Spotlighted artists were drawn to each other’s work

Las Cruces artists C.C. Cunningham and Noël Sandino first admired each other’s work during For the Love of Art Month last year and the 2019 the ArtForms Artists Association of New Mexico member show.

“I loved her work instantly,” Cunningham said. “She had a similar reaction to mine. We connected deeply as abstract artists and process painters. I love to play in the studio.”

Playing in the red clay of her native Oklahoma as a child, one of her first artistic creations was a sculpture of a horse’s head. After moving to Las Cruces, she found herself mixing Las Cruces-area red sand with acrylic paint to give a more authentic flavor to her artwork. “Here I am playing in the dirt again,” she said. “There’s something about the earth that is so appealing to me.”

Cunningham first came to northern New Mexico in 2000 to attend a journaling workshop. She met a couple from Las Cruces and knew she would live here one day. After living in Denver and Taos, she moved to Las Cruces in 2002. She moved back to Denver in 2010 before returning to Las Cruces in 2015.

Cunningham took up painting until age 50, when she took a watercolor class and painted petroglyphs near Deming. She fell in love with acrylics, but her first sale was a watercolor landscape. She’s participated in a number of art workshops, but never attended art school.

Sandino and her husband had lived in Sacramento for nearly 40 years before moving to Las Cruces in 2017. She said she soon realized, “This is an art community!”

Sandino started drawing cartoon characters at age 3 or 4, she said, took ceramics, textile and printmaking classes in grade school and high school and won an art scholarship in junior high. She began work as a decorative painter and muralist for commercial and residential interior designers professionally and “felt so blessed that I was able to make a living in an art field,” she said.

Sandino had an early interest in photography, discovered she had a good eye for composition and switched to painting. She also loves printmaking and teaches it in workshops and classes.

“I play a lot,” Cunningham said. “I love texture. I like to push paint. “It’s really a lot about the play. What if I do this?’”

Visit www.noelsandino.com and www.cccunningham.com.