Published on June 05, 2020

Cynthia Guild

There is an inherent meaninglessness to fixed mechanical surveillance images that I find compelling. Random and authorless they are none the less capable of being beautiful and representing an authentic capture of reality as we know it in 2020. Guild is attempting to create works that embody the poetry within our everyday existence as actors in the larger landscape.

Philosophically Guild asks – “What role does the earth play in our lives today? Technology and politics continue to blur the line between reality and an image of reality. I use the physically scratched-in “video interference patterns and “blank label” to remind the viewer of the distance between reality and an image of reality.”

Intuitively choosing imagery that resonates for her is one aspect of Guild’s artistic sensibility – making the work is another. Guild uses the many choices in the processes of making a painting to twist the work into a more expressive poetic vein. Underpainting, thick layers of white, scratching back, destroying parts of the painting, glazing with transparent layers of color, and painting “wet into wet” all play a role in making this work.” Cynthia Guild.

Cynthia Guild grew up in western Massachusetts and received her MFA from UMass, Amherst in Printmaking, focusing on lithography and monotype. Now primarily a painter, she has carried over her printmaker’s interest in process and gesture. Guild has exhibited widely in the US and Cuba and was recently featured in an exhibition at New Bedford Art Museum. Ms. Guild was invited by Imna Arroyo to Taller Experimentale de Graphica in Havana, Cuba in 2012 to make relief prints for the artist’s book: Ellegua. Her teaching career includes RISD, Bennington, Mt. Holyoke College. Currently adjunct at Eastern Connecticut State University; Cynthia lives and works in Stonington CT