Cynthia Scontriano Schildhauer grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has resided in and worked in Boston, MA and the in the desert of Southern California. She has studied at the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, receiving an MA in Painting from CSU Chico.  Her work has been exhibited on the East Coast and throughout California, and can be seen in over 100 private and corporate collections.

As a child, I lived in a steep river valley at the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. My early years of living on the river with rocks and trees left a lasting impression on me. These two natural forms are dominant elements in my work and are used to draw attention to the interconnectedness between humans and nature. Strength, adaptability, fragility, balance, the cycle of life into decay and mystery are manifest within nature, and are characteristics I express in my work.

David Hockney once observed that it is very good advice to believe only what an artist does, not what he says about his work. However, I feel I owe the viewer a few words about how I work, and why I paint what I paint.

As with many other artists, my inspiration comes from the ordinary things which make up a large part of the fabric of our lives, such as eating breakfast or riding on a crowded bus, I prefer them as subjects because our busy lives often blind us to them, and also because they are so open to personal interpretation.

My love of creating surfaced at an early age.

I began painting as a child, using those hard pans of watercolors that come in the plastic boxes. I continued to paint all through my school years with these simple tools. When I was twenty-two I learned how to stretch watercolor paper and bought some quality tube paints and brushes. Oh, what a difference good materials made! I went wild over all the available colors in watercolor tubes. I painted on my own for years and then in 1989 went back to school to obtain my Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the California State University Chico.