Featured Artist Cindy Packard Richmond

Painter Cindy Packard Richmond shares a collection from her portfolio depicting life on the open water. Visit her website to learn more.

 

 

What you choose to paint would seem to be what you love. But for me, it is more convoluted. I am just as drawn to what gives me anxiety.

 

 

I began painting late in life. Previously, I wrote two published novels and did freelance food writing. Classes at the Art League in Alexandria, Virginia, changed my life. I began with pastels, painting oversized, juicy produce, seafood and desserts. (I was overweight for much of my life. Food held promise and self-punishment.) I switched to oils in 2006.

 

 

I learned to swim next to a waterfall. Perhaps that was the onset of my irrational fear of water. Or maybe it began when as a child, I was pulled away from shore by a riptide.

 

 

My parents bought an old Victorian house on a small island overlooking a bay and the ocean. We spent every summer there. The island is my touchstone, my sense of place. My emotional home is surrounded by water.

 

 

Sailboats are lovely to look at, the devil to paint. Why did I paint so many boats? It could be that love/fear dynamic. Boats have no brakes. Once, the gears on our Boston Whaler jammed in reverse. I had to thread my way home backwards through a packed harbor.

 

 

Sailboats. Again, no brakes. And at the mercy of wind and tides! My brother and I were often becalmed or lost in fog. Invariably, I was the one who had to get out into the squishy muck to pull us off a sandbar. In 2020 I began to address the water itself. “The Curl” is my favorite.

 

 

I was a resident member of the Torpedo Factory Art Center for seventeen years. My studio, with huge windows, was forty feet from Alexandria harbor and the Potomac River. Of course.

 

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