Statement
I have always been drawn to the water’s edge. Here, the surface looking down reflects the distances on the horizon and the sky overhead. I have spent the last fifteen summers painting by the sea along the rocky coast of Maine. The variability of weather and tides combined with the pleasant temperature allows for long days of painting en plein air.
My landscape work investigates the effect of atmosphere on color, as it pertains to visibility and invisibility. Shadows, dust, fog, mist, and extreme sunlight provide aesthetic phenomena that both create and destroy form. Atmosphere creates a visual mystery not easily known or solved in painted form. For example, what color is fog?
The mixing of oil color becomes a way, in and of itself, to respond to visual experience. There is joy in the color relationships on the palette: the varieties of tone, saturation, and key. When I shift from the color mixing on the palette to the brush on the canvas, I approach painting with a poetic economy. The result is often abstracted with color blocks, gestural movement of light, and a pervasive sense of atmosphere.
Bio
Christine grew up in the Hudson River Valley city of Poughkeepsie, NY, one of four daughters of an immigrant father from Cuba and an American-born mother. She received an A.B. in English from Bryn Mawr College in 1991. In 1995, she earned a Certificate in Painting and Printmaking from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and was awarded a Louis S. Ware Memorial Scholarship for European Travel. Soon after, Christine was awarded her first major exhibition through the Fleisher Challenge Competition in Philadelphia. While Artist-in-Residence at the Fleisher Art Memorial from 1997 to 2002, she began teaching painting.
She moved to Brooklyn, NY in early 2003, to earn a master’s degree in fine arts from Brooklyn College. Christine began exhibiting with Frost and Reed Fine Art, with whom she had a solo exhibition in New York in 2006 and London in 2008. Between 2009 and 2019, Christine traveled to and painted in Havana, Cuba; County Cork, Ireland; Oldwick, New Jersey; Mount Desert Island, Maine; Tuscany, Italy; and Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. In March 2020, she returned to Puerto Rico and sheltered-in-place there during the Coronavirus pandemic for five months.
In 2023, Christine received a grant from the Schaevitz Foundation and attended a printmaking residency at Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Italy. She lives and work in Brooklyn, NY and paints in Maine in the summers.
I have always been drawn to the water’s edge. Here, the surface looking down reflects the distances on the horizon and the sky overhead. I have spent the last fifteen summers painting by the sea along the rocky coast of Maine. The variability of weather and tides combined with the pleasant temperature allows for long days of painting en plein air.
My landscape work investigates the effect of atmosphere on color, as it pertains to visibility and invisibility. Shadows, dust, fog, mist, and extreme sunlight provide aesthetic phenomena that both create and destroy form. Atmosphere creates a visual mystery not easily known or solved in painted form. For example, what color is fog?
The mixing of oil color becomes a way, in and of itself, to respond to visual experience. There is joy in the color relationships on the palette: the varieties of tone, saturation, and key. When I shift from the color mixing on the palette to the brush on the canvas, I approach painting with a poetic economy. The result is often abstracted with color blocks, gestural movement of light, and a pervasive sense of atmosphere.
Bio
Christine grew up in the Hudson River Valley city of Poughkeepsie, NY, one of four daughters of an immigrant father from Cuba and an American-born mother. She received an A.B. in English from Bryn Mawr College in 1991. In 1995, she earned a Certificate in Painting and Printmaking from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and was awarded a Louis S. Ware Memorial Scholarship for European Travel. Soon after, Christine was awarded her first major exhibition through the Fleisher Challenge Competition in Philadelphia. While Artist-in-Residence at the Fleisher Art Memorial from 1997 to 2002, she began teaching painting.
She moved to Brooklyn, NY in early 2003, to earn a master’s degree in fine arts from Brooklyn College. Christine began exhibiting with Frost and Reed Fine Art, with whom she had a solo exhibition in New York in 2006 and London in 2008. Between 2009 and 2019, Christine traveled to and painted in Havana, Cuba; County Cork, Ireland; Oldwick, New Jersey; Mount Desert Island, Maine; Tuscany, Italy; and Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. In March 2020, she returned to Puerto Rico and sheltered-in-place there during the Coronavirus pandemic for five months.
In 2023, Christine received a grant from the Schaevitz Foundation and attended a printmaking residency at Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Italy. She lives and work in Brooklyn, NY and paints in Maine in the summers.