Cyndi Schick grew up just outside of New York in Montclair, NJ. She has been interested in art for as long as she can remember. Cyndi was influenced by the endless architecture, art and excitement of the city. She began studying art seriously while still in high school, starting off with oil painting and watercolors. She joined the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and obtained a B.S. degree in Economics, with a minor in Studio Art. Cyndi studied oil painting and art history in Paris for three years under two professors: Chris Boïcos, an art historian from the Sorbonne in Paris, and Nina, an artist with an MFA from The National Academy of Fine Arts of Bulgaria.
Cyndi’s style combines her love of both oil painting and photography. All her fine art pieces are actual black-and-white photographs that have been hand painted in limited edition series. She uses pastels, oil paint, and or color pencil depending on the paper used. None of her pieces are exactly the same since she hand paints each of them individually. Cyndi relies on natural or minimal lighting and avoids elaborate set ups to produce a candid style of photography. Her art is influenced by both Modern and Impressionism, for its energy and due to its optical truth. The painters that she admires most are Gustave Caillebotte, Edward Hopper, and Nicholas de Stael, while her favorite photographers are Henri Cartier-Bresson, Fred Stein, and Willy Ronis. Each of her oil paintings is an original, painted on cotton or linen canvas and signed by her.
