STUDIO VISIT

MANIFESTING LIGHT

The art of Annette Cyr

By Victoria Solan

Annette Cyr has never written a manifesto, but if she did, she tells me, it would echo Georgia O’Keeffe’s declaration of painting as “the thread that runs through all the reasons for all the other things that makes one’s life.” An accomplished and prolific artist, Cyr is currently designing a video projection while editing her first novel, so it is not immediately evident that oil on canvas would be the heart of her creative practice. She has also produced a film about the threat of impending blindness, written about matrilineal caregiving, and she is currently rethinking the role of gender in the constellations for her upcoming digital project, Women in the Sky. It is perhaps this track record of public engagement and interaction that makes me surprised that the time she values most or sees as the constant in her life is the time she spends alone at her canvas, looking at sunlight interacting with the material world.

For the past fifteen years, Annette Cyr has divided her time between San Diego and New York City. Trained as a painter at the Yale School of Art, she added filmmaking to her roster upon her return to California and acquired a second MFA in Digital Filmmaking in 2017. In addition to making art, Cyr teaches, exhibits and curates. Her film Blindness was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 2018. Her writing was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2021, and she soon expects to publish Emergence, a novel about a painter’s career arc. 

Across all her creative endeavors, Cyr has built a network of supportive colleagues. It is in fact, through this network that we first encountered each other. (For the past five years, Cyr, four other women and I have co-led the Yale Women Writers Group, an online group which she founded with Northern California writer Lisa Fabish). Cyr and I have corresponded weekly since 2020, but we have not yet met in person. Perhaps it is her energy for social engagement that leads me to be surprised by the high value she places on solitary engagement with her art. As she explains, though, her social framework powers the creative work she performs alone.

Given the distance between our home bases in the United States and Canada, Annette and I have decided to hold our studio visit by Zoom. On the day we meet, Annette is in her studio in San Diego. I’m in my office in Ottawa, where the afternoon sun is already low in the Ontario sky. Worried about missing out on the in-person aspects of a traditional studio visit, I’ve propped one of Annette’s paintings next to my laptop. It’s a small image of a goldfish bowl, devoid of fish but almost full of water. The twelve-by-twelve-inch canvas is entirely filled with the earth-toned geometry of the bowl, which strains against the edges of the image; the surface of the water reads as a gray-and-white parallelogram at eye level. Annette sent me the painting three years ago and it’s usually in my front hall, where its stillness offers a moment of respite from frantic searches for missing shoes. The title of the painting, #160, 12:26 PM, Four dots of light at top, triangle of light bottom right, refers to its placement in Cyr’s Year of Light, Year of Change painting cycle. Already, the painted forms on the canvas have taken on new life on my desk, where they are surrounded by bound volumes of painters’ manifestos and other books. The round form of the goldfish bowl, partially obscured by a shadow, takes on the appearance of a sundial, glowing wordlessly in the late afternoon sun.

My laptop screen lights up, and Annette appears. Her bright fuchsia sweater stands out against the earth-toned grid of paintings behind her. Since our time is limited, we’ve agreed to focus on Cyr’s Year of Light project and its follow-up series, 24 Hours, which has just been exhibited in curator Rebecca Shippee’s Painting in Real Time, a show at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Ana, California. Year of Light, which Cyr designed as a refuge for herself during the pandemic lockdown, consists of 365 daily paintings of the same goldfish bowl, illuminated only by the sunlight in her studio. (Cyr posted each painting on Instagram; the series can still be seen on @annettecyrstudio). Its sequel, 24 Hours, is a smaller, more intense series of hourly views of the same bowl; the contrasts between the daylight, dusk and night canvases are mesmerizing for both their compositional simplicity – each comprises a bowl of water on a table, lit by skylight which remains out of view. Cyr restricted her colors in both series to earth-based pigments, and the trapezoids of light which track the movement of the sun glow with remarkable contrast against the neutral palette of the background. Nominally, the subject of each series is time, but the longer I look at the images, the more clearly I see that the absent orb of the sun is the true center of the project.

Annette’s studio is well designed for this endeavor. She paints in a renovated garage attached to her house. Swinging her camera around, she notes that she is lucky to have a garage with an unusually high ceiling. Working with a local contractor, she designed a skylight which channels the sunlight into her workspace with a chapel-like effect. Below the skylight is her still-life table, on which the goldfish bowl remained throughout both the Year of Light and the 24 Hours series. 

