| Cynthia Mitchell Scott | |||||||
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Artists Statement My paintings are expressions of my state of mind and personal reflection as I go through each passage of my life. As my marriages altered into divorce, my children matured into adults and my parents and other close relatives died, my perception of family changed. One painting started life as a family of four – a mother and father with two children – a girl and a boy. Over a period of years, I altered that painting - first the father disappeared, then the daughter. At one time, the boy and his mother were together. Now, the mother and son are in separate paintings and the boy is alone, forever locked into boyhood. I have a set of portraits that I set up as a family – mother, grandmother, sister and brother portrayed on four sides of a cube with the father on an inside wall of the cube, opposite an openly hostile and aggressive son - a different expression of my thoughts about family. My relationship to my mother is the theme in a painting of four young women bound into sisterhood by spiritual ties to a universal mother. I am an only child and cousins and friends are the closest I can get to sisterhood. Another continuing theme in my paintings is carnival. The Children’s Parade is very much a part of the West Indian carnival as in one painting with three young dancers at the end of a long hot day. Carnival in the islands is a process - there is the long anticipatory period with meticulous preparation of costumes and rehearsal of the dances. Then there is a month long out-door party at the end of which there is jouve, a wild bacchanale the night before carnival. The road march – the adult carnival - is almost anticlimactic – it’s great fun but it’s also very hot and tiring. So, my carnival paintings aren’t the typical explosions of color and movement – what outsiders see. My paintings are about the outlook of the carnival dancers as they move through the streets amid the heat and the music. Not long ago, I began to think about an approach to examining love. Not being a painter of abstract forms and shapes, or surrealism, realistic paintings about love create a fascinating problem – how to represent love without being maudlin. One painting of three women is about love and friendship when I was feeling alone and friendless. Another is a Black Madonna with a naked baby Jesus to express my annoyance about seeing only naked white babies rendered as Jesus. I remembered myself and my first love as I painted a young man and his adoring wife. Then, I painted a portrait of an old man and his wife, together for over 50 years – a solid and structured pair. In the end, all paintings are of different people, with the artist, as observer and translator of mood and character and life’s passages. |
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