Artist Bio

Inspired by whimsey and purity of the feminine form, Cindy Shaoul is known for her impressionistic and abstract style. She is best recognized for her series ‘Brides’, ‘Dripping Dots’ and ‘Hearts’, as well as her ‘Plein-Air’ street scenes of quintessential New York locations. Shaoul’s works can be found in thousands of private and corporate collections worldwide.

Since her first group show at Parsons School of Design in 2009, her work has been showcased internationally – from Italy to South Korea – and has been shown at various art fairs nationwide including Miami, Palm Beach, Dallas, and New York. Shaoul has had numerous solo exhibitions and has garnered the attention of notable celebrities such as Emma Roberts, Lily Collins, Ashley Park, Catherine Deneuve and John Malkovich.

Her love of painting began at the age of 18 when she was on Thanksgiving break from college. She painted a 9-foot colorful, abstract mural in her mother’s art studio and has been painting ever since. Shaoul later traveled to Israel and Hungary, and studied abroad for 2 years at the Budai Art Institute, which created lifelong experiences that still influence her art today.

Upon her return to New York City, she continued her artistic education at the Art Students League, working under the tutelage of Joseph Peller, Gregg Kreutz, and Tom Torak, where she learned techniques from the great masters of impressionism. But it wasn’t until she met renowned street artist LA II (Angel Oritz) - who previously worked with Keith Haring - that her work would become strongly influenced by street art and graffiti, propelling her reputation and pushing her into the city’s explosive urban art scene. Shaoul and LA II worked on a collection that was an homage to New York’s streets, where Ortiz and Haring began collaborating when they first met. This style of creation heavily impacted Shaoul’s technique, expanding her voice of discovery and moving her hand, not only from impressionism, but to boundary-free expressions in the abstract world.

While Shaoul honed her skill at the Art Students League, in her studio ‘Dripping Dots’ began a whole new aesthetic. This abstract style started as she would clean her brushes and leftover paint from her pallet onto a new canvas, not to waste the leftover oils, and soon, the motion of cleaning turned into dots on the canvas. She began connecting the dots with linseed oil and this is how the motif of ‘dripping’ was imprinted. For her, it would become a freeing moment while painting abstractly after going to school and learning the impressionist technique. The experience of discovery with color and emotion in the brushwork became very cathartic, and felt familiar from the times she would collaborate with LA II.

Shaoul would continue to explore new themes in her work. In 2018 she began the ‘Brides’ series which balances her love for impressionism with an abstract hand. While exploring the purity of the feminine form and the drama of French haute couture, she would create a dialogue between the figurative and the abstract. ‘Brides’ would give a new meaning of expression to her practice, and allowed nuances to emerge, demonstrating a whimsical expression of femininity and formality adding a stunning display of awe-inspiring grandeur to her work.

Later, in 2019 she began ‘Hearts’, an extension of her love for abstraction. In this collection, she would fuse a symbol into the abstract. First, she uses a pallet knife to slather thick and rich impasto oil paint directly onto the canvas. Creating worlds of color and rich textures, an exciting new technique that she would become fixated on, allowing the flow of oils to speak for themselves while loading up the pallet knife with several different colors at once. Uncovering how the different colors would interact with one another is what motivates Shaoul in this series. The wild and exotic forms of paint would then propel her to find the colors for the heart that layer on top with a thick brush over the mesmerizing colors. The hearts are then titled after fun themes like ‘candy’, ‘ice cream’, or more spiritual statements like ‘follow your heart’, and ‘free your heart’. The hearts would become a tribute to feelings of independence, childhood memories, and moments of love that inspire and excite.

Publications (Vanity Fair, LUXE, Authority, Aspire Design & Home, among others) have written about her work. Her studio is a vibrant and exciting place that is ever-changing with art pieces, tables lined with oil paint tubes, backgrounds for hearts, and new and worked-on canvases that line the walls. In 2011 she began her journey as a singer and songwriter creating music alongside painting. She lives and works in New York.