Bio
Cynthia Crook, a native West Tennessean, began drawing the natural world when she was a small child. Eventually Cynthia came to Nashville and graduated from Peabody College (now part of Vanderbilt University) with a B.S. in Art. During her college years, she also studied at the San Francisco Art Institute.
An early encounter with renowned artist Wolf Kahn had a profound effect on Cynthia’s work and how she uses color to enfold her audience in the glories of nature and light. She has continued developing her own unique style and technique. She has studied with a number of esteemed artists including Albert Handell, Skip Whitcomb, Harley Brown and Dawn Whitelaw. Cynthia works in both oil and pastel, and enjoys the qualities available through the different media. While her love is plein air painting, she is an accomplished portrait painter doing a select number of commissions a year.
Cynthia’s work is primarily in private collections in the US and the UK. Recently Vanderbilt University Medical Center acquired a number of her paintings for a new clinical facility.
Cynthia’s work has been included in a number of juried exhibitions and is much sought after by local enthusiasts of Radnor Lake and the Cumberland Plateau.
She is a member of The Chestnut Group, a nonprofit alliance of landscape artists and friends dedicated to the conservation of wild and open spaces in Middle Tennessee.
Artist Statement
From the time I was a child, I found joy in seeing beauty. Colors excited me. Nature nurtured me.
Today as a professional artist, I bring my lifelong connection to light and color in nature to the canvas. I prefer the lushness of oil to capture the visual and evanescent character of the natural world.
The play of light and how it affects perception of color intrigues me. That’s probably what made it inevitable that plein air (outdoor) painting would become my preferred genre. Plein air is about capturing a moment in time and at the same time hinting at the ever changing aspect of nature.
Nothing is ever fixed or static because the light is always changing. Responding moment by moment to what I see in nature is meditative for me. A completed painting captures the uncapturable, creating a portal back to the experience in and with nature.
