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Cynthia Fontayne, “Spare Time Artist”
The
Brick Coffeehouse Café is featuring the work of Marysville resident
Cynthia Fontayne during the month of March. The name of her show,
“Spare Time Artist,” reflects the fact that she has to make room
for making art amidst the demands of a full-time job. Oil paintings
predominate the gallery display, but there also are examples of her
use of other media, including collage, photography, photo collage,
pen and pencil, writing, handmade cards, web design, altered books
and jewelry.
Encouraged in all the arts at an early age, she received an art
scholarship to cover the cost of supplies and studio time from
Vassar College, where she minored in Art History and studied
painting with Alton Pickens. Her primary talent, writing, led her
to a career in marketing and communications, but she has never been
without art supplies of one kind or another, which fight for storage
space with her collection of books, old and new.
Long
interested in architecture, she moved to Marysville in 2007, drawn
to undertake the restoration of the 1920 Julia Morgan house in which
she now resides with Jet, her Border Collie mix. One phase of the
house project (still underway), converted the former garage (big
enough only for a Model T) into an art and craft studio, with
painting annexed to the sunny sleeping porch upstairs.
Cynthia serves on the board of directors of the Yuba Sutter Regional
Arts Council, and as president of The Friends of the Packard
Library of Yuba County. These interests and volunteer commitments
led her to chair The Big Read Yuba Sutter 2010, a reading and
cultural program funded by a grant to the Arts Council by the
National Endowment for the Arts.
She
hopes that “Spare Time Artist” will show that “Art” has many forms
and definitions, and does not have to be great to be legitimate, and
that it will encourage others to make time for making art, because
she believes we all have art of some kind inside us, just waiting
for expression.
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