Christen Yates
Crozet, Virginia
Christen Yates is an abstract landscape painter based in Central Virginia and Cape Ann, Massachusetts.
Message
Christen Yates renders the emotional experience of the landscape through the use of layered oil and earth paints creating compositions that border representation and abstraction. Raised on the North Shore of Boston, Christen attended the University of Virginia and later completed graduate studies in theology, art & sustainable development in Vancouver, BC. Since moving back to Central Virginia in 2014, she has exhibited both locally and in venues from Cape Ann, MA to the San Francisco Bay area. She's held artist residencies on Vancouver Island and in the highlands of Texas and her work has been acquired by the University of Virginia. Christen works out of her home studio on a small farm at the foot of the Blue Ridge mountains.
Statement
"My paintings seek not simply to observe, but to explore our relationship with the land as well as its flora and fauna, to connect my vulnerability and fragility with the created world’s. They emerge from a deep love for and care of the land. Focusing especially on the Blue Ridge Mountain area of central Virginia and the coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts, I use loose and suggestive strokes that imply an immediacy of experience within which I want the viewer to linger. Painting for me is a process of paying attention, of looking at the layers of meaning we ascribe to our placed-ness and hopefully evoking moments of re-humanizing connections."