Christine Dear
About Christine
Enthusiastic for art; I first tried traditional painting media and techniques at Oil Painting evening classes in my early 20’s. My favourite mediums are oils and pastels, as I like to work in a way more suited to manipulating the paint whilst it is still wet and have time to mix it on the canvas, or layer, smudge and soften like you can do with pastel.
My eye is naturally drawn to dark and vibrant areas of colour first. This fits well with the painting of oil; darks before lights on top, and the same goes for pastel. Whereas, watercolour need to leave those light, white areas first!
I work in mixed media as well, and enjoy exploring this way from time to time, adding textures, photos, print, seeing how different media react and explore a certain piece, for the viewer to look into it more.
Participating in the art group’s exhibitions, and attending various art workshops provided by the group or at other professional artist’s day/weekend courses. Through these I have explored different ways of working, developed my portraits and subjects of seascapes, landscapes and buildings.
I completed a BA Degree in Visual Communications (Graphics) 1998 at Southampton Institute, as a mature student, which gave me another valuable perspective of art and computer aided graphic design. However, afterward I still wanted to get back to the feeling of using that physical paintbrush!
Christine’s Gallery
All images © Christine Dear