Playing in 2 D

Mar 6

I’ve been working on paper with India ink. I’m playing with the properties of the ink, the ability to make lines both fine and thick, wash from the lightest grey to nearly solid black. I am using regular brushes and sticks and threads and all manner of found and made tools. I am sprinkling tea leaves, spraying water, adding dry pigment and applying gilding. I even attached some dried hydrangea petals!

When I start to do these pieces I quiet my judging mind, and become aware of the present moment. I make myself available to catch, to receive. to be open to appreciate how good it is to be here in the nowness of the moment, to know and feel the abundance and beauty in every single moment.

Below I have created a gallery of random selected pieces made since 2/14/24.

Enjoy!

RitaMarie Cimini

RM Cimini is a painter based in Delaware, working in oil glazing over acrylic on canvas. Trained as a formalist, she now turns that structural discipline toward a different aim: paintings that invite viewers into a moment of interior stillness. Most works begin with an underpainting, built up through repeated layering, scraping, and re-layering, sometimes with raw pigment worked into the surface for texture. That process of addition and subtraction stays visible in the finished painting, inviting the eye to travel through the paint and find forms that are partly hidden.

Drawn to water and celestial skies, Cimini uses light as a visual metaphor for the fragility of form and our shared transitory state of being. A meditation practice spanning more than four decades informs both the paintings and how she hopes they're experienced. She also facilitates meditation groups and writes about art and spirituality for Huffington Post, Sivana Spirit, and her website, rmcimini.com.

Cimini's work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the McNichol Gallery at Neumann University in Aston, PA, and at baby grand Gallery at the Grand Opera House in Wilmington, DE, and in group exhibitions at The Delaware Contemporary, the Delaware Art Museum, the Belskie Museum in Closter, NJ, and the Monmouth Museum in Lincroft, NJ. She served on the board of Studio Montclair, a nonprofit visual arts organization, from 2013 to 2022, including as President from 2016 to 2019. She holds an MFA in painting and sculpture from Bennington College and is an inducted member of the National Association of Women Artists. Her work is held in private collections in the United States and abroad, and in the public collections of Atlantic Health System, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and the MC Hotel.

https://www.rmcimini.com

Playing in 2 D

Art-making, an emotional voyage

Where the paintings came from