CINDY HOUSE

The pastels of contemporary artist, Cindy House, are meticulously handled realist works where the artist treats her medium in a very refined manner. Cindy's landscapes and nature studies, many of which measure under 12 by 16 inches, feature New England subjects: Celia Thaxter’s garden, a beach at Weekapaug, Rhode Island, or a tidal river in Maine.  Other times she focuses on nature’s details—a rock or a waterlily—and it is in these close-up works that she comes close in spirit and detail to the work of the nineteenth-century Pre-Raphaelites.  House’s work also shows its debt to the American Impressionists, whose light-filled canvases and ability to convey, as the artist puts it, “a sense of place” inspired her to work en plein air using pastels.

House’s watercolors and pastels of birds, one of her specialties, have been included in the exhibition, Birds in Art, held at Wisconsin’s Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in 1981, 1984-85, 1987, 1989, and 1996-98, and she has produced illustrations of birds for many publications, including those of the National Geographic Society, Reader’s Digest Association, and Houghton Mifflin’s Peterson Field Guide Series.  A member of the Pastel Society of America and the Society of Animal Artists, the artist has exhibited widely, and her artwork is in the collection of the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, the Audubon Society of Rhode Island, the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and Bausch & Lomb, Incorporated.