Article on Cover Art by Deb Candy,  Alternative Law Journal*, Vol 46(2) 92, 2021
SAGE Publications

With a dreamlike vividness against the palest of skies bathed in ethereal light, the two elegantly dressed girls clasp hands and delicately point their toes as if to test the water. There's a natural grace and innocence to the duo that counterpoints the words at water's edge; what will they do, and what will we all do when the waters rise?

What will you do when the waters rise? was featured in Cynthia Breusch's most recent exhibition, Dreaming in Metaphors, at Lethbridge Gallery, Brisbane. Breusch sometimes pays homage to her heroines - female painters and photographers of the late |9th/early 20th centuries - by re-imagining figures from their works. In this instance it is Cecilia Beaux, an American Impressionist and society portraitist (and rival of John Singer Sargent).

As Breusch explains, “I've taken the sisters from her portrait Dorothea and Francesca (|898), just as Beaux portrayed them choreographing their own steps, and placed them in a universal landscape using them as a symbol of ‘all that we hold dear’ which is now threatened by the climate change emergency.”

Breusch's art stirs the viewer's conscience, just as literary critic George Steiner explained: a work of art, like metaphors in language, can ask the most serious, difficult questions in a way which really makes the readers answer for themselves, that the work of art far more than an essay or a tract involves the reader, challenges him directly and brings him into the argument.'

'I'm aiming for something universal, inclusiveness of the viewer, about what it means to be human', Breusch says. I think of the landscape as a stage set for open-ended narratives, stories that are only ever hinted at as in our dreams.’

Her artworks were a response to recent crises: the ruination and toll of our country's unprecedented fires, dangerous air quality and searing temperatures, too heart- breaking. [..] Post-fires, and as the ecological and human toll was being calculated around the nation, the return of birdsong seemed miraculous ... [then] a world turned upside down by a pandemic.'

Queensland born and educated, Cynthia Breusch lives and works in the Blue Mountains. She has held more than 35 solo exhibitions, participated in numerous exhibitions nationally, in Japan and the US, and has been a multi-finalist in major awards including the Portia Geach Memorial Award (Australia's most prestigious portrait award for female artists).

And her narrative? 'Ultimately Nature's resilience gave me salve, and ... a "blue streak" of inspiration: the need to celebrate the natural world and the power of beauty and wonder in our lives.’

Breusch's paintings and drawings are represented in public and corporate collections and are held in private collections worldwide.

Cover art: What will you do when the waters rise?
Acrylic on canvas (2020)
91 x 91cm
Image courtesy of the artist
© Cynthia Breusch