WhatsApp Image 2022-05-31 at 1.09.00 PM

PHILADELPHIA, PA

Cindy Ruskin

About the Artist

Cindy Ruskin is a self-taught artist who received her BA in Fine Arts (art history) from Harvard. Originally from South Africa, she lived and worked in New York as a teaching artist with low-income children for more than 20 years and recently relocated to Connecticut. In NYC, she devoted herself to community art projects including the creation of a large mosaic for the Lower Eastside Girls Club’s new building; she also ran the art program at Avenues for Justice, an alternative-to-prison organization for juvenile offenders.

While she focused on teaching, Cindy occasionally showed her own work, including two benefit exhibitions: a one-week solo show at the Matthew Marks Gallery in 2006 to benefit The Duk Lost Boys Clinic in Sudan, and a group show in 2020 at Fergus McCaffrey to benefit the Girls Club. In 2009 she was awarded a gallery space for a solo show in Times Square by the arts organization, ChaShaMa.

Cindy’s paintings were selected for three magazines this year: The Purposeful Mayonnaise, Clover and Bee, and All SHE Makes art magazine.

About Artist’s Work:

I’m currently working on a series of paintings about seduction in nature in which I imagine the hidden dwellings and “bowers of bliss” where nymphs, succubi, goddesses and other femme fatales — from poetry, literature, mythology and the Bible — lure the unwary traveller.

Female power and femininity in nature are themes that I return to over and over again in my work. This series evolved when a recent accident with my hand temporarily kept me from painting. I decided to experiment with symmetry by scanning some of my oil paintings into my computer, and creating mirror images of each one digitally, transforming the originals into Rorschach paintings. As I experimented with patterns and symmetry in nature – doubles and mirror images – these paintings took on new meaning, heightening the erotic secrecy and strangeness, while revealing the darkness that lurked within the lushness. As I added hints of feminine sensuality to each imagined landscape, the entrances to each enchantress’s web emerged.

Call For Art
100 Artworks from
Emerging Artists
2023 WOMEN'S EDITION
OPEN TO WOMEN ARTISTS WORLDWIDE

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