Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Christina McPhee. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Christina, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

In the best of times a meaningful project is one in which the hands-on material process of intuitive searching and paying attention leads to new ideas, which can be communicated beyond me into common grounds, culturally and spiritually. One is a recent and ongoing project, working title Feast Day: Saints and Supernaturals. The story begins in the autumn of 2023. In common with everyone, struggling to deal with the horrific images of human suffering coming across my social media feeds, I was overwhelmed with anxiety and sorrow. I had a chance to revisit a painting by the Renaissance Venetian painter, Giovanni Bellini, which depicts Saint Francis greeting the dawn, his arms outstretched, towards a landscape filled with natural wonder and a distant city. I spent a long time in the presence of the painting. A few months later, in the studio, I was getting ready for a solo painting show. On one of the canvasses, a large square about five feet on each side, I had collaged torn and crushed drawings in ink on Japanese paper onto the canvas, alongside brush marks in oil. Stepping back I noticed that there was a shadowy suggestion of a figure. It suddenly occurred to me that the pose of the figure was like that of Saint Francis in the Bellini painting. Only now this shadowy form was facing me, not a landscape. I felt confronted and inspired. Almost comically I noticed, too, that the crushed paper collages looked like wounds, but wounds flying around unattached to a body. Saint Francis is known for his marked hands or stigmata, Suddenly, here is a story, a mini-drama happening in the painting. I left the painting very delicate and ethereal, and called it ‘Stigmata in Search of Saint Francis.’ Once this painting manifested itself I thought, well, the saints might want to be marching in– in a timely way, in the face of so much suffering and upheaval. On the level of pop culture, ‘saints’ could just as well include animation characters like Mothra (Godzilla’s worst enemy), and goddesses like Athena (and my mental ear worm was the Athena song on the dance album Hercules and Love Affair). This project bears witness, I suppose, to how sometimes the meanings of works of art come through the artist, like a transmission. Art bears witness through forms of feeling.

Christina, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am a painter and media artist. I work in drawing using many kinds of inks, including gel pens, calligraphy and permanent inks, often on large scale handmade Japanese washi (paper) as well as recycled industrial papers, most recently in black. My painting practice spans multiple levels of medium including oil, oil stick, digital and analog collage, ink, and dye on canvas. My work in painting is influenced by photographic fragments and cinematic montage, so the sense of time in painting is an important element. I bring drawing, painting and photographic elements into animations for landscape and performance based films. I draw on a lifelong fascination with synaesthesia between sound, music, and color. For me, drawings and paintings are like concrete scores. My practice ranges, in its public forms, from exhibitions in non-profit and commercial gallery art spaces and museums, to performances in theaters, choreography studios, and screenings. I’m grateful to so many people who’ve helped me sustain a practice that matches and exceeds the dreams of my childhood. I grew up on the Great Plains, imagining layers of time in the vast skies. Thematically, I’m obsessed with apparitions, revenants, traces of story and history, dramas of erasure, and regeneration. A sense of place, where animal and human sentience reaches more-than-human worlds, comes into realization in the studio practice as well as in collaboration with sound artists, poets, composers, and scientists. I also write on art. Born in Los Angeles, I live and work between LA and the central coast of California.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

All roads lead through the drawn line, which seems to regenerate continuously in my practice across media and decades. Drawing is a portal through which my practice passes its material effects, and also carries the baggage of stories. To nurture resilience I often try to draw while listening carefully to others. Music, song, story-telling, listening to conversations— drawing helps listening: it keeps the kinetic energy of the sound flowing through the hands and onto paper. It’s almost like the drawn line is the material effect of the listening process. I’m inspired by the life and work of composer Pauline Oliveros, who invented a whole practice of ‘deep listening.’ I’ve loved working with musicians in live concerts, as in “Carbon Song Cycle,” with Pamela Z (pictured here at the Exploratorium, San Francisco) in which I create a live score for 5 musicians by listening to them— so there’s a feedback loop, almost simultaneously, between us; they watch me draw by the light of my mobile phone on a giant screen layered in my prerecorded video, and as they watch, they create music improvisations from what they see instantly, and as I listen to them, I’m drawing. Like a model of how life on Earth participates in and creates the carbon cycle through land, ocean, and atmosphere…

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

The best part, besides the incredible high of making something that goes beyond anything I could anticipate in advance, is the part about community. About encounters and mutual shared experimentation and collaboration with
artists, musicians, scientists, poets… One moment of friendship and connection opens to another. When I have an intuition that I might have common ground with another person, I try to be sensitively aware to whether there could be a future connection; sometimes it’s just a feeling that we might be able to collaborate as artists together on a project– in a way I rely on intuition and prescience, or, a sense of the future, of making. a future together. In the long view, it seems to me that almost everything good that has happened in my career comes from this intuition in action, there’s something genuine, or ‘meant to be’– we will be creating a good way together. Sometimes a wonderful surprise occurs just because of staying open to possibility. For example, the sculpture I’m wearing in the lead photograph is by the multimedia artist Pepe López Reus. I met Pepe recently when my friends at Kino Saito Art Center in upstate New York invited me to visit and participate in a performance film that the artist would be carrying out. I was already in New York City for a few days so I could come (I’m usually working in California). Improvising with movement for video in Pepe’s ‘poncho’ reminded me of how much I love street theatre and even the Italian tradition of commedia dell arte. Back in the studio, I started working in ink and watