“Simona Conducting” 2010, Oil on Masonite, 12" x 12"

Cover, “Standing In for Christ” 2010, Oil on Masonite, 12" x 12"

Cindy VojnovicRecent Works in Oil

February 20 — March 21, 2010NYC Cathedral on 2nd Gallery

59 East Second Street, New York, NY 10003www.nycathedral.org

www.cindy-vojnovic.com

“Wegman’s Parking Lot” 2010, Oil on Masonite, 12" x 12"

1

“Sometimes, taking the Road Less Traveled entails painting the road that everyone trav-els,” says Cindy Vojnovic. A painter with a fresh and provocative approach to traditional subjects, Vojnovic has set out to create art that reveals the scenery “that we are condi-tioned to ignore.”

Take “Interchange” which depicts a sub-urban Pennsylvania view that’s familiar to the modern eye: a truck barreling down a freeway in the foreground; an off-ramp with its queue of vehicles; street lamps and grain elevators defining the vista beyond. It’s cer-tainly the kind of landscape that is so com-monplace as to be rendered invisible. Viewed from a car window, it is a place that seems to exists merely to inform us of the rate of

our progress toward more meaningful locales. Summoned into visibility by Vojnovic’s skill-ful brush, however, this nondescript “back-ground image” becomes something more than itself. Unhinged slightly from the vertical and horizontal planes we expect, it appears frozen in time: an off-guard moment, an accidental snapshot that nonetheless fascinates the viewer with its details and lush textures.

“I don’t go out looking for things to paint; I simply don’t ignore the images that come to me in the course of living my life,” Vojnovic asserts. “I hope my paintings serve as a kind of antidote to information overload. We text, watch T.V., play games and spend a lot of our time interacting with screens of all sorts, while advertising of all kinds vies

A Strangely Delicious Slice Of LifeEssay by Rebecca Migdal

2

for our attention. Amidst the glut of media images, we become disconnected from what we actually see.” In choosing unconventional subjects, Vojnovic’s paintings avoid the cliché of the “scenic,” striking a pleasing tension between the realism of their execution and the transcendence of their effect. In “Weg-man’s Parking Lot” a glorious sunset appears

on cue: an everyday miracle, and one that presumably goes unnoticed by the shoppers who, as the artist describes, “come and go as quickly as they can in the busy lot.” In “Dead Mall Parking Lot” a school bus sits alone and strangely misplaced among trailing blobs of dirty snow. Forlorn as the scene is, nonetheless the bus, the featureless architec-

“Interchange” 2008, Oil on Paper, 22" x 14.25"

3

ture and empty pavement alike are bathed in the pearly light of a delicately tinted atmo-sphere, softly iridescent as an angel’s wing.

Consider for com-parison the work of Charles Demuth, who painted the industrial landscapes of Lancaster, Penn-sylvania in the early 20th century. His glorifying, proto-cubist portrayals of the vigorous archi-tecture of agricul-ture and industry are infused with a mechanistic energy: these are places where men become one with their machines, become giants or immortal robots, part of the magic clockwork of progress.

In contrast, Vojnovic’s luminous, synesthetic scenes of the ordinary are infused with both humor and wonder. Appearing at first glance to be almost photographic, the paintings are

“Dead Mall Parking Lot” 2008, Oil on Paper, 12" x 12"

4

meditations on their subjects in a way that photography cannot easily achieve. There are no statements made here about the ugli-ness or lack of meaning in modern landscapes, no coyly referential reinventions of the real, laden with irony. There is only a loving eye, humble, honest and acute, gazing outward and inward simultaneously.

Vojnovic’s tenderly amused, yet meticulous lens is not confined to cars and tarmac. In “Pumpkin Time” a girl balances one of the golden squashes on her head, glancing sideways knowingly. Looking at this painting, I want to jump in and wander about in the October stubble, touching the pumpkins, laughing. And yet the painting has a slightly manic quality that makes it visually arresting, a composition that leaves us in suspense. Rather than casting a glow of sentimentality around her subjects, Vojnovic’s keen observation and sense of design is applied with equal measures of humor and fondness. Her scenes of fam-ily life reveal unexpected and quirky moments with the same deftness that laid bare the wide sweep of inhospitable pavement in “Wal-Mart Parking Lot.”

Vojnovic paints the world where she lives, works, shops. It is a world we all share, often going about our business blindly. In this world we may pass through the uncomfort-able and strange, the beautiful and magical, without ever really seeing them. Sometimes it takes the eye of an artist to see these things for us, and the brush of an artist to make them real. As quiet as these paintings are, I think they have the power to transform, to make the viewer think again about the things we experience every day.

Rebecca Migdal 2-11-2010

“Pumpkin Time” 2007, Oil on Paper, 8.25" x 12"

6

Q How do you choose what to paint?

A For this series, I’m painting things to which I’m connected - though the nature of the connection may vary quite a bit from painting to painting. But they are not novel things, something I just happened to catch in a photo. Almost always, they are something deeply woven into my life. It takes me so long to paint a painting, it’s such a time investment, that I go through a process just deciding what I want to paint. I will jot down in a sketch book ideas for what I want to paint, then later, sometimes much later, I take the photos. Then there can be a lapse between when I take the reference photos and when I actually paint-a lapse which “swallows” many painting into the abyss of not enough time. Only the most persistent images actually get painted.

Q Do you work from Photographs?

A When I began drawing and painting I worked from life, from my drawings, or from

imagination ... but never from photos. Now, I shoot my own reference photos, and I shoot what I know. So if the photo has distorted something in a way that doesn’t serve my purposes, I just paint it the way I know it to be. Beyond the optical differences between what a lens sees versus what two human eyes see, in life we make our observations not from one instant, or one frozen point of view. As humans, we PUT TOGETHER an image from what are actually multiple images.

Q How do you transfer the image to paper or panel? Do you use grids, or a projector or some other technique?

A I use my eyes. I either paint from life, looking at something, or I paint from LOOKING at the reference photos. I’ve been enjoying working in a square format, since all the photos are rectangular. I have to make more choices that way. What I discovered long ago, when I only photographed something AFTER painting it, was that the paintings were better compositions than the photographs. And the interesting thing was, no matter how I shifted

Excerpts from an Interview with the Artist

7

around, I could never find a spot from which I could take a photo that viewpoint was exactly that of the painting. Which ties into the last question, how in life we don’t see a frozen image, we’re seeing a stream of images, images that shift constantly as we move, lighting conditions change etc. That’s why I prefer to take a group of reference photos, so I have more choices. In “Interchange,” for example, I moved the truck from one photo into the space of another photo etc. And since I paint what I experience in the ordinary course of my life, and it takes

me a long time to complete a painting, I often see my subject in “real life” over and over again while a painting is in progress, and take mental notes which will influence what I do back in the studio. Staying with “Interchange” as an example, that view from the on ramp to Route 33 is something I see every morning on my way to work; I had to see it dozens of time in the course of making that painting. Photos can be deceptive, even when I’m working with photo references, I am augmenting those with first hand observation.

“Route 80” 1990

Oil on Board

17.25" x 12.25"

8

Q Do you consider yourself a “realist” or a “photorealist” painter?

A Neither, I just consider myself a painter. I don’t care if a painting looks “realistic” or like any of the reference photos or not, I care if it’s a good painting. Finally, after three decades of painting, I’m over art school. When I went to art school in the late ‘70s, I was told that figuration was no longer a viable option in painting, that only a handful of figurative artists in the world were actually making good figurative art,

and what makes me think I could ever hope to be among such a select few? The real message was that figurative art is dead, and any kind of painting whatsoever is starting to smell funny. That late-modernist art establishment arrogance was just another “salon,” another generation telling the next how they can and can’t paint. When I said I don’t care if a painting looks “realistic” or like any of the reference photos, I mean it both ways. If it does appear “realistic” that’s just as irrelevant as if it’s not realistic.

“Warehouses on the Horizon”

2009

Oil on Board, 12" x 12"

About the ArtistCindy Vojnovic decided she wanted to become as a painter after her first visit to a major museum (Philadelphia Art Museum) at the age of four. Things didn't go as she had hoped when she tried to execute her vision with the crayons and paints at home, but she persevered. She graduated from the School For Visual Arts in New York City with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, concentration in Painting. Her first exhibit was at the juried exhibition L.E.S.S. at P.S. 122 Gallery in 1982.

Her first solo exhibition was at the Limbo Lounge, also in the East Village, in 1984. Vojnovic has continued to paint and exhibit her work ever since, A more detailed resumé and further information can be found on her web site, www.cindy-vojnovic.com

Vojnovic has adapted her work to her life situa-tions throughout the past three decades. When her first child was born, she shifted to smaller works, for example. She studied with Jennifer Perkins, Dmitri and Vladaslav Andrejev at the Prosopon

School of Iconography from 1998 through 2002. This exhibit show-cases her works in oil since having studied iconography. The one excep-tion is "Route 80," painted in 1990, in a style very unlike her work at that time, but a foreshadowing of her cur-rent work.

Vojnovic now resides in Easton PA with her husband Tagor Vojnovic–her model for “T Time.” Her daughter Jane Chardiet is a senior at Temple University in Philadelphia, while her younger daughter Margaret Chardi-et–her model for “Pumpkin Time,” is a sophomore at Hunter College in Manhattan.

9

“Parking Lot that Was A Fish Mar-ket” 2009, Oil on Board, 12" x 12"

Left, and Detail

Above;

“T Time”

2007

Oil on Paper

10.5" x 19.5"

About the AuthorRebecca Migdal is a graphic novelist and an inter-disciplinary artist, performer and writer working in new and traditional media. She has appeared on various television and radio programs, and per-formed and exhibited widely. Her work has been supported by a number of grants including the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance, Emerg-ing Artist Grant in 1989.

Career Highlights: Migdal received her Bachelors in Studio Art in 1982 from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she was a Regent’s Scholar. During the eighties she exhibited and performed at galleries and museums across the U.S. From 1990-1997 she was a singer-songwriter in the critically ac-claimed New York alt-pop bands The Rubber Dahls and Clockwork Robin.

She was an artist-in-residence at Pratt Institute's Drawing Center, where in 1994 she created a multimedia video and art installation and per-formed “Doctor Death,” a memorial to the Iraqi dead of the first Gulf War.

Since 1996 Migdal has been the sole proprietor of R.L.Migdal Creative Multimedia, offering digital design, animation and presentation services to a variety of clients in publishing, media and the fashion industry. In 2000 she was an animator on Queer Duck, written by Mike Riess, now on Showtime. In 2004 she directed a short animated faux commercial, “Shugga Crax,” which appeared in Alberto Bonilla’s human rights play, Walking to America. In 2005 she received her Master of

11

“After the Fall”

2007

Oil on Paper

12.125" x 8.5"

Arts in Communication Arts from the New York Institute of Technology, where she studied video, journalism and script writing. The same year Migdal was awarded a merit scholarship to the MFA program in English and Writing at South-ampton College, where her thesis was read by Jules Feiffer, Roger Rosenblatt and Robert Reeves. In 2006-7 she wrote, directed and performed in The Yippee Skippy Puppet Theater’s Agent Alpha, the Pentagon's Tiniest Covert Operative, at the Museum

of Comic and Cartoon Art and other venues.

She is currently serving on the editorial commit-tee of World War 3 Illustrated Magazine, working on a graphic novel series entitled Rosetta Stone, and is involved in co-founding Gonzo Comix and Tours, a publishing, educational and travel com-pany dedicated to Social Justice through Comics Journalism.

12

13

Above, “Master Connor Vojnovic” 2010, Oil on Board, 12" x 12"

Left, “Building a Bigger Barn” 2008, Oil on Paper, 14" x 11"

14

“Wal-Mart Parking Lot” 2009, Oil on Board, 12" x 12"

15

“View of University Center from the Pit” 2009, Oil on Board, 12" x 12"