Cici Artist: From Mathematician to Artist

Cici Artist
From Mathematician to Artist
By Carolee Ross

Much like her current professional name, cici artist always wanted to be an artist. Her parents didn’t agree with her passion, although she’d been drawing and painting since childhood. (lower case letters for her new name are cici artist’s choice).

cici artist (the movie)
by cici artist
selected for 7th annual Big Apple Film Festival

When she went to college, parental restriction forbade her from majoring in art or even taking more than two art classes. An obedient daughter, she majored in an “approved” area – Applied Math. She did well scholastically, getting a fellowship for a Master’s degree in Biostatistics and worked in that field for 25 years.

Her vacations, however, were “her” time and she always took drawing and painting supplies with her. “My vacations were always art vacations,” she explained in a recent interview. She married, had a son, divorced, and raised her son alone.


Cici Artist took a solo vacation to Sundance and ascended the mountain to the Sundance Resort where she took “Bed and Art” classes. “I took two hour classes in watercolor, photography and ceramics,” she recalls. “When I came down the mountain, I was never the same.”

The fledgling artist had managed her finances well, saved for her son’s college education and knew she had to make a change in her life. She gave herself six months to save some more money and at age 50, she took a risk, leaving a successful career developing computer systems (her advanced degrees are in applied mathematics, biostatistics and education). It was time to embrace risk and finally follow her passion.

How a Mathematician became an Established Artist


Artist developed a plan for her first year. She decided to focus on a theme, “Transformation: The Face and the Mask,” as she had radically changed her life and felt this embodied the change. She took art classes to keep structure in her life and took hand building pottery classes at Lakeside Pottery in Stamford, Connecticut, where she began making small ceramic masks. (Writer’s note: It’s a given: from earliest childhood, the sight of the human face engages our interest more powerfully and more consistently than almost any other visual fact).

Faces in the Crowd
by
cici artist
24"x12"x3"
Cut Bronze mounted on Canvas

Next, she took welding courses at Silvermine Guild, New Canaan, Connecticut, and made masks in steel and copper. She joined online art groups, participating in themed online shows and trying to sell her work. She notes, “I made very, very little money.” She drew every day and invested in a large format printer so she could make giclee art prints of her work (pronounced zee-clay).

The word “giclee” refers to the fine art prints produced by an ink-jet digital printing process. The term giclee refers to the French word “gicler” meaning to spray or spurt out. The first giclee art prints were produced in the 1980s so it is a relatively new art form. Since many people cannot afford to purchase original art or artists would like to make more than one sale from an original painting, giclee art prints are an affordable way to capture the color, clarity and quality of the original piece of artwork in a printed art sheet. The end result looks as much like the original artwork as possible.

The Breakthrough aka Fairy Tales Can Come True


Morty Bachar, owner of Lakeside Pottery, gave cici artist her first solo “One Day Art Show,” and simultaneously, Sandy Labriola, Labriola Frame & Art Gallery, named her artist of the month and showed her ceramic masks. Since then, “artist” has joined the Loft Artists Association (Stamford), and has had several shows, including “Music & Masks," at the Sackler Gallery, Palace Theatre (Stamford). The exhibit was sponsored by the Stamford Center for the Arts Cultural Fine Arts Program. “Music and Masks” celebrated musicians, who held their childhood dreams to pursue g-clefs and quarter notes with the same inspiration that artist uses to bend metals and paint canvas.

RedHeaded Violinist
by
cici artist
30" x 24"



Allegro Violinist
by
cici artist
24" x 30"



Artist has published several books, including “People and their Pets,” “Diminutive Nudes,” “Love in the Wild,”, “The Fruit Ladies,” and Laura-Lee and Laura-Lye: The Best of Friends.” “Cici artist (the movie)” was selected by the Big Apple Film Festival 2010 and is a short animated art murder mystery that can be found at the artist’s website, http://www.ciciartist.com/ciciEvents. It is produced, directed, animated and edited by cici artist with the screenplay by Bill Buschel. Also on the site is cici's Daily Flips, a short video record of 77 consecutive days created using a Flip Video camera.

Cici’s current show is “Musician Series – Notation 1” which consists of eleven works on canvas. The exhibit is located at Allegro Pianos, 205 West 58th Street, New York, New York. Call (800) 968-9250 for details.

The Musicians Series
works on canvas
by
cici artist