CYNTHIA WINIKA
Cynthia Winika is a talented mixed-media artist whose life has given her a background in both Western and Eastern traditions. She is also the best-known teacher of encaustic painting at R & F Paints in Kingston. Easy, outgoing, imaginative, and very engaged, she has helped many an artist (myself included) master the challenges of painting in molten beeswax.
In her own work, Cynthia is constantly exploring ways to bring life and art together. One literally explosive example is the use of fireworks, which she lights above a large paper. As the fireworks die, their afterlife of marks and fired elements become part of collages to which she adds her own drawings and sketches, bits of found objects, colored papers, and transfers. Anchored in wax, visible from two sides, the works assume a new life in a larger, created whole.
Similarly, Cynthia brings her adventures as a serious mycologist to bear in her art. Gathering all manner of fungi from as close by as her backyard, she experiments with making mushroom spore prints in encaustic paintings that illuminate the imagination as the stars illuminate the sky. These natural and mysterious elements are gathered into beautiful works of art.
Cynthia’s resume is a long and rich list that reflects a life of teaching, creating, and displaying art in institutions around the United States. Her studies took her to Hawaii and Taiwan, as well as more familiar venues closer to home. She is a stalwart of the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale and her work has been collected by several museums, including the Museum of Modern Art. In 2006, an exhibition of her fungi-based art in New York City was written about in the New York Times. More recently, the International Encaustic Artists named her the best teacher of 2014.
Marilyn Perry
3/14/16
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