Clyde Moore

The way we view and perceive our own lives can change drastically over time. The commonality of the human experience is but a flimsy framework, all the colors, details and texture applied uniquely over time. Maturing, in my experience, becomes as much about appreciating what makes each of us different, and the differences among us, as it does how we may behave.

I showed up at the McRae Art Studios on Railroad Avenue last Friday to talk with local artist Cindy Anderson, probably a bit more excited by the anticipated conversation than I have been before one of these in a while. I thought of her artwork, of finding her hidden away in her studio during one large event, her headphones on, listening to music. I’m shy, she told me. I’m interesting and march to my own beat, I heard.

I enter her individual McRae studio serenaded by a Violent Femmes song from the ‘80s. Art is all around, on the walls and on the floor, sitting on countertops, upstairs, downstairs. Her iPad sits propped to allow easy view of an old photograph of two little girls with a puppy on their lap. She’s painting it, the puppy now a piglet, a darkened forest behind. I enjoy her sense of humor. She strikes me as a friend I wish I’d had in high school or college, the kind you get into wonderful mischief with; not the kind you got in trouble for as much as the kind you look back on and laugh about the rest of your life.

Cindy is a quiet rebel with a paintbrush. She talks of weird and sinister, and admits a fancy for them. She also speaks of expectations, which come even for artists, and how she is sensitive to them. “I’m sensitive about it because we’ve been taught that that’s what we’re supposed to do,” she says, referring to consistency of the subjects that she captures or creates. “If you want to be successful, and you want to be in a gallery, you want to do shows, you need to have a cohesive body of work, meaning that it all needs to be all landscapes or all figures. And get good at that and do that the rest of your life.”

It is that body of work that attracted my attention some time ago. But it attracted me because of its diversity; the idea one artist had created it all and what she might do next. Solemn figures on boats, bear shaped bottles containing honey, potato chip bags, monsters and, lately, these often normal, vintage looking images with a dark irony, obvious or found upon close inspection.

“I love sinister. I love macabre. I love old circus-y stuff. I love New Orleans. I love the kind of stuff that gives you a little bit of a tingle on the back of your neck,” she says as she references a vintage image of the Queen of England wearing a surgical mask. In this new series, there are many surgical and gas masks, unexpected additions, sometimes small, that may have you doing a double take.

She references one painting of a little boy, a hat on his head with a small bird. She seems disappointed. Not all works, she admits, turn out as she imagines they might, unexpected to her now, rather than the future observer. I ask about another, one of my favorites, a little girl in a blue dress on a swing, a bow in her hair, smiling broadly. “And then the images that don’t have any silliness at all,” she says, “There’s just something sinister about them. The little girl on the swing with the tornado. It’s called ‘Bliss.’ She’s just blissfully ignorant of what’s going on. We know that she’s in trouble, but she has no clue. I love that kind of tension. It’s just kind of fun.”

Cindy’s mother was a painter, her father a photographer. She now paints and frames art, while her husband, Jeff, is a sports photographer. A portrait she did of them in Paris hangs on the wall along with others in the current series. They each have on a red clown nose. She speaks of the people and characters she’s painted as an extended family, feeling she needed to be up there with them, and went with a clown’s nose instead of a gas mask so that she would be recognizable. The image she uses for her avatar on Facebook is complete with gas mask, however.

“Whimsy is important to me. I love doing work that I’m laughing and giggling the whole time. It just makes me feel good.” Her works are in acrylic, but I’m stunned it’s not oil given the depth of images, and the colors she achieves and blends.

She refers to herself as abnormal but then admits, “I’m probably as normal as everybody else. I’m not sure there’s such a thing as normal. Even the most, well, think of a normal family, the Cleavers, or some ‘50s family, I just don’t think that existed, don’t think that’s real. Even the Cleavers had some little hidden skeletons in their closets. I’m probably as normal as everybody else.”

Would she even want to be ‘normal’? “No, that’s boring,” she says, laughing. “Normal would probably mean painting pink flowers, and that would bore me silly.” So I ask what’s the most normal thing she’s painted. “Flowers,” she replies, laughing again.

“No, actually, I’ve gone on big binges of trying to be normal, thinking that I would sell more or something. Or I would get people’s approval more. But honestly, I hear more positive things about my crazy stuff than I do my normal stuff, or my … ‘normal stuff.’”

Clyde Moore operates local sites ILUVWinterPark.com and ILUVParkAve. com, and aims to help local businesses promote themselves for free and help save them money, having some fun along the way. Email him at iluvwinterpark@ earthlink.net or write to ILuv Winter Park on Facebook or Twitter.