LINDA CHRISTENSEN

Santa Cruz artist Linda Christensen creates immersive, color saturated paintings of women working at a task, relaxing at the beach. or just musing on their own. A longtime dancer, she has an intuitive grasp of embodied language, and the emotional states revealed by the tilt of a head or crook of an arm. She works in loose, lavered passages of thick paint, adding and subtracting color to build up form as she goes. This expressive style of painting reflects her interest in the mid-century Bay Area Figurative movement, especially artists David Park and Richard Diebenkorn. She also acknowledges the influence of Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot and photographer Dorothea Lange, who made the daily lives of women subiects of their art.