By Cynthia Frost
All images in this series are © Cynthia Frost and used by permission.
Artist’s Statement: Reaching Backward
To depict the essence of any other person is an uncertain venture. It demands empathy and identification. Reaching backward into infancy, we see only a distant epoch, obscured in every way—a view clouded by the passage of time and by an accumulation of all later complexities. We can't look all the way back; such hindsight is denied us. Childhood and infancy are inscrutable from the remote vantage of adulthood. Yet, the desire to penetrate the unknowable realm of the infant remains. A child is at once a rumor, a latent promise, a perfectly formed totality. He or she is created fully complete, but only just begun. Manifestly present and at the same time unutterably distant, these other beings are misty mirrors and maps of adults yet to come. They were the acorn that has grown into the oak that is. I'm compelled by images that bridge that gulf. My paintings give me the opportunity to steal a sideways glance at those first years and to indulge the gratifications of paint—from pasty and thick to thin, wet, or dry. Painting's tools of tone, color, space, scale, and movement all summon the myriad colors, textures, and resistances of flesh. Into that impermeable space flood memories of our own youths. The images in this series are a window into the substance and mystery of some other person-hood. Out of the canvas plane, faces, spirit, and soul rise and coalesce in fictions that project my own truth, at least. These frozen moments present, in fragmentary form, my documentary vision.
Cynthia Frost grew up in the Boston area where her mother owned and operated a bookshop. Her love for reading is second only to her love for painting, which is influenced by the former. She has been especially inspired by works about the creative process by women writers.
She teaches painting at Tufts University through a combined program with the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Her paintings have been exhibited in England and the U.S. and are part of many private and public collections.
More of her work can be viewed on Cynthia Frost's website.
