Interview with Cynthia Consentino

q)Something about you…what you want…

a)I want to come to that place where I am using my abilities and resources to their outmost. To get to a state where my work and daily pursuits are so integrated that they are like breathing. Inevitably I am searching for peace and equilibrium.

q) What are your main goals when you create?

a)To learn something, start with something that I don’t totally understand, play with it and reconfigure it until some of its mystery is revealed. I also want to be able to offer something of significance to others, to communicate and share my ideas and interests.

q) Do you rule by any tendency in your creative work, or you only follow what comes in your mind?
a)My work always has content. I want it to have depth and meaning to me and anyone who is looking at it. Art making is always a quest for me, a search for meaning and understanding.
q) How has the internet and your website helped you spread your artwork to a wider audience?
a) My website is fairly new, but I have found it incredibly useful in getting images of my work quickly to galleries and curators that already now my work, as well as, exposing my work to new venues.Artists definitely need to have a website that at least has your contact information. I set up my website after being told by one curator that she often had trouble getting a hold of artists.

q) How do you define your style and how would you describe your art to someone who could not see it? a)My style seems a bit nostalgic, something from the fifties, or from folk art. It derives much of its character from children’s things: fairy tale, cartoons, dolls, games, as well as the domestic world. The work often incorporates imagery that is loaded with symbolism and history, such as flowers, animals and the ceramic figurine. It is very much about the familiar, things of our dreams, our stories, our childhood.

q) What materials do you use to realize your creations?

a)Clay mostly, but have worked in bronze and cast iron. I also do a bit of drawing with pencil, ink and charcoal.

q) What is your favourite a) taste b) sound c) sight d) scent e) tactile sensation?

a)Can’t really pick but some rank really high: raw sea urchin, sound of the wind, a certain sunlight on trees and sky, a cat’s silky fur. Scent is another matter. I can’t imagine choosing between Fragrant Olive, jasmine, oranges, cedar and spruce, garlic, chocolate, coffee.

q) What are you doing now…your current projects…

a)Lately I have been working on drawings and loving how it enables more of an environment or location to exist with my figures.
I am also working a series called Exquisite Corpse after the Surrealist exercises. I have sculpted different figures, made molds of them, and am casting them many times. Then I reassemble their parts: heads, torsos, and legs, in different combinations. This allows for some discovery and I can be freer with each piece. I am starting to add some parts that are from molds I made from found objects.

q) Do you listen to music while you’re creating and what do you listen and what do you like to listen?

a)Yes, but more often I listen to books on tape when sculpting. A good story keeps me patient and focused, and helps me persevere through the difficult parts of a sculpture. When I draw, I prefer music.

q) Do you draw influences from a wide range of artists, musicians, books…?

a)Absolutely. I am always looking and being inspired by other art. Nor could I live without music, though it doesn’t directly influence my work. Books though, both fiction and nonfiction, along with other media, have had a major impact on my subject matter. I have incorporated ideas from sociology, psychology, woman and gender studies, mythology and contemporary history and politics.

q)Name 3 things you couldn’t create without?

a)Story, other people’s art, sunlight.

q) Where have you shown your art…?

a)Many different galleries, some museums, though all in the USA.

q) What haven’t you done yet that you definitely want to try someday?

a)Be a hermit for half a year. I have always had a desire to spend a good amount of time totally alone, away from all man-made distractions. It would have to be a beautiful, natural location: a mountain top or island, maybe an isolated old monastary. To discover what was left, after all pulls from society and others were removed, to perhaps be absolutely still, would be an incredible learning experience and gift.
Live in a culture that was the very opposite or at least extremely different from my own. I want to be put in a position that would force me to reevaluate everything I know…to have the feeling of stepping out of my own skin, into another time, world, view.

q) How important is self-promotion for an artist nowadays?

a)Pretty important, though I don’t do enough. You have to keep on getting your work out there.

q) Would you say that your work consciously reflects characters and situations found within your daily life?

a)Absolutely. It all comes from my personal experience, my own childhood, from things I am reading or living. If it doesn’t have a certain potency and mystery, that is if it doesn’t intrigue me and pertain to my life, I am not interested.

q) Favourite book?
a)It is too hard to pick one. A few that have had a big impact on me are Paradise by Toni Morrison, Bailey’s Café by Gloria Naylor, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, and many of Elie Wiesel’s and Gabriel José García Márquez’s novels. In my youth I read everything by J.D. Salinger and Herman Hesse.

q) Designers/Artists you admire?

a)Annette Messager, Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, Tom Friedman, Flor Garduno, Sally Mann, but there are so many more.

q) Your contacts….e-mail…links…

a) cnconsentino7@hotmail.com
www.cynthiaconsentino.com