Cynthia Breusch is a poetic painter known for her lyrical figurative imagery, rich use of colour, and inventiveness.   

Her atmospheric paintings convey an other-world timelessness.

She works in the media of acrylic paint, collage, oil pastel, and chalk pastel. Some works can incorporate hand-cut stencils, stamped words, or found vintage book covers.

Her gestural multi-layered and scumbled application of paint combine to create a surface that is alive, as if everything has been put down in one continuous flow. 

Growing up in a creative household in Brisbane, Queensland, Cynthia can never remember a time she wasn’t drawing or painting. 

Though she always knew her future lay with art, Cynthia also studied the clarinet from an early age and music has been a recurring motif in her work.   Over time her themes have encompassed figure-in-landscape (landscape as a stage setting or emotional threshold); figure-in-interior (interior as dreaming room) and mixed-media/collage (where a figure in art history or from vintage photography is referenced).  In a ‘romantic-modern’ idiom these themes are used metaphorically to evoke universal themes of meaning and purpose, memory and dreams.

This makes for lush subject matter where beauty resists being an end in itself and is instead a by-product of something deeper, even attempting the transcendent. 

As Cynthia tells it:

“It’s difficult to describe what happens intuitively.  I work in themes, some recurring in new ways.  But these are metaphorical, a way to explore the relationship with the Self, and our human need for transcendence beyond material reality. So while the figure is typically the subject, the real subject is something else : hope, a sensing of something eternal, inner reflection.  I like to have some mystery, to create a mood suggestive of a longing, or anticipation of something.  I’m particularly interested in capturing the state of reverie where time is both stopped and unending.”

Cynthia has won many awards for drawing and painting.  She is also a multi-finalist in numerous significant award exhibitions and by-invitation exhibitions.  She has exhibited widely in galleries around Australia, as well as in Tokyo and California.

The artist’s work is held in public and corporate collections as well as private collections in Australia, the UK, USA, France, Germany, Switzerland, the United Emirates, New Zealand and Singapore.  
Her art also features in many publications.

She lives and works in the World Heritage area of the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, with her husband and fellow artist, Christopher McVinish, where for her, life and art, beauty and meaning, are inseparable.