As an artist, Christine finds joy in walking the local beaches at sunset with her husband and two American Eskimo puppies. Of late, she has delighted in breaking from traditional processes – like the familiar gestural abstractions of a Pollack or de Kooning – by adding layers of textured sand to her oil-on-wood panel and canvas seascapes to convey the wonder and beauty in the ever-changing Maine seashore after tidal highs and lows.
“Sunset,” says Christine, “is like the day exhaling its last breathe in a shimmering bloom of kaleidoscopic colors dancing on the water and sandy shore. It’s like having an encounter with the divine – or taking a walk on some foreign planet.” Driven to express this visual wonder, Christine first primes the canvas with layers of bright hues across the horizontal plane and then repeating mirror images in the water. Once the sunset colors are to her liking, she moves on to “playing in mud.” Molding sand into a textured paste, she then applies the mixture over the painted shoreline, leaving pockets of color in the forsaken tidal pools and skewed rivers running to the sea.
