By Julie Osterman
Texas artist Cyn McCurry has been creating art for as long as she can remember. “It was a natural compulsion,” she says. “My mother swears I was drawing on the uterus walls.” At age 11, she started doing portrait commissions, and the young artist worked feverishly in her sketchbook through her 20s. Then, as a single mother with five children, McCurry turned to commercial work to provide for her family. She found the work stifling and soon returned to her oil paints, translating the drawings in her sketchbook to canvas.
“It was difficult at first because it’s very intimate, like letting someone read your diary,” she says. The images portray women dealing with life experiences such as puberty, young love, and divorce. Candles and storms are present in most of McCurry’s work as they signify fire and water, which the artist says are her natural elements, and the eggs that appear represent female energy.
Very few of her paintings are meant to be self-portraits, but “a lot of them come out looking like me or my daughter,” she says. The painting specific gravity of self depicts her teenage daughter “weighing her own self-worth,” McCurry describes, a notion that has become difficult to discuss since her daughter’s death last year. The artist plans to finish the series featuring her daughter and present the pieces in a tribute show in October at RL Foster Galleries, Denver, CO. She is also represented by Edmund-Craig Gallery, Fort Worth, TX.
Featured in “Artist to Watch” January 2005