As we talk, I’m struck by the simplicity of the scene: Was it easy or difficult, I ask, to paint the same subject so many times, and what were the formal challenges of fitting an irregular circle, distorted by light and shadow, onto a perfectly square canvas? Annette’s first response is about the sun, which I can see streaming through her skylight as she talks:

At first the challenge was tracking the changes [in the light]. These happen most dramatically in the late morning, as the trapezoids of light float across the fishbowl, white table, and white wall. After about twenty minutes, what I was excited to paint is gone, and something new is in its place. Different and maybe even more wonderful. Every time I look at the fishbowl, I am dazzled by what I see. 

Cyr’s dazzlement is remarkable, given the number of times she has painted the same scene. She tells me that her practice dates from her undergraduate years, when her painting teacher asked his students to bring still life materials to the classroom. Inspired by Matisse’s well-known paintings of goldfish, Cyr brought her pet fish to school. The fish, which lived in a brandy snifter, promptly died in the heat of the studio, so Cyr painted the water and the glass for the rest of the term. She didn’t know it at the time, but both Matisse and the simple exercise would remain intertwined with her painting practices for decades.

Returning to the topic of the unwritten manifesto, Cyr tells me that Matisse would also play a prominent role. It was from his work that she came to understand that “the only light that really exists is in the mind of the painter and that light comes from color, and not from contrast of dark and light.” 

Later, typing up my notes, I realize this focus on color, rather than dark and light, has been present in our earlier conversations: it was Annette who steered me in the direction of Josef Albers’ color lessons when I wanted to rethink my own art practice a few years ago. Annette, who keeps detailed notebooks of her studio practice, later sends me a popular Matisse quote which she has found valuable over the years: “It is with color that you render light, though you must also feel this light, have it within yourself.” The painter’s brain, essentially, becomes an alternate sun, guiding the application of color on the canvas.

For Cyr, narrowing the color range of a still life setting is an essential precursor to painting, or perhaps even looking. The clear glass bowl sits on a white table, whose intriguing curves appear at the edge of some of her paintings. The hand-me-down table, Cyr tells me, was originally dark brown, but had to be repainted before she could work with it. “As long as something is painted white,” Cyr tells me, “I can see the color and form.” 

We dive into a brief discussion of Georgia O’Keeffe’s still life practice, and Cyr contemplates the “subtlety and trust” required by the process of transforming vision into a material, pigmented object. For Cyr, all painting is ultimately about perception and transience. “I want to show [the viewer] these moments of exquisite beauty or stillness or weirdness. Before they – and I – disappear,” she says. Looking at the painting next to my computer, I can see why she has restricted the still life exercise to so few colors: each of the gray-beige forms in 12:26pm will never recur in precisely the same relationship as the one she recorded on my square canvas.

For Cyr, the 24 Hours series was an even more intense exercise in transcribing perception into paint than Year of Light had been. There are twenty-five paintings in the series, one for each of the hour-long slivers that mark the day, and a final composition which marks the closure of the project. The Year of Light series had been a refuge for Cyr, her way of creating a comforting daily ritual during the pandemic. In contrast, she tells me, 24 Hours forced her out of her comfort zone, both physically and perceptually. (Since the series required Cyr to paint at one, two, and three in the morning while balancing her usual daytime obligations, she did allow herself four weeks to complete the series.) The goldfish bowl remained at the center of her composition, but the light was no longer within her control, as it had been in the earlier series. Dark night hours invited new colors into the project, but it was the flat, dusky afternoon paintings that Cyr found most difficult:

Having to look more closely during those afternoon hours pushed me to realize the true challenge [of painting] is about perception: what do I really see, as opposed to what I know is there? I know the glass bowl is there, but do I really perceive it? Sometimes I do not. I attempt to be authentic, to paint only what I see… What is so surprising is that in this attempt to only paint what I really see, these works become timeless, inhabiting a mystical realm.

As she painted both Year of Light and 24 Hours, Cyr found that the essence of each individual painting had to be captured in about twenty minutes. Any longer gestation would be disrupted by the movement of the sun and consequent changing of the transient shapes in her scene. Counterintuitively, this tight time limit was true in both sharp sun and diffuse light; it was even more true in the moonlit nighttime hours.

Seeing the Zoom timer run down on our conversation, I ask Annette why painting, rather than other pursuits, remains at the heart of her multidisciplinary career. The question is not easy, for writing, drawing, and filmmaking are all important to Cyr. Together, we grapple with ideas about brain-hand-brush connections, and she identifies painting as “the ultimate solace.” Her final answer is disarmingly simple: “when everything else is fraught, it’s the one thing I can do.” 

Victoria Solan writes about design, finance and sustainable development in a global context. Clients of her Ottawa-based communications practice include the World Bank Group, Stanford University, and Studio: Craft and Design in Canada. A practicing textile artist, Victoria also holds a doctorate in art history.