Summer’s First Light. Cynthia Llanes, artist
By Gina Malone
After receiving her Bachelor’s in Fine Art, Cynthia Llanes became active in the Los Angeles art scene. Since childhood, she had been drawn to sketching and designing clothes for her dolls. “I was always creating,” Llanes says, “always exploring, experimenting. Arts and crafts have always been a part of my life.” She explored a career in fashion as a textile designer while devoting more of her time to painting and trying out different mediums, including acrylic, watercolor, oil and mixed media. Her work was displayed in juried shows and exhibitions in L.A.
Llanes grew up in the Philippines, surrounded by natural beauty. “We have beautiful vistas of mountains, coastal terrains and breathtaking sunsets,” she says. “Summertime was always spent vacationing with family and taking field trips to the countryside with friends and excursions to white sand beaches. Being surrounded with tropical forests, waterfalls and lush mountain ranges has been a great influence in my present work as a plein air artist.”
For her first solo exhibit there, in Manila, Llanes portrayed dancers on canvas. She says she was first drawn to painting the human figure, going back to her childhood drawings: “women with red lipstick, wearing high heels and carrying a purse.”
The Firetree. Cynthia Llanes, artist
This preference for figurative rather than landscapes was only furthered with the life drawing required during her university studies. “I find grace and movement in the lines and forms of the human anatomy,” she says. During time in the 1980s while serving as a missionary in Asia, she was awakened to lives different than her own. “This travel allowed me to witness extreme poverty and persecution of women in many restricted countries,” Llanes says. “Their tenacity and devotion to their families compelled me to paint them—a series done in pastel that I exhibited in Los Angeles.”
Today, living in Western North Carolina, she hikes and finds herself drawn to the wonder of the natural world. She credits the move with transforming her vision. “Living in WNC has truly been an inspirational awakening,” she says. “Such an abundance of beautiful landscapes and sceneries! I found a more emotional connection with nature and began painting en plein air. Exploring and painting the terrain with fellow plein air artists is always fun and motivating. And, most of the time, I use my plein air paintings for larger studio works.”
For her, there is no difference in the technique that goes into landscapes versus that which goes into figurative work.
“There is a wonderful parallelism between landscape painting and figurative art,” she says. “Both can be executed with dynamic grace and expression.”
(From left) Hidden Waterfall; The Sky is Not the Limit; Water’s Edge
The spark of an idea, a color palette, a mood, a concept or scenery—any of these can mark the start of a painting. “I like to find that ‘magic’ a scene offers, no matter how ordinary it may seem,” she says. “I have always been captivated by natural phenomena such as the movement of light and shadows, the ever-changing colors of the skies and the reflections on water.”
Bold brushstrokes and palette knife effects help give her work the movement and atmospheric depth she wants. “I like to use bright and bold colors,” she says. “My color palette is usually complementary colors to produce warm and cool contrasts. My goal is to amplify and enhance the beauty found in nature. For instance, I like to exaggerate the intensity of light on a tree or the bright reflection of a sunrise on the lake.”
Some of her greatest influences have been the Impressionist and Expressionist masters. Sometimes Llanes sketches ideas for a painting, letting the scene before her be a reference and inspiration. At other times, she says, “I just directly work on the canvas and paint away, allowing my intuitive subconscious to express the subject. I believe that there is no single approach in painting, but one mind and heart of the artist. The beauty of this process is that it is a feeling of freedom for me. I do not want to be restricted by rules. Either way, the creativity is freedom and that’s what I love most about painting.”
To learn more, visit CynthiaLlanesArtist.com, Facebook (Color Your Heart) and Instagram @cynthiallanesartstudio. Visits to Windy Porch Studios, located in Candler, are welcome by appointment. Find Cynthia’s art at Asheville Gallery of Art, 82 Patton Avenue, Asheville.
