| Artist's Statement | Resumé |
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Cindy Vojnovic Artist's Statement:
My recent paintings are about seeing in the 21st century-and often about what people try not to see, or simply ignore, usually without being aware of doing so. Our visual diet–what we actually look at-has changed dramatically. Amidst the glut of media images, we become disconnected from what we actually see. I’ve read 19th century journals and letters penned by ordinary people (not professional writers) which go into vivid detail about their surroundings, the landscape near their home, the weather and so on. The emails, MySpace postings etc. in other words the things ordinary people write now, show a radical shift in how my contemporaries see their life and surroundings.
I don’t go out looking for things to paint; I simply don’t ignore the images come to me in the course of living my life. Moment after moment, day in day out, I see literally millions of images, so I choose to paint what will distill as much as possible into a single image, an image that can stand for many of those images that I see but will never have the time to paint. These paintings are, in a sense “re-constructionist,” figurative easel paintings in oil. Rather than presenting images that are abstracted, fragmented, or synthesized out of disparate elements as in my past oil paintings, these images are “whole” meditations on images.
My years of egg tempera painting have effected my work in oil. I paint on smooth paper or board, primed with an average of 8 coats of gesso.The texture of canvas doesn’t work for my technique. The gesso will show through to varying degrees in the final painting, so for me those gesso layers are almost an underpainting of brushwork devoid of color. I almost never complete a painting in a single day, I prefer to use many layers of wet over dry paint to construct the color structure I want. While I love to build up some areas with rich, translucent color built from many layers, and sometimes “punch up” certain areas with detail, I don’t want a “licked” finish, or a uniform level of detail. I like to see how loose and minimal I can leave areas of the painting. I’ve been known to go into a detailed area and wipe it out with broader, loose brushwork. Ironically, even areas only very minimally described tend to “read” as detailed, unless you look closely. Earlier in my career I painted on canvases as large as I could stretch on my walls, so it was easier to show various “attacks” of paint with varying stroke, style, detail and build-up of paint. While my recent work is small, the contrasts are no less there, but at this scale they don’t shout, they whisper. These paintings are a “reduction,” in the cooking sense of the term, that is, boiled down and concentrated.
Below, detail of "Dead Mall Parking Lot" actual size,
showing texture of gesso through layers of oil.
