Following his bursary trip to the USA Cina began painting minimal colour-field works. The M.H. series, which he began in 1969, features angled lines in paired colour combinations against a constant vertical notation. Cina has written of the analogies between this form of painting and music: “The intention is to imply a readable implication of growth of the notation, in and across pictorial space, to its climax.”
NationalityBritish
Lectured at art schools in Wolverhampton and Manchester, retiring in 2003 as Head of Chelsea College of Art and Design.
Cina is an abstract painter, born in 1943 in Scotland, of Polish-Russian parents. He studied at Glasgow School of Art and at The Central School of Arts and Crafts in London.
He has exhibited frequently, with numerous works in national and public collections in the UK and abroad. Cina also taught at several British art schools. He became the first Dean at Chelsea College of Art in 1989 and later Principal. He retired in 2003 and was made Emeritus Professor of Fine Art.
He served as Chair of the UK National Association for Fine Art Education and was a member of the founding committee of the European League of Institutes of the Arts (ELIA).
In 1966 Cina won a Peter Stuyvesant Foundation Travel Bursary and visited the USA. At the time he wrote:
Essentially, my paintings are concerned with planar structures inhabited by life-forms, with an intentionally urban quality. As the painting proceeds, the form of the structure establishes itself. Then the life forms evolve physically, either as a function of the structure, or, in some of the paintings, in spite of it. The structure creates a three-dimensional illusion, within terms of which exists the life form. I try to manipulate the elements in each painting until they ask me as much as they tell me. The common factor in all of these paintings is the extreme relationship in scale between the images and the structures. In some cases, by reducing the life forms to the minimum possible size in relation to the whole canvas, I can emphasise the imminent reality of the situation developed in the painting. I can only explain the geometrical basis of my work as the most satisfying and direct, and the least nostalgic means by which I can represent the structure in and around all of us.
