In 2014, artist Cynthia Daignault hopped in her Dodge Ram pickup and spent the next six months traveling the entire 15,000-mile perimeter of the continental United States, stopping every 25 miles or so to sketch and photograph the view. When the journey was complete, she spent another six months in her Los Angeles studio transforming her reference material into oil paintings. Her remarkable installation Light Atlas,now on view at UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art in Costa Mesa, California, fuses 360 of those canvases into a panoramic portrait of the American landscape.
Installation view: Cynthia Daignault: Light Atlas, 2025. UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, CA. Photo: Yubo Dong, ofstudioWorking in such a methodical manner is not new to Daignault. For past projects, she painted the sky every day for a year, an outdoor clock at every hour, and trees from the same point of view for 40 days and nights.
“I think my work is reflective of how my brain works,” says Daignault. “I think in series; I am more interested in long form storytelling. Some people are poets, focused on a single vision, and some are novelists or filmmakers, who are interested in letting a story unfold over time and in sequence. Inspired by 20th-century new media work, I always wanted to explore the possibilities of pushing painting more into a serial time-based space, to explore immersive and monumental painting to see where that took me and the medium, to really push the boundaries of what’s been done before with the medium, if possible.”
Installation view: Cynthia Daignault: Light Atlas, 2025 (detail). UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, CA. Photo: Yubo Dong, ofstudioBefore Daignault hit the road, she had a conceptual framework for Light Atlas that provided the structure for her process. She knew she wanted 360 canvases to reference a full circle, and when she divided the total mileage by that number it dictated stopping to capture a scene every 27 miles. Those parameters left Daignault with little choice when it came to her subject matter beyond what to keep in the frame or omit. “At that point, my painting brain took over, finding what I thought was the most compelling composition at the site. Maybe I liked a cow, or a barn, or light across a hillside. Sometimes there wasn’t a lot of choice, like if I was stopped in front of a field of grass.” The only time she remembers having a real choice was when she stopped at the appointed milepost and saw a person for the first time, sunbathing on a beach. “I had a real crisis about whether to frame him in the painting or frame him out. I had just gone 300 paintings without a single person, and I wondered should I include one now? I really labored over that choice, going back and forth, but as I was debating he got up to go, so in the end fate decided that the piece would have no people.”
Cynthia Daignault: Light Atlas (detail). Courtesy the artist.
Cynthia Daignault: Light Atlas (detail). Courtesy the artist.
Each individual canvas is a snapshot of a specific place, environment and moment in time, but for Daignault painting all of the separate scenes runs together, like the installation itself, a long line of images reminiscent of the scenery flying by as we speed down the highway. “There are moments on the trip I remember that happened…when I wasn’t working, but the painting process is a bit of a blur, kind of like driving itself,” she recalls. “A lot of artists talk about a flow state that you descend into when you’re working, where you’re not really thinking. You’re painting, but you’re not really aware of what you’re doing in your conscious mind. That’s the place I try to get to when I’m working, because that’s where the best painting happens, but it’s also a place that doesn’t record a lot of memories.”
Cynthia Daignault: Light Atlas (detail). Courtesy the artist.
Cynthia Daignault: Light Atlas (detail). Courtesy the artist.
That doesn’t mean Daignault didn’t have some big takeaways from the overall experience. It gave her a more intimate understanding of the country as a whole—where our food is grown, where we mine our minerals, graze our livestock, and each region’s industries, environment, weather, light, color, flora and fauna. “And the whole is something unto itself as well—a portrait of a trip or a country or a life,” she says. “This split between part and whole—synecdoche—is metaphoric for the country. State and federal or citizen and populace or, for a life, seconds and years and the moments in your life versus your life as a whole. And then feeling how it all fits together.” —
Cynthia Daignault: Light Atlas
Through February 8, 2026
UC Irvine Langson Orange Country Museum of Art
3333 Avenue of the Arts, Costa Mesa, CA 92626
(714) 780-2130, www.ocma.art
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