Leanne M Christie

Urban Oil painter Leanne M Christie has a reputation for complex paintings that are built with powerful brushwork and the sophisticated manipulation of white. She paints full time in her Vancouver studio and her daily 50km cycling commute from her home in Coquitlam, gives Christie an intimate kinship with the flow of the urban streets. The unrehearsed transitory moments provide the abundant source of her paintings.

Born and raised in South Africa, Christie moved to the Canadian West Coast in the late 2000’s after a period of 10 years abroad that had originated as a 2 week holiday after the completion of her Bachelor of Fine Art from Rhodes University.

Christie’s paintings are at first understood by the viewer whose participation is then demanded by her relentless harnessing of the communicative properties unique to oil painting. The distilled open relationship between the painter and the slow drying oil painting is the unique characteristic of the medium that Christie burrows into in order to activate the complexity that is developed through the alchemy of passive and active time. Active time that is dependant on the relationships that the viewer is able to develop with the work.

Christie’s concept of complexity through the inclusion of active and passive time as a catalytic element in the paintings finds the perfect partner in her urban subjects which are naturally founded on the complex relationships of the urban citizen and urban politics.

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