Abstract Realism: The Art of Cindy Rockwood Since 1991: A Spiritual Journey through visual art by Cindy L. Rockwood

By Cindy L. Rockwood

A spiritual journey through time contains the consecutive order Cindy Rockwood’s artwork from 1983 to 2021 of 266 paintings. Many of these are gifts to people. Abstract realism is the art style she uses since 1991. It is about putting together images that do not belong together. Christopher Selmek initially wrote Rockwood’s interview. Cindy took it from there.

Cindy Rockwood became a Christian in 2001 and began painting images related to her spiritual vision dreams, where she learned to explore God, by relying on him. She had tried many things in her painting career—nature, painting sketches, and seeing painting three-dimensional like the dancer. For the first time in 2017, she began to see a color code, and vision of doing three-dimensional work of her 5"x5" paintings, based upon items she saw on the page before she started to paint. She could see these works in view. Spiritually, she relied on God to show her what to do with the new images. She took out a 5.5-by-5.5-inch acid-free paper taped around the edges then waited for the direction that led her to create without plans as she painted. She would see a circle and color in a position where she would start. Then after doing this, more colorful lines would appear and on and on, until the painting felt done. Cindy’s main verse that lives by in the Bible: Jeremiah 29:11–13.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9781638147503

Book preview

cover.jpg

Abstract Realism: The Art of Cindy Rockwood Since 1991

A Spiritual Journey through visual art by Cindy L. Rockwood

Cindy L. Rockwood

ISBN 978-1-63814-749-7 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63814-750-3 (Digital)

Copyright © 2022 Cindy L. Rockwood

All rights reserved

First Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Covenant Books

11661 Hwy 707

Murrells Inlet, SC 29576

www.covenantbooks.com

Table of Contents

Early Years

Influence

Art of Perceiving

Painting Sketches

After the Stroke

Foreword

Early Years

Cindy Rockwood was born on June 5, 1957, in North Bend, Oregon. From three years old, some of her first paintings feature the birds, trees, mountains, and waterways of the Northwestern United States. While she was still in grade school, Rockwood would sit in the car and draw out nature scenes with a pencil then apply color later. Cindy thrived in foster care in Allegany, where she spent most of her young life from ten to eighteen.

The thing I liked about Allegany was there were trees that had some moss hanging down, and so it looked like a spooky place in some parts of the woods, she said. "I would go there and paint by the river, and that’s when I got into realism.

My dad told me a story. I didn’t know him very well, but he told me a story about when I was three years old. I was taking the color crayons, and I was fading all the colors into a coloring page. So if I had a bear, I had light on one side and dark on the other side, and I was already doing that sketch and the shading when I was a toddler. That’s something that kids don’t usually get at that age. Usually, they scribble. He said he just admired my coloring because he’d give me Smokey the Bear, and I’d do everything. He wished he would have kept them, but I don’t think they are still around.

Rockwood’s father passed away in 2018, but she said that it may have been due to his encouragement that she continued applying the artistic techniques that he recognized. He was a fire warden and absent for most of her youth, and it was only during his absence that his children suffered sexual abuse at the hands of their stepmother. When he returned to the family, not knowing the full situation, his wife convinced him to place Rockwood in foster care, saying that she was out of control.

From the ages of five to eight, Rockwood and her siblings suffered ritual sexual abuse at the hands of a cult. What memories remain of those years have cost her significant time and effort in psychological recovery. She entered foster care at eight and did not try creating her own artwork because coloring, simply coloring, was one way her mind struggled to deal with the abuse.

I did not try to create my own art until I was around ten years old, and then I started creating on my own, she said. I would copy, like, the Carpenters’ logo, and I started doing lettering, so I would copy it, and then I would put it in sort of a 3-D setting, cut it out, and the color was underneath.

For the first few years of foster care, Rockwood said she does not remember if she did any artwork at all because she was struggling to recover, mentally and spiritually, from the abuse she had suffered. She had a few art assignments while in grade school and remembered getting an A+ on a picture of a bird that she drew when she was eight. She seemed to achieve success at just about everything she tried.

At the