About the Artist

“As a child,” Cynthia Peterson says, “I cannot remember a time that I did not draw.” Her parents had a large influence on her lifelong interest in art. She recalls fondly that her father, a photographer, shared with her old books about the Renaissance masters. She recalls her mother took her at an early age to the Phoenix Art Museum where she became intrigued with a painting by artist Joseph Stella called Flowers, Italy, to the point of trying to copy it from memory at home. “ Another of my early contacts with art when young was looking at reproductions of Baroque paintings. My father, a photographer, brought home books of old master still life paintings, starting a lifelong interest in the use of still life as subject and the variety of painting techniques. I was fascinated with the way these painters carefully rendered the effects of light upon reflective surfaces. Throughout my art studies, I have felt compelled to explore light and color in combination with these surfaces. Masters such as Willem Kalf, Zubarón, and Cotan continue to influence my work, as well as more contemporary still life and figurative artists. Later I became very influenced by the photorealists and contemporary watercolor painters such as Joseph Raffael.“

Cynthia Peterson considers herself to be “a contemporary realist whose roots are in a classical tradition.” Much of her work consists of still-life constructions built around the way surfaces play with color and light. Peterson uses glass and other intriguing surfaces because of the way they reflect and distort shapes; the resulting images being both realistic and abstract. She uses watercolor because it allows her to achieve greater color luminosity in the illusion of transparent and reflective surfaces.  “I have been working with glass as a muse for a number of years. I am very attracted to the qualities of transparency for color luminosity and refraction for the abstract passages it can reveal. My still life paintings use various glass objects chosen for their shape, color, clarity, and pattern. Different light sources are used to manipulate color, temperature and reflections on the shiny surface. This allows me to push color in very dramatic and oftentimes very abstract manner. It is this combination of reality and abstract that inspires my work.”

Ms. Peterson has exhibited in many solo and national exhibitions including the Rocky Mountain National and Colored Pencil Society International exhibitions. Ms. Peterson has received awards and regonition from the National Watercolor Society, Watercolor USA, American Watercolor Society, Plein Air Salon and more. Her artwork has been published in Southwest Art, Watercolor Magic, The Best of Watercolor, The Best of Colored Pencil and Artist’s Magazine. She holds a BFA degree from Northern Arizona University, and a MFA from Arizona State University. She resides in Phoenix, AZ.