Cynthia Daignault.

Brooklyn-based painter Cynthia Daignault was a few years into her professional career when she went on an artist's residency and spent three months alone in the woods with her work. She describes the experience as 'incredibly intense. I would be lying if I said I didn't cry and drink through the first bit of it, but when I emerged I knew without doubt that painting is my life's vocation.' This intensity has remained in her works. These often transcend the two-dimensional, singlecanvas model, but do so without losing any accuracy or compositional rigour. She refutes the usual labels: 'I am not a conceptual painter, nor is anyone, for the term implies that there is a type of painting that is non-conceptual. The very act of rendering anything in paint is conceptual. I am not a figurative painter, nor is anyone, for the term implies that the act of figuration isn't at its core an act of abstraction. I endeavour to dismantle these binaries with which we talk about painting (alive, dead, figurative, abstract, conceptual, expressionist) to explore the liminal spaces between polarities in order to expand the meaning and relevance of painting in contemporary art and life.' Her subjects, she says, are simply 'light and colour, ideas and things.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]