My ongoing work finds expressive purpose in abstraction and looks to nature – at once profoundly simple and quite complex, to reveal emotional and dramatic content. Themes of change, renewal, evolution – synonymous with nature itself, are used as metaphors for human emotion.

Cynthia Grow – Biography

Cynthia Grow received a diploma in Contemporary Painting and Ancient Painting Techniques from Accademia d’Arte in Florence, Italy and has attended art workshops and seminars throughout Italy and Spain, as well as New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, & Sculpture, National Academy School of Fine Art, and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In addition to studio training, she received a Master of Liberal Arts with a concentration in 20th Century Arts & Literature from University of South Florida. She has worked for esteemed art galleries in New York and Philadelphia as well as the Editorial Department of Fine Art Books at Princeton University Press. She most recently completed a program at Christie’s Education New York / Christie’s Auction House, receiving a Graduate Certificate in Modern Art, Connoisseurship & History of the Art Market. Grow’s work is in a number of private collections and her paintings have been exhibited in galleries and public spaces in the United States and abroad, including New York and Philadelphia as well as Florence, Siena, Lucca, and Venice, Italy.

In the Studio –

Night Sea is my ongoing series. Please click on "The Work" tab above for photos.

In a deliberate effort to employ tension between pure abstraction and reality, I have created meditative, atmospheric renderings of gathering storm clouds slowly swelling and drifting over dark seas. These works have been created with a limited palette and draw from no documentary source other than imagination and memory.

In the larger works, contemplative, luminous voids are at once empty and serene, while also alive, filled with potential and possibility. Seeking to capture the elemental instability inherent within nature, there is a sense of impending turmoil and uneasy premonition running throughout the work. Sensual, yet introspective, these works look to nature’s atmosphere of uncertainty as metaphor for human emotion.

I use monochromatic palettes composed in thin layers which have been gently washed with solvent or wiped faintly away with a brush and repainted multiple times. Ultimately I am interested in the study of subtraction to the point of purity, simplicity, and refinement. With these paintings, I invite the viewer into a meditative space, and it is my hope that these spaces inspire both introspection and reflection.

A note about my process -

I find that working on wood panels prepared with traditional gesso, a technique commonly used by Renaissance artists and first documented c. 14th century by Cennino Cennini in Il libro dell'arte, best suited to my purpose. The preparation – which includes sanding, cutting, and cradling panels as well as heating glue and gesso in a double boiler then applying in multiple layers – is laborious. Using wood “supports” (instead of canvas) can result in more resistance to brushwork and thinner layers of paint. The brilliant white gesso undersurface thereby shows through, providing an overall luminosity to the painting. As the washes of paint dry, the natural grain of the wood begins to show through, and the panel then becomes an integral part of the work.