Cindy Betzer – A well-rounded artist with many hats.
By Shelby Rose
She is a mom, a teacher, an animal lover, and an artist of many talents. Most of her time is spent making and teaching art. Betzer had started teaching as an elementary teacher, after her career as an art therapist, and then taught at a community college for sixteen years. She is currently a fine arts teacher for Valencia High School, where she teaches several different things from Ceramics to AP Studio Art. However, Betzer is not just a teacher but and artist who produces great pieces of art. As an artist Cindy has created many different types of artwork. She has done portraits, drawings, mixed media, paintings, photography, sculptures, and even poetry. She does not limit herself to a single medium; instead she has experimented in several types of media. She chooses the medium that goes best with her idea. Here are some of them:
Her artwork has evolved from a need to create more personal and meaningful pieces of art. She states, “My work is about connections that human beings make or don’t make through language, a gesture, a look, an expression, physical placement, cultural values, standards, emotions, and desires. Exploring how we communicate, accept, constrain, or reject these connections to form relationships is an evident theme throughout my work. My art centers around the human figure, as it is often the vehicle which relays the connection. Portraits are a predominant part of my work as I am fascinated and challenged by the changes age, experience, the environment, lighting, background, and just a slight muscle movement can make. My bodies of work are categorized similarly to how I live my life: processes, portraits, and conceptual pieces, or experiences, relationships and connections to others, and my inner, more consuming ideas and reflections on how moral and spiritual gauges are created within social, historical, and instinctual contexts.” I like how her works of art allows you to really connect with the pieces because you, yourself, recognize the expression or emotion that is coming from those pieces. Like the following pieces:
This next piece that I am about to show you is a piece that has made me see family portraits in a different way. It makes me wonder sometimes, as I look at someone’s family portrait, what is really going on behind the smiles that they have places upon their faces. Are they really happy or are they pretending so people on the outside cannot see what is going on inside them. In the piece “Sweep It Under the Rug,” you see four people posed for a family portrait. Cindy statement on this piece was to say that, “I found it paradoxical that young victims of sexual abuse often internalize guilt, rather than the predators who often have no remorse. I created this painting to explore social mores in traditional families that help perpetuate this pervasive sense of guilt. I interviewed different women, and played their statements in speakers underneath the rug. A step in overcoming victimization is in bringing perpetuating, yet subtle, social rules into clarity, and making conscious choices to accept or reject them.”
Here is my source:
http://www.portraitsandart.com/index.htm