Figurative Thoughts by Cindy Holmes of Texarkana will be in the Price and Lobby Galleries March 2-30. The artist will be in attendance at the reception on Saturday, March 7 from 6-7:30pm.
Cindy said, “Each painting starts the story by using figures, found objects, and the incorporation of clichés into the titles. I lead the viewer to use their own personal experiences to explain, question, or finish the drama. And each story leads to another……”
Born in California, Cindy lived a rather nomadic life with her family until they settled in a small Mississippi town. Books play an important part in her memories. They are tied to her dreams and as a talisman in how her childhood is remembered. Literature gave her a doorway into other lives – fanciful, dramatic, scary, intense, soothing or dreamlike. “It was all there before me, to be gobbled up like a Thanksgiving feast,” she said.
As an adult, instead of becoming a writer, she found herself wanting to express herself visually. “Mushing paint onto a canvas was what made my heart sing and brought the same focus as the most riveting book from childhood,” she said. I learned to make pretty paintings and beautiful landscapes. I reveled in each achievement, yet one day I awoke with a yearning to tell an unfinished story with paint. I wanted to start a story that would make a viewer finish it from their own perspective of life. So that’s what I do these days. I’m still that kid that reads, that bookworm that unknowingly listens in on other people’s lives (love those public cell phone conversations!). But I paint the imagined story, the real story, the overheard story, the story I want to tell, the story you need to finish.”Cindy plans her paintings around the figure, found objects, and word play and clichés. “First and foremost is the figure. That is the first thing my eye goes to and I want to explore how they can make us feel just by using that figure in different situations,” she explained. By exploring thrift stores, she runs across small, forgotten objects that inspire her to plan and paint “what if?” situations; this is how she uses found objects. She is inspired to translate clichés visually so that they are no longer meaningless, but become a different story.