Accent your home with this brightly colored collection from Annie Selke and Cynthia Wick
By Jennifer Huberdeau
LENOX, Mass.
Cynthia Wick is not afraid to change the color of her living space.
It’s something she does on a regular basis. And she isn’t afraid of big, bold colors.
“My sister asked me, ‘How can you just decide to paint a wall turquoise?’” she said during a recent interview. “I’m always painting a wall a different color. If I’m avoiding the studio, I paint a wall in the house a different color.”
Vibrant, bold colors are Wick’s signature; her abstract paintings are collages of shapes, color and light. Each is a mosaic crafted with layers of acrylic and oil paint, and bold brushstrokes. She is hoping a new collaboration of home furnishings with The Annie Selke Companies will bring color, as well as her paintings, into homes across the country.
This spring, The Annie Selke Companies launched The Cynthia Wick Collection, which includes 10 pillows featuring Wick’s paintings and a collection of eight fine art prints. The pillows, priced at $70 and up, come in a variety of sizes and materials — some are printed digitally onto dense, smooth, cotton felts, while others are printed on linen-like performance fabrics woven with pet- and spill-proof yarns.
“Bringing what I love to customers has always been my mission and sharing Cynthia’s genius eye for color and exuberant painting style is a thrill and an honor,” Annie Selke, president and chief vision officer of The Annie Selke Companies, said in a prepared statement. “Her work hangs very happily in my house and her friendship lives very happily in my heart.”
Selke approached Wick about a collaboration after seeing her show of abstract landscapes and flowers, “Cynthia Wick: The Shape of Color,” at the Berkshire Botanical Garden in 2019.
“Annie saw the paintings and just flipped for them; as an artist alone in a studio, you never know how people are going to react to your work,” Wick said. “It was wonderful for me, because I trust her taste so implicitly. Annie is so dynamic and has a great eye for color. I never thought of translating existing paintings to textiles.”
The pillows, she said, are a “connected vision”: “I had a vision to make the paintings, and Annie had the vision to put my work on fabric. It’s wonderful to connect with another creative person.”
Wick hopes the pillows, inspired by the woods and landscapes around her home in Lenox, will motivate others to be brave and incorporate more color in their homes and lives.
“People tend to be really fearful of color,” she said. “What I love about this collection is that people — who haven’t thought a lot about color and have very neutral colors in their living spaces — are bringing color into their homes.
“I hope that this collection will inspire our inner artists to take a risk — paint a wall a color you adore from one of the pillows — and reinvent how we see our own living spaces.”
To order, visit annieselke.com/c/the-cynthia-wick-collection •
