Statement
My love of color and the joy I feel in working with oil paint keep me devoted to oils as my main medium. However, I make brief forays into assemblage to house objects I’d like to see parked in a curated collection. My favorite subjects are landscapes, animals, marine life, and oceanscapes. When I get frustrated with land, I’ll attack a still life. Most of the time I come right back to my first love, which is depicting place. I am in the process of “unlearning” all I have learned, focusing for now on the discipline of showing up with a paintbrush and my tubes of paint. My recent work recalls my time in the UCLA art department, as it leans more abstract, layered, and “drippy,” looking more like watercolor than thickly painted oils.
Bio
Thanks to a mother who was an artist and an art educator, Christine Echeverri grew up steeped in the arts, exploring a variety of art media; she entered UCLA as an undergraduate art major. Soon after college, she began her own floral design business in Pasadena, which she operated for a number of years. She enjoyed shaping natural plant materials and working with color to create arrangements for special events. She credits the late California plein air painter, Margot Lennartz, with teaching her essential oil techniques that are a big part of how she paints today.
As an entrepreneur, she loves to create opportunities to collaborate and show work; while in Los Angeles, she produced several interdisciplinary contemplative arts-oriented events, as well as a solo show with her paintings and mixed media work in 2018. She currently teaches and directs an online class program for homeschool students with Carrier Shell Curriculum, a company she founded when she began authoring and publishing educational materials almost a decade ago. She is an active volunteer at the Puget Sound Estuarium, where she loves to introduce families to the wonder and variety of marine species living in the waters surrounding Olympia.