Meet Cynthia
About the Art and Artist:
Cynthia Garside is an abstract expressionist artist, surface pattern designer, and creative coach based in the Greater Toronto Area, Ontario.
Working primarily with acrylics and mixed media, she creates intuitive, emotionally driven paintings that explore the connection between feeling, memory, and self-discovery. After a successful 31-year career in the technology industry, Cynthia returned to her lifelong creative calling, embracing art as both a personal and transformative practice.
Through expressive layers of colour, texture, and mark-making, her work invites viewers to pause, reflect, and reconnect with their own inner landscape.
Her work is held in private and corporate collections across Canada.
Artist Statement:
My work is rooted in the belief that creativity is not something we learn—it is something we remember.
From an early age, I was drawn equally to art and mathematics. While those interests may seem like opposites, I have come to see them as complementary ways of understanding the world. Mathematics offers structure, rhythm, and relationships; art provides freedom, intuition, and emotional expression. Both continue to influence how I create.
After spending more than three decades in the technology industry, I found myself at a crossroads. Burnout and life transitions led me back to the canvas, where painting became a way to process emotions, explore ideas, and reconnect with a part of myself that had been waiting patiently for attention. What began as personal healing evolved into a deeper creative practice.
Working primarily with acrylics and mixed media, I paint intuitively and express myself through painting. Rather than painting what I see, I paint what I feel. I paint using acrylics as the fast drying time allows me to work quickly and immerse myself in the moment. I don’t like having to pause and watch paint dry. I use various mark making tools, mixed media and collage elements to add in graphic elements and to build up multiple layers of depth and texture. I love the smell, texture, the endless possibilities of colour and the transformative energy of paint. To me paint is the ultimate form of creative self expression. It is the alchemy of paint that fuels and inspires my work.
My process begins with journaling to help ground and center my thoughts and emotions before painting. I approach the canvas using gestural movements, sometimes in relation to music. I write words, scratch into the paint, scribble and often use black paint to start. Each mark, each movement informs the next. Pops of colour and collage elements are added to provide further depth, texture and interest. It is a process of intuitively adding and subtracting elements until the painting captures the feeling or observable energy that I was trying to convey.
My work is shaped by three recurring themes relating to emotional energy, the human condition and belonging.
I believe that everything is energy. My art is my way to process that internal and observable energy. The world to me is best viewed in the abstract, as an explosive expression of movement, colour, line, texture and form.
I have always been fascinated by what makes people tick, therefore my art serves as a metaphor for my observations of people; we all have darkness and light within and I am drawn to exploring and expressing that creatively.
I believe everyone deserves to see themselves clearly, even when the world makes them feel small. My work is a mirror. It’s a conversation. It’s a reminder that you’re not alone in your struggle and that your existence has meaning.
When you stand in front of my paintings, I hope you see yourself reflected back. Not in literal form, but in the raw humanity that says you are here. You matter. You are seen.
The black dots in my paintings reflect just that…the dot on a map that declares ‘you are here’ grounding, recentering and pointing you in the right direction.