Cynthia Huff lets her imagination get the best of her in paintings at Riverrun Gallery.
By:Susan Van Dongen
Like the best jazz improvisations, Cynthia Huff’s new paintings outrun the censor. They’re explorations in imagination, with minimal structure.
Using a variety of quirky, artistic marks along with a muted palette, her newest works have sock monkeys and beatniks sharing the space with hourglasses and harlequins. The paintings incorporate techniques of layering, erasing and direct opaque graphic rendering combined with transparency of color. Ms. Huff has intuitively chosen symbols and images that suggest fortune telling, patterns of divination and luck hence the sock monkeys and an abundance of rabbits.
Her current paintings, on view at Riverrun Gallery in Lambertville through Nov. 28, are laced with humor and references to the food chain, pondering why some animals are "chosen" as food and some are fortunate enough to escape from this destiny. In one work, for example, we see a lucky rabbit riding a not-so-lucky pig.
"Some of the questions I pondered while creating these pieces were, ‘Is there luck in the food chain?’" she writes in her artist’s statement. "’Are there current needs for tools of fortune telling?’ ‘Do randomly chosen symbols that suggest a pattern create a divination tool?’ ‘Are there universal connotations in images?’"
With influences ranging from musicians John Cage and Laurie Anderson to painters Francesco Clemente, Philip Guston and Susan Rothenberg, Ms. Huff lets the ideas flow through her hands spontaneously, much like the music comes through the fingers of a master musician.
"I heard an interview with an artist, who was saying he didn’t see much difference between the arts, especially painting and jazz music, that many of the decisions are made in the same way, improvised and intuitive," Ms. Huff says. "That’s what I believe creativity is randomness. In contrast, our (logical) minds are constantly gathering and filtering images, ideas and information that are accepted or rejected and used as interpretative tools or mores of the culture. But these paintings reflect the process of random selection.
"I think you have to take an uncensored (attitude toward creativity)," she continues. "You have to have this spontaneity in your marks, too. I might have an overall idea of how I want something to look, but I try not to have a preconceived notion. Because if you get too tight about subject matter, then suddenly your marks become tighter and your paintings become tighter and tighter, too. I prefer a looser result."
Born in Indiana, Ms. Huff has a diverse and dynamic artistic background. Formally trained in ceramics and sculpture in the mid-’70s, she began her focus on painting, collage and two-dimensional work in the early ’90s. As her paintings have evolved, Ms. Huff has employed a personal language that incorporates expressionistic techniques and experimental processes.
She also embraces the rawness of Outsider art, juxtaposing symbolic motifs and historic references, like the images of Italian chalkware that float here and there in her new works.
After undergraduate work at the prestigious Herron School of Art in Indianapolis (part of the University of Indiana), she received her master’s degree from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Ms. Huff was the recipient of an Individual Artists Fellowship from the New Jersey Council of the Arts and her work has appeared nationally in many solo and group exhibitions. In addition to shows at the Riverrun Gallery, she’s exhibited at the Trenton City Museum at Ellarslie, the Steamroller Gallery in Frenchtown, the Hunterdon Arts Center (now the Hunterdon Museum) in Clinton, Contemporary Porcelain Gallery and Wheeler-Seidel Gallery in New York as well as the Works Gallery in Philadelphia.
Ms. Huff taught art at the University of Tennessee, as well as the Parsons School of Design in New York and Mercer County Community College.
She says the stringent curriculum and European atmosphere at the Herron School gave her an abundance of technical control. But once out of school, she has always tried to rise above technique and let the creative spirit come through more organically.
"That’s what the art school experience is supposed to be they teach you all these different styles but then you pull back and create your own style," Ms. Huff says. "Unfortunately, so many times people take this technique but they don’t do anything with it. They’ll just carry on with what they studied in art school. For me, it’s been a struggle to not tighten into something structural, something I learned in art school."
Recent Works by Cynthia Huff are on view at the Riverrun Gallery, 287 S. Main St., Lambertville, through Nov. 28. Gallery hours: Mon., Wed.-Sat. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Sun. noon-5 p.m. For information, call (609) 397-3349. On the Web: cynthiahuff.artspan.com

