Cynthia Spillman, submitted artwork
Cynthia Spillman
Painting
Aptos, CA.
Cynthia Spillman is an American multidisciplinary artist based in Aptos, California, whose work spans painting, performance, and voice. Her creative path has been shaped by a richly varied background, including decades as a radio DJ—beginning in her formative years in Hawaii, where she also worked as a designer and farmer. In 1990, her home and studio were destroyed by the Kilauea Volcano, prompting a relocation to San Francisco. There, she began a career in acting and voiceover, eventually returning to the visual arts after moving to Los Angeles. Though largely self-taught, Spillman was invited to study at the distinguished Santa Monica College of Design, Art and Architecture—a school known for its immersive, interdisciplinary, and experimental approach. There, she honed an intuitive artistic language grounded in color, gesture, and contemplative inquiry into the nature of self. At the core of her work is an unwavering ethos: that directness and sincerity form the foundation of artistic communication. A fundamental thread is woven through her practice—an instinctive mandate to express truth above all else.
Works
Cynthia Spillman, submitted artwork
My work is a direct communication from the truth of who I am—something that arises without conscious orchestration. Beneath layers of thought, identity, and belief is a deeper presence: my true nature. Each piece expresses that essential self. The paintings are the alchemical result of action and material, holding mystery and the unknowable in their form. I’m drawn to what can’t be said, explained, or described. If I had to offer a word, it would be innocence. There is an innocence asking to be revealed. I’ve never seen the universes in my paintings before they appear, yet they rise from somewhere primal within—native, and untouched. They aren’t created to build narrative or meaning, but to embody essential presence. For me, expression and being are inseparable. In a way, the work is a nonlinear biography of my being in time; it’s fluid, shifting and alive. “Self-representation” takes on new meaning: it’s not the crafting of identity or persona. It is the Self, expressed—unfiltered, unmanufactured. What emerges is the only exact expression of its kind, the one that I am, now and ever. I experience grace in this process—a breaking free from inherited identity, a remembering older than language, truer than self-image. Kinship with the CoBrA artists is at the heart of my work—their wild, intuitive ethos continues to guide and affirm my own, resisting refinement in favor of truth.
