ABOUT CHRISTINE LOWE

About Christine Lowe

“I am trying to make paintings that look not like a child painted them, but like a child imagined them.”

Born in Perth Ontario and raised in nearby Almonte, Lowe studied Graphic Design at Algonquin College, and has done a variety of jobs over the years including custom framing and graphic darkroom work for a newspaper.

Born in 1969, her childhood was steeped in the Warhol, Yellow Submarine, and Peter Max-inspired magazine illustrations, TV commercials and cartoons that were ubiquitous in North American pop culture during the 70s.

Later, she was influenced by Lichtenstein, Dali, Warhol, O’Keefe, and art nouveau. Comic books, Mœbius, Patrick Nagel, 70s anime, graphic novels, and more recent animated movies and shows like Scanner Darkly, Archer, and Black Dynamite have been a big influence on her work.

Living with random spontaneous epileptic seizures since birth, she spends most of her time at home in Cape Breton with her husband, dog, and iPad. Although her work is not really about epilepsy, the fear of sudden death is what drives her, daily, to keep working. The work itself is informed by the disjointed, tenuous, and fragmentary relationship that she has with reality.

“I suppose ‘eclectic’ is my oeuvre…”

She has, of late, developed a new aesthetic vocabulary and has been producing a lot of work since 2018. Combining influences from the above-mentioned painters and illustrators with a sort of birthday cake/stained glass feeling, she explores nostalgia, memory, and experience through the prism of epilepsy.

Intended to produce works that depict a quasi-reality that stimulates, in the viewer, an indistinct sense of whimsy and nostalgia, she uses expansive areas of flat colour to create a vague kind of abstraction, but the heavy outliner allows the image depicted to impose itself onto the canvas.

By working with materials usually associated with crafts - like the cerne relief outliner, metal leaf, glitter and metallic paints - it is also her intention to elevate these humble materials to a higher level. Her works are paintings, but also art ‘objects’.