Stowe Reporter
"Magical Barns at Clarke Galleries"

STOWE --- Cynthia Price's paintings, pastels and prints Ð metaphorical farmscapes sensationally spot lit with sunlight and unusual rich colors -- depict a deserted place of otherworldly beauty, and imaginary Vermont that the artist has filled with iconographic farm images.

"Price's compositions are colorfully brilliant as well as spiritual," said Clarke Galleries' owner Grier Clarke. "They are, at first glance, color-saturated juxtapositions of geometric silos, barns, trees and roads -- complex surface designs of multiple angles of view that create a rhythm between the whole and the components -- and then gradually reveal abstract complexity.

An exhibition of her recent works, "Landscapes: Real Imagined," will be held at the gallery from July 4 through July 19.

The artist examines barns for everything they are and aren't. The works are mood vehicles that employ agrarian icons such as barns and trees with their inherent, essential unadorned strength. That essence evokes symbolic meaning: Clusters of trees become families, the barns can be prisons or homes or can represent motherhood or female figures.

These are not desolate landscapes, they are buzzing with life, and depict the personal and psychological journey of the artist who explains that her journey is "about change, freedom."

Born in Pennsylvania and raised in western Massachusetts, Cynthia Price first came to Vermont in the 1960's to attend Middlebury College where she majored in religion. She did not begin her career as an artist until 1984 when she prophetically ran into printmaker David Bumbeck, who invited her to audit his printmaking class at Middlebury.

Remembering her mother's example of painting in her kitchen, Price began making prints at Middlebury and soon was lured by the immediacy of paint. She first painted directly from nature and has remarked, "God does it best."

But she became more interested in human relations than in observation and began painting the metaphors in brilliant sunset colors for which she is known.

In 1993, she returned to contemporary printmaking to make her images accessible to a wide range of people.

The images of these prints are at first created as small pastel sketches which are scanned onto a computer and manipulated. The image is then printed on an Iris printer that was adapted for fine art production, and which allows for tremendous color saturation.

A silk screen is then produced to screen another layer of imagery onto the printed images. This step creates further surface texture, depth and richness. Final touches of hand coloring are added to each print. Cynthia Price's works have been acquired by international private collectors as well as Vermont institutions and corporations including Middlebury College and the Chittenden Bank.