Tennessee Drawing on her color-rich Scandinavian heritage Cynthia Tollefsrud uses layers of glaze and paint to create the intense palette of her oil paintings. The subject matter is influenced by old photographs from the early 1900’s or her random musings. I begin my paintings by going through the photographs I have collected of people from the Victorian era. The portraits that come from my initial sketches are not of anyone in particular. As I paint, they take on a character all their own. They are often different from the original photograph. They become their own personalities.