Cynthia Winings

About the Artist

My figurative oil paintings represent a human experience of the feminine, touching on isolation, reflection, solitude, resignation, and detachment. I seek to engage the viewer indirectly with a direct kind of obscuring—a lying down figure looks off-frame; a face is hidden behind tree branches or flowers. I want to draw the viewer in and create a curious empathy with the figure or object, an ineffable ‘shared experience’ with the subject. The implicit message is that there is a larger world beyond what is seen. Recent motifs, like the maypole paintings explore feelings of fleetingness and disconnection—something once vital becoming redundant, no longer extant. I think of my figures in the trees as contemporary 'Venus of Willendorfs': faceless presences, absorbed into a nature that is unknowable.