I keep staring at the flyer and the outfit is what finally makes the whole thing feel off.
Cathy Roberts is in the center, late sixties, smiling, black top pulled off one shoulder with that white drape hanging like a soft-focus costume. It is the kind of styling that reads, on a page for a 6 p.m. watch party at the senior center, as an attempt to look available. Not available for conversation about mosaics. Available in the older, more calculated sense—the slight suggestion of skin, the necklace, the lighting that keeps the face and the bare shoulder in the same frame. The text says the event is to celebrate Cynthia Fisher. Cynthia is nowhere in the picture. Her contact information is nowhere on the page. The only email and phone number belong to Cathy at Cohn & Company.
That is the move that turns the portrait from ordinary headshot into something else. A community flyer for an artist’s television segment does not need the host posed like she is selling the idea that buying a house from her might come with a little extra attention. The off-shoulder cut does that work anyway. It sits there against the mosaic background and pulls the eye toward the realtor instead of the work. The senior center address is printed underneath like an afterthought. The ADTV logo is present. The practical path to the mosaic artist is missing. What you get is a page whose visual priority is the host looking a certain way, with her real-estate contact information waiting at the bottom.
At the same time I have to say this: Cynthia already has enough work around town. She has dominated the village scape. It started with the mosaics for the surrounding towns—ten of them, I think—each one labeled with a different place name. Visitors walk through Shelburne Falls, see “Conway,” and get confused about where they actually are. Then they move on and hit Charlemont, and so on. There are a few that look like private commissions but sit in public space on the further buildings. In the middle of Shelburne Falls there is a poorly executed set on that gigantic factory campus where three of them are jammed next to each other, mounted on pressure-treated 4x4s. And then there is the fish on the observation deck on the Buckland side of the river. It looks out of place. It does not fit. The back of it is literally plywood that she spray-painted with haphazard fish details. The front of a public piece matters, but so does the back. That one is the ugliest piece of public art I have seen.
I also collaborated with her on the Buckland Library mosaic. They came to me and wanted the sign itself—the metal stanchions and the surround—and I made an open-book cutout in metal for it. It took considerable time. I do not see it credited on her community mosaics page or her news page. The Buckland piece is listed, the library is mentioned, the 2015 dedication of the two-sided mosaic sign is noted, and there is a photo of her standing next to the finished sign. The metalwork is in the frame. My name is not. The library’s own site crops the metal out of the image so only the mosaic shows, and it does not mention me either.
I can list her contact. I can acknowledge that some of the work is good. I can also say I do not see any need for more of it in the village, and that the collaborations do not always show up where the public looks. The flyer treats her as the occasion for a real-estate host’s portrait and phone number. The town already has her mosaics everywhere, some of them executed in ways that do not hold up when you walk around them. Both things can be true at once. The page that claims to celebrate her does not give anyone a way to reach her. I can. I just do not think the village needs another round of the same.
I am willing to put Cynthia’s information on my own site so anyone who actually wants to reach the artist can do it. Her site is bigbangmosaics.com. Her email is cindy@bigbangmosaics.com.