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artportfolio: Cynthia Barlow Marrs SGFA

Reed Bed

Reed Bed

Selected for DRAW 11, the 90th Annual Open Exhibition of the Society of Graphic Fine Art
The Menier Gallery, 51 Southwark Street London October 3 - 15

Original
Printmakers' ink and cut paper on paper
19cm x 23.5cm

Introduction

Statement


 

 

I am inspired in equal measure by both science and art. These dual interests stem from a life-long fascination with underlying structure, and the irresistible urge to experiment.

 

In my mixed media paintings I use techniques developed through trial and error, covering canvas, wood panel and paper with drawing ink, watercolour, gesso, printmaking ink and acrylic glazes. I look for pathways, horizon lines and hidden light, reworking the surface just enough to bring out the inner landscape of a painting.

 

It’s slow-motion work. But the aim is to create a sense of movement, in bas-relief, across a canvas. Sometimes I feel like an animator working frame-by-frame to create a few seconds' worth of dynamic motion across a screen. I also think of subliminal perception, and how the hidden or partly visible structure of a painting influences the viewer.

 

I work on drawings and paintings "in the round”, turning them as I go, checking that they hold together as a composition even when upside-down. As I do this I am also looking for the source of energy in a work of art: it no longer surprises me if a painting, when turned on its side, suddenly comes alive.

 

In my Edge to Edge series I work across multiple canvases, some of which may be taken apart and reassembled in new ways. A small-scale example of this is Water Meadow (in Private Collections); the largest is Undercurrents, a five metre-long collage which had its debut at the River & Rowing Museum in Henley-on-Thames in 2007-2008.

Biography

  

Council Member, Society of Graphic Fine Art www.sgfa.org.uk


 

I have returned to England and my art and design roots after living and working in six countries as a landscape architect and environmental planner; a profession that marries aesthetics and the natural and social sciences. 

I started out with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Painting, and as an undergraduate would have gladly camped out in the life drawing studio. But my first love, at the age of five, was drawing pages and pages of Os and ellipses. The S-curve has been an obsession ever since.


As a child I drew Cinderella dresses with yards of ribbons and flounces, but in my teens I moved on to apocalyptic prairie landscapes featuring what I now know to be severe gully erosion. These days my drawings and paintings are inspired not only by the human body but also by tropical and temperate landscapes; in particular the prairies of North America and the fields, fauna and flora of Windsor Great Park. I use repeated shapes of leaves, trees, grasses and wildlife to create stylized landscapes that borrow from the conventions of landscape architectural illustration: the sketched field observation, the surveyor's grid, the planting plan, the artist's impression.  

 

My art is in private collections in the UK and abroad. I participate regularly in solo and group exhibitions, taking part each year in the Windsor Fringe artists' open house scheme and the Society of Graphic Fine Art annual exhibition. I also host open studio events at home, by invitation.

 

I live and work a stone's throw from Windsor Castle, and welcome requests to view art work by appointment. I regularly undertake commissions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Education

BFA (Painting; Art Education), University of Oklahoma

MSc (Landscape Architecture), Oklahoma State University

MSc (Environmental Management), University of London, Wye College