman, she became interested in advertising. She traveled in 1967 to the United States for a short trip to see firsthand the marvels of American marketing, then stayed on. “I fell in love with this country. American people are so easy to get along with.”

She eventually opened her own business, Silke Schreiber Advertising Design. Clients included real estate and financial management firms, resorts and other businesses. She lost 70% of her business when the recession hit.

That forced her to reassess her priorities. Like many older people who sacrificed artistic pursuits when they are young for other careers, she knew time was running out. Why not turn the fact that she had less work to her advantage and use her free time to paint seriously?

She put the flyers up in West Valley pet shops about four months ago. A man behind the counter at the Woodland Hills Pet Shop said a lot of customers take down Schreiber’s phone number.

“I’ve received some calls,” she said. “But most of the time people are surprised about the cost.”

Her luck may be changing. An agent in Germany recently asked for a portfolio after seeing some non-pet paintings she did for her family. “I wasn’t really ready for it. I thought I would be needing two to three more years,” Schreiber said.

And although her flyers have not paid off yet, Schreiber has done three pet portraits for friends.

One was of Anne Malsin and her springer spaniel, Gilbert. Malsin, 38, a Sherman Oaks businesswoman, said she decided to have the portrait done for her husband, Dan, to coincide with his 40th birthday.

“Gilbert is very special and the two of us are special to my husband,” Malsin said.

The only conflict she had with the artist took place when Malsin asked that the painting be done in colors that matched her furnishings.

Schreiber warned she would not compromise her vision of Gilbert for the sake of decor.

Malsin is impressed with the work. She particularly liked Schreiber’s impressionist vision of her and Gilbert. “It looks like I’m looking beyond with clarity and vision, which is not like me,” Malsin laughed.

As for Schreiber’s interpretation of Gilbert: “She really got his personality. It’s him, his eyes, everything.

“Gilbert’s our son,” she said.