Cinnamon Studio
Cinnamon Studio, led by digital fine artist Joel Cinnamon, works collaboratively with architects, interior designers and space planners to envision and develop works that resolve design challenges and integrate harmoniously within planned spaces.
Lead artist Joel Cinnamon draws upon his skill as a graphic designer to construct site-specific objects that function as a focal point within the built environment and allow visitors opportunities to enrich their experience, to pause, and to reflect.
Cinnamon Studio works with clients to develop customized fabrication specific to individual project needs, adjusting color, scale, and material as determined through the design process. We frequently use colors and textures from the surrounding environment to create a sense of visual and spatial harmony throughout the project.
Joel Cinnamon
Joel Cinnamon is an artist and designer based in Southern California. His “painterly” digital compositions and large scale, abstract paintings find inspiration in the boundless skies, rolling foothills, majestic mountainous terrain, and the alternately serene and unruly bodies of water that make up our natural environment. Trained as a designer, Cinnamon has had a lifelong interest in the things that shape our experience of our world: architecture, light, pattern, shape, color and texture.
His paintings and digital works function alternately as allusive landscapes and pure abstraction. They readily switch between the atmospheric textures of organic forms and flattened geometric shapes, as the viewer’s perception is activated by subtly modulated visual clues. Cinnamon’s painting uses a cumulative layering of multiple grids, drawing freely from the geometry of modern architecture and coded elements like typography. Yet, within his compositions, geometric forms are positioned harmoniously in relation to the natural world. In his artistic practice, he seeks to represent the idea of a substance or thing, whether it is sky, ground, water or structure.
Cinnamon’s early aesthetic sensibilities were shaped by an informal mentorship with the architect Foster Rhodes Jackson, who studied under Frank Lloyd Wright as a Taliesin fellow before starting his own architectural practice in Southern California. As a young man, in the early 1970s Cinnamon began a coursework of drawing, design, composition, and basic building skills under Jackson’s guidance after he quite accidentally stumbled on Jackson’s home in the foothills above Claremont, California. Drawn to the residence for its formal rigor and beauty, he introduced himself to the man who opened the front door, who, Cinnamon soon discovered, was a Frank Lloyd Wright disciple.
Cinnamon’s painting has also been profoundly influenced by numerous modern painters. Noteworthy examples include the hard-edge abstraction of Karl Benjamin, and his use of rhythm and pattern; Helen Lundeberg, whose abstract painting references natural and architectural forms; and Richard Diebenkorn’s sublime Ocean Park series. Cinnamon’s work draws relationships among these various predecessors, alternating between the angular geometry of the Bauhaus, the hard-edge of Abstract Classicism, the veiled references to landscape in painterly abstraction, and the spatial complexity and soft repose of Mid-century modern architecture within the natural setting.