Meet Cynthia Egle-Grant

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Cynthia Egle-Grant. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Cynthia below.

Alright, so we’re so thrilled to have Cynthia with us today – welcome and maybe we can jump right into it with a question about one of your qualities that we most admire. How did you develop your work ethic? Where do you think you get it from?

My work ethic is energized from a few different sources. One is to continually view the art being made by others. It is inspiring to see how people create their views of the world, and change the world because of what they add to it, which calls me to attempt to do the same.
Some of my work ethic originated with a parent who started that process by sitting me in front of Monet’s water lilies at MOMA, admiring the scale of something so beautiful. Then including me when building puppets, creating furniture, so I learned how a project could develop in steps, and you didn’t need to be an expert, just a problem solver.
I also had a 12 year stint learning advanced Traditional Chinese Martial Arts. I started out terrible at it, not having any athletic abilities or natural talent. But I persisted. I chipped away at it everyday, a small skill at a time. I had nothing to lose, only could gain growth. Eventually, I won a grand championship around 2000, competing with fan, swords, spear, deerhook; I had reinvented myself. Through those years I actually learned how to learn, to ask questions, to accept being unsuccessful at something temporarily and embrace the work, not the end game. I delved into education and creativity, because I was interested in the motivation behind learning after that experience, and circled back around to drawing, painting and photography more recently.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

Photography has been an important passion over the last 5 years. It has been an opportunity to seek out unusual compositions, abstract elements, and moments of light and shadow that transform and are timeless. I tend to take architectural photos, often abstract, or somehow draped in rich shadow, light and texture.
Sometimes the images seem to have other purposes besides themselves, such as reference for my drawing and painting, or inspiration for poetry. I have compiled several photo-poems and actually self published a zine that I bring out when I show photos in galleries. When the image has a metaphoric quality that notice, usually the words just begin to form, and sometimes there is a poem that happens, that needs a symbolic image to focus it. Building connections is something satisfying that comes out of that work.
I have been working on a series of color pencil drawings on black paper about Industrial Skies. These have fictional colored and clouded skies that set the mood of various waterfront sites in Brooklyn and New Jersey. These use the built environment for its play of light, shadow and texture, and a general commentary on how we take air quality for granted. These are about to become larger, more surreal, symbolic in composition and placement. The current piece I am working on will have radial symmetry, and not be a realistic viewpoint.
Another series is about Mindset, mostly in pen and ink. These have humans with their heads turning into objects, such as spikes (showing how your inner child, when unmanaged can keep hurting you), flames (anger), pruned trees (change required to grow). Presently I am working on a figure that is encased in rock, with vines poking through the holes in these stones–showing how growth prevails even when we are frozen or stuck.
Painting, working on plexiglass, and montage are mediums I will be exploring further as the current projects are completed.
My work has been included in several group shows such as at Culture Lab, The Long Island City Artists gallery space, Atlantic Gallery, Art 150 (Pro arts JC) in Jersey City, the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists gallery space, and I had a solo show at the Milburn Public Library in 2024. I have really enjoyed being a member of LICA and ProArts JC, (both organizations are encouraging to artists at any stage in their career) and look forward to showing in new locations as well.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

Three important qualities or skills that have impacted my journey are staying curious, avoiding end gaming, and being true to your own voice (even if you are figuring out what that is). Staying curious helps me wonder “what could happen if? ” and try something new, even if it fails. You learn something more from that then to keep doing what you have done again and again. Don’t end game: it is the doing, the work, that is the play. A professor in my freshman year at Parsons School of Design taught us this lesson very simply: he told us to close our eyes and select 3 pastels randomly, and start drawing. After, he explained that was the best way to learn about color. Don’t rely on something you already know as your ending combination, create something new and find out what that could be. As much as consistency is important, art is also about learning, so you have to let go of what the finish piece will be sometimes, to create a better one. It doesn’t just need to be color, it can be any visual element, medium or mix of genre. As far as being true to your voice, I am still working on finding mine, but I focus on work that relates to what is important to me or helps me tune my understanding of my own experiences. I think it is about taking responsibility for your unique journey. Examples of others are inspiring, but you need to build your own meaning and timeline.

How would you spend the next decade if you somehow knew that it was your last?

The biggest challenge I am facing currently is one most of us face: the life/work balance. I am a full time educator for the NYCDOE, and that has many hidden hours of work, especially when the entire curriculum is new in every subject. There are many hidden hours of preparation at home besides the physical day at work as well. There are required development hours that we take in the summer and on weekends. Exercising is essential, and of course maintaining quality time with your loved ones. Luckily, my fiancee is creative as well and we enjoy photography together.
This is all challenge because to really develop a new idea in my artwork, I need to keep imagining, sketching, jotting, and trying out quick ideas. It is not usually a direct, efficient path. Sometimes I commit to just executing something, just to be working. The more I work overall, the more other art I see, the more ideas there are. I am learning to just trust this process.
Since the pandemic, I have been learning to prioritize, and take a few hours for myself each day, and honor my own time. The one thing I still can’t figure out is getting everything done and still accomplish getting enough sleep!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://linktr.ee/eglegrant
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/c.egle.photography & https://www.instagram.com/c.egle.art
• Other: Other websites:
  https://apanational.org/profile/m311896
  https://www.licartists.org/cynthia-egle-grant
  https://www.proartsjerseycity.org/artist/cynthia-egle/