Christine Bush Roman (b. 1983) is a mixed media artist and educator based in Charleston, South Carolina. She earned her MFA from the University of Georgia in 2013 and strives to combine visual art with storytelling. Each painting is unique and contains its own narrative, but Christine’s style is unified by a distinctive approach to color and mark-making that combines anthropomorphized creatures, geometry, sprawling organic shapes, and pattern. When not in her studio, she stays busy homeschooling her children, baking, writing stories, and hanging out with animals. You can find her work at Miller Gallery in Charleston and at ChristineBushRoman.com.
Statement
Christine Bush Roman creates mixed media artwork exploring themes of neurodiversity, mental illness, parenthood, and human bonds with nature.
Her work reflects how one’s private, internal world intersects with the requirements and expectations of society. Becoming intimate with both autism and mental illness inspired the artist to create work that maps the differently wired brain. Through drawing, painting, and collage she explores elaborate inner worlds that may be masked or hidden from acceptable society. Other aspects of her work depict the ways in which motherhood rewires the brain, often causing depression and intrusive thoughts, and forces mothers to discard previous versions of themselves. Christine often delves into metaphors that connect human behavior to science and natural phenomena. Though whimsical and playful, her mixed-media paintings incorporate subtle imagery that is dark and disquieting. The work can be chaotic and abstract with elements of surrealism.
In the belief that artmaking is a balance between intuition and planning, her works combine instinctive mark-making and strategic thematic imagery. The pieces are created using traditional water-based drawing and painting materials and incorporate collaged papers and textiles, found objects, wax, and threads.
Powered by Artwork Archive