Cynthia Westwood

#CynthiaWestwood

Born in 1969 in Texas, USA.

Live and work in London, UK.

The sweet-strange universe of Cynthia Westwood’s painting unties body, time, flesh, and dance in a construction in which contradictions harmonize. At once rounded and angular, neither sexual nor puritan, seductive but never consensual.

Cynthia Westwood was a ballet dancer for 4 years before turning to painting. She paints from live models, elegant and powerful women, in the intimacy of the bath. The choice of pose is a work of choreography in collaboration with the model. The composition places flesh at the center, filled with a strength and a dignity that banish any notion of voyeurism or vulgarity, and raise these portraits to the ranks of contemporary Madonnas, or secular icons.

The female bodies, often divided and segmented by the framing or by partial immersion in water, radiate a powerful and peaceful presence, born from a state of reflection and introspection with which the gaze and posture are imbued.

The bath is that solitary and transitional moment, the before or the after of the social being. Westwood’s painting is not hyperrealist. The thick layer of paint, along with the resulting visible brushstrokes, establish her very particular style and contribute to the carnal, magnetic, almost shamanic presence of those bodies, motionless but not frozen.

An inward gaze, a celebration of female physicality, not open to intrusion, indifferent to being observed, but in full possession of her body, comfortable with herself and her own sensuality.