Christine Walker

Christine Walker is a visual artist and writer. She works in oils and also in mixed media and monotype on paper, investigating a visual vocabulary inspired by nature and movement, while seeking resonance with an inner landscape. Her interdisciplinary career as an artist, author, and creative consultant encompasses design, strategic visual facilitation, and teaching. She exhibits her paintings in galleries, museums, and corporate and private collections.

My painting has long been informed by the interplay of humans within their environments. Early in my career, this sensibility was nourished by a love of dance and collaboration as a stage designer with contemporary choreographers. I have painted water, woods, streets, gardens, and landscapes that include figures at work and play, or the human presence may only be implied through associations with the elements that appear in the painting. The painted image speaks a language that spoken or written words cannot express, but in my heart and mind there is always a narrative threading through and tying my engagement with the visual. Discovering what is there leads to expansive moments of clarity and joy. It is for these moments that I paint.

For the past several years, I've been working on a series I call “Terrains," which begin with quick sketches of the landscape below while looking out from my airplane window seat. I notice how the earth's large gestures embrace small clusters of human activity, how arabesques of roads follow and intersect with meandering rivers, how patterned fields juxtapose with one another and with built structures, how the serenity of bays and lakes contrasts with the cacophony of cities and tangle of freeways. In the studio, I make small watercolors, developing compositions based on the sketches, and then move to oil paintings, relying on visual memory of place seen from above, along with emotion and invention. Painting is about what we notice and choose to show to others. When I paint I think about the big issues of climate and environmental degradation, as well as human ingenuity, persistence of community, resilience and hope. What appears on the canvas is the painter's journey, giving the viewer a place to go.

The power of art is to make us see. We crave meaning, look for it, and shape it to our heart work. Once, while on a plane descending to land on a runway surrounded by fields, I overheard a man in the seat behind me say to his young daughter, “Look, you can see the airport." She said, “Yes, Daddy. And I can see the grass too!" 

As Teilhard de Chardin said, “We are not human beings on a spiritual journey, we are spiritual beings on a human journey." 

CHRONOLOGY

Christine Walker was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1948, and was raised in Shawnee Mission, Kansas. She was encouraged in the arts as a child and in her early 20s began exhibiting her paintings and prints in galleries, museums, and corporate and private collections. She came to San Francisco in 1977, where she ran a graphic design business and made paintings of people moving in environments—pedestrians, swimmers—and of images from islands and wild landscapes. In 1990 she began growing a small urban garden as subject matter for her art, and in 1994 she moved with her family to Sonoma County, where a perennial garden and surrounding landscape profoundly influenced her painting. She continues to be inspired by nature—earth, sky, and water—in her current series of paintings informed by aerial landscapes.

Her book, “A Painter's Garden: Cultivating the Creative Life" (Warner, 1997) was inspired by her journal sketchbooks, which document her inquiries into creative process, and by gardening, which provides a metaphoric framework for the essays. Illustrated with her paintings and drawings, the book was reviewed as “Intelligent, evocative, elegant, and articulate...the parallels between lessons in the garden, the studio, and life ring true..." (Eleanor Coppola, filmmaker, author) and “...you can almost run your fingers through the richness of experience, insight, and caring that makes art and beauty possible..." (Sonoma County Independent). Christine is also the illustrator and co-author of Wooleycat's Musical Theater, (Tortuga Press, 2003) a children's book with song CD.

Christine has an MFA in Writing and Literature in Fiction from Bennington College in Vermont, an MA in Creative Arts Interdisciplinary from San Francisco State University, and a BFA from the University of Kansas. She has been self-employed since 1977 as an artist, writer, creative consultant, designer, teacher, and strategic visual facilitator. She is married to composer and musician Dennis Hysom. They live in Sebastopol, California.