Now, at a moment when photography is so pervasive that it's been forced to grapple with its own identity and look inward, it feels like a natural moment for painting to look out, to reclaim that directive of picturing America.
Cynthia DaignaultThere are many options for how images can aggregate not to nihilism, but to significance, or to meaning.
Cynthia DaignaultOn a surface level, regionalism is gone, if we define regionalism as human culture. But, what if we define regionalism as something older than human culture?
Cynthia DaignaultStores are the same everywhere; small downtowns are done. Not just in America, but globally. You hear the same music on every station, all our building materials look the same, and all our clothes look the same. But I thought that it couldn't be that simple, because Arizona is not Minnesota. There is this other reality, which is a reality of landscape.
Cynthia DaignaultPainting is the chance to create a different space, or different way of picturing a literal stream of images.
Cynthia DaignaultFor me, going back to itinerant landscape painting, it's not about returning to an older method, but about building on what happened in the 20th century in photography. And also highlighting what the differences are between a painting and a photograph in picturing space.
Cynthia DaignaultArtworks, whether fiction, music, or painting, because they have the power and possibility to become truth, when repeated enough or told enough are somehow truth about what America is, whether they were or not.
Cynthia DaignaultI could name many women who travel or who work with America as a theme. I think it was more not being able to name canonical women, whose work is part of the American canon.
Cynthia DaignaultOne of the reasons I work serially, but also one of the reasons that I try to claim space in painting, is I'm desperately interested in asking: How can a group of images, or even two images, have meaning together?
Cynthia Daignault