Cynthia Grilli, passionate portraits

Cynthia Grilli has a very elegant site with her vibrant figurative paintings.

About her portrait paintings she says:

portraits and figures
Painting people has been a passion of mine for as long as I can remember. Discovering a person through paint is a powerful experience – what is revealed can sometimes be surprising. While structure and likeness factor into a painting I am much more interested in intuitively searching for the essence of the subject. Rather than steering the course of a painting through technical skill I prefer to allow myself to be lead by the paint. The result is a sort of co-creative process between the paint, the model, and me.”

la famiglia
I began work on this series of paintings after the death of my grandfather. While sorting through his belongings I discovered a box of small black and white snapshots of my Italian family dating back to the early 1900’s. These photos fascinated me; the environments were both familiar and yet antiquated, provoking memories of a time and place that existed before I was born. I became fascinated with the idea that the lives of my ancestors seemed so familiar to me, that I could relate so strongly not only to the people in the photos, but to the choices made by the person behind the camera. Sometimes humorous, often poignant, the photographs triggered in me a desire to further explore my roots on canvas.

Cynthia Grilli
Nov 7, 2013