Perennial

Cynthia Wick in Bloom

Once Again

By Hannah Van Sickle

Floraborealis, 2022

Acrylic, painted paper collage, glitter on canvas 48x60 inches

Peter Baiamonte Photography colorless snow outdoors, a distillation of the artist’s feelings unfurls from a paintsplattered easel-turned-epicenter.

Despite myriad differences among the two dozen canvases dotting the walls of Cynthia Wick’s studio, an invisible tie binds each to the next. Amidst layers of bright acrylic paint, buried beneath bits of embellished paper, there resides palpable joy which — considering the artist’s generous and open disposition — makes perfect sense. Viewed in the context of when the paintings were created? Now that begs a bit of a backstory.

Wick neither aspired to paint flowers, nor does she have a green thumb. Some of her earliest memories are of being just a head taller than the boxwood hedges surrounding her parents’ rose garden in California, “and seeing [those] giant flowers.” Touching upon the practice fueling her most recent body of work, she makes “an effort to access my sense memory about beauty … and moments in my life that were incredibly inspiring.” She speaks of a conscious decision to think less and listen more “to the inklings inside.”

“How does one make beautiful art in the face of such darkness?” is the wholly rhetorical question Wick wrestled with in the days and weeks after the pandemic descended in March 2020. “I almost decided not to paint anymore,” Wick admits, citing the deep devastation she felt in the wake of countless COVIDrelated deaths coupled with the tumultuous politics at play in this country. Equally accustomed to political activism and painting, Wick at first thought she had to choose one or the other before endeavoring to simultaneously employ her pair of penchants — a realization at the root of her show, “FLORABOREALIS” in the Center House Leonhardt Art

Galleries at Berkshire Botanical Garden June 30 through Aug. 27.

"It was essential to mine my memory,” says the former en plein air painter who, after relocating from Los Angeles to the Berkshires 13 years ago, spent many years painting landscapes — largely inspired by her living on the edge of a forest and slowing down enough to notice the details. “I became much more observant about the light and color in the woods, and it really drew me in,” Wick explained during an early March visit to her studio. These days, she’s less interested in painting what she sees and more keen on accessing what’s inside. Standing in stark contrast to the bare branches and

Gone is an antiquated allegiance to recreating the immediate moment. Of late, Wick is focused on the process of creating art as opposed to producing paintings. Each canvas gains character loosely; when a particular color speaks to her, Wick runs with it — an approach she likens to “a constant effort to let the paintings tell [her] what they want.” The end result is a playfulness that’s alluring.

Take for instance, “In the Garden of the Space Angel,” a canvas Wick walks away from in order to gain perspective. “If you stand back, you can see it more clearly,” she says, pointing to a figure that showed up rather unexpectedly (from an inner-city garden) and made the artist laugh. A long time ago, Wick would have painted him out; today, she’s evolved in her approach. “I’ve learned that when those little — and often they are figurative — [details] emerge, they’re a part of the history of the painting,” she says, leaning heavily into the big picture and loosening her grip. “I’m letting those stay,” she admits of a shift that made painting “way more exciting” in recent years.

Over more than two decades painting full-time, one thing remains constant: Wick’s intuition is razor sharp. While a daily meditation practice keeps her grounded, her spirit is open to the myriad ways in which her current medium, paint and painted-paper collage, can take shape on any given day. She likens it to a call-and-response exercise for musicians. “Something will occur to me in an earlier phase,” she says enthusiastically, pointing to several yellow painted-paper squares placed in the corner of a nearby canvas, “and then all the paint chatters with that, and it’s like a back and forth between the layers and layers and layers of paint and the hard edges of a little piece of flat paper.” And, when concerns about commerce do creep in, Wick returns to the wise words of the late Founder and Director of Art 101, Ellen Rand, in whose

Brooklyn gallery Wick’s work was first shown: “Darling, it’s not about selling it’s about showing.” As a tangible tribute to that advice, Wick has been known to embellish her paintings with the small red dot stickers once reserved for marking a painting “sold” in galleries.

Come June, as the seasons shift and summer nears, the seeds for Wick’s show — sown more than three years ago amidst dark uncertainty — are slated to bloom, effectively punctuating the post-pandemic landscape with hope and optimism gleaned from within the proverbial storm. As for serendipity, Wick has taken up gardening. “Just two beds,” she says, evidence of a continued commitment to cultivating joy in the world. As to her parting words?

“Accolades are really nice, but you’ve got to paint what’s inside of you.”

Two Out of Eight!

Our art season began this year on a distinctive note that’s worthy of retelling. The Berkshire Eagle chose two of our exhibitions as among the “8 art shows of 2022 in the Berkshires that reminded us of the power of art.” Those exhibits were Hunt Slonem’s “Hunt Country” and Madeline Schwartzman’s “Face Nature.”

Anastasia Traina Returns

If you’re reading this before June 25, you still have time to see Anastasia Traina’s “Alchemy and Innocents,” which opened on May 5. Anastasia’s work illuminates the botanical world and its hidden creatures by building a Nouveau-Victorian landscape inhabited by magical insects and fauna placed into realistic botanic backdrops. Her inspiration is the nature found in her backyard, fairy tales from around the globe, natural history, and Victorian culture. This exhibition is Anastasia’s second at BBG, following 2018’s “Anastasia Traina’s Fairytale Botanical World.”

Coming Up: Something Curious

Ann Getsinger’s “The Garden of Curiosity” runs from Sept. 1 through Oct. 15. This exhibit will include oil paintings, mixed media drawings and sculptures as it presents carefully observed and freely rendered objects in a range of outdoor settings, times of day, seasons, and weather. “Subjects are chosen for their capacity to delight me for any number of intentionally unexamined reasons,” Ann says.

In Case You Missed It

So far in 2023 the exhibitions in our Leonhardt Galleries have underscored how it is that Berkshire Botanical Garden has become such a bold name on the regional map of eminent art institutions. We were pleased to welcome Karlene Jean Kantner and her show, “Volumes,” that featured pit-fired ceramic works combined with cuttings from the Garden. That show ran from Jan. 20 through Feb. 26. Karlene provided us with one of our favorite quotes so far this year: “My first lesson, really, in ceramics was how to accept loss and then relate it to your life,” she said. “Yeah, there’s a lot of loss in ceramics.”

Next up was Community Access to the Arts’ “The View from Here,” from March 3 through 26, that featured nature-inspired paintings and drawings by artists with disabilities. Some of the works were created on-site here at BBG. Elizabeth Cohen then beckoned us to her botanic world with “Nest/Emerge,” from March 31 through April 30. Her work incorporates hand-thrown porcelain, mulberry paper, wasp nests, and other materials found in nature. “I find inspiration everywhere: the natural world, microscopic images, landscapes, shells, bugs, bark, leaves, pods and seeds,” she said.