Cynthia Packard is an accomplished artist living in Provincetown, Massachusetts. After growing up in Princeton, New Jersey, she studied sculpture and art history at Massachusetts College of Art. She moved to Provincetown in 1981, where she was tutored in drawing by Fritz Bultman, a painter, sculptor and collagist and close friend of abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann. Cynthia has maintained a studio in Provincetown for 30 years. She has taught at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Scottsdale Art School in Arizona, Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) and Castle Hill School of the Arts in Truro, Massachusetts. At the tip of Cape Cod, Provincetown is considered America’s first art colony, founded by early American impressionist painters. Cynthia teaches intensive workshops at her Provincetown studio. She raised a family of four (Zach, Silas, Caleb and Emma) holds a black belt in karate, and enjoys pickup basketball games.
STATEMENT
At the core, I’m an abstract painter, but I submit to an emotional urge to share my relationships—with nature, with people, even personal objects I’ve collected—which makes my work feel figurative. I am a process painter—I’m willing to go wherever the painting tells me to go. The creation of my work is an athletic process; I use massive amounts of paint, digging and pulling, I use wax, tar, a blowtorch. But I have to be open to see something I don’t already know, to start without a preconception and follow through to the nebulous end. It is a journey. The work is my voice, it can be honest or dishonest, but in the end, painting is honesty. Sometimes I am struck by a theme which inspires me or makes me angry; after the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida, I created a series of color-splashed, roiling portraits of young black men. I made a series of sexual abuse paintings, and a grouping of collages depicting refugees. Living in New York, I painted the dynamic ebb and flow of the city and its rivers. Since the birth of my granddaughter, I embarked on a series of portraits of my daughter-in-law with her child. My studio is always a forest of incomplete works, swirling with colors, emanating intense energy.
The density of light and color in my work express the evolutions of mood. I trust myself. Each painting has two aspects: my emotional response to the subject; and the fundamental composition, current and line. From Bultman, I learned the importance of the removal of lines, the revision of gesture, the radical re-orientation of geometry. Structure and emotion. Yet in the end, it’s about the paint—the paint is like blood. When I teach, my students leave at the end of three days crying, paint-splattered and filthy, but deliriously happy—they have discovered their own voices. I am good at two things in my life: painting and being a mother.