Christina Weaver grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. She studied painting and drawing at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and earned a Master of Fine Arts in Painting from Indiana University Bloomington. She has received the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant for artists who work representationally and was recently a resident artist at Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, Ohio. She has taught art in a variety of settings and currently teaches drawing and painting at the University of North Carolina Asheville. Her paintings are exhibited nationwide, collected worldwide, and her work has been featured in The Artist’s Magazine, Southwest Art, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Christina lives near Waynesville, North Carolina, in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Show Title: "In Season"
My paintings are celebrations of living subjects, mostly plants, filtered through the language of color, shape, and light. As an observational painter, capturing what I see is essential. But working from life en plein air, among elements that are bound to change, has transformed my definition of success. Visual truth has moved away from photographic accuracy towards the conveyance of an unfolding event.
Flowers and foliage, subject to the whims of nature, continually shift under the influence of light and weather. If we take a minute to look, they bloom, grow, and fade before our eyes. Sometimes I manage to catch and record my findings with clarity; sometimes a moment is missed or remains in the picture as a vestige.
When in tune with the fluidity of nature, I am free to revel in the qualities of my materials — transparent and opaque application, hard and soft edges, color tensions and harmonies. Marks and fragments accumulate over the course of an hour, a week, or a month, interweaving to form a single image. Painting problems find unexpected solutions — the sun emerges from behind a cloud and casts a needed shadow, or a bug bends a blade of grass to an angle that pleases the eye. This outdoor studio, extending no farther than my backyard, is ripe for serendipity.
If allowed to evolve over time, a painting can reveal shifting light on a leaf, the opening of a flower, or the fading of a season. A balance is struck between order and chaos, and the work emerges as a layered document of both subject and experience.
