Collection: Cynthia Back

My artwork celebrates landscape, using the media of prints, painting, and collage. I am immersed in nature: from a window, walking in it, standing and listening to its sounds, watching shadows and colors dance across water and foliage. My sense of the natural world is life-affirming, healing, immersive, and contemplative. Design and abstract qualities enthuse. Inspiration is found in the excitement of seeing a familiar place take on a new aura, the changes of season and weather, and the scale of subject, from the immediate found at one’s feet to sweeping panoramas.

Water, forests, and the ways in which they are being changed figure prominently in my artwork. My subject matter is a response to the environmental degradation I see and read about. At the same time I’m striving to convey my deep attachment to this natural environment; it’s ever-changing pattern, color, and shape. This tension between these oppositional forces is important in my work.

In my artmaking I stress recycling – older work, prints and paintings on paper, whether as substrates for collages or cut and torn, the images and objects chosen have symbolic and emotional content, reusing and valuing the past, the forgotten, the unsuccessful. Prints, combined with paint, become collages, cut for color, detail, and pattern.

My attraction to printmaking and collage comes from a fascination with the many ways I am able to play with images, determining the appropriate processes, juxtaposing shapes and colors, and changing the feel of my work by the aesthetic choices I make. I love the discipline of the reduction relief printmaking process and the surprises which come with each layering of color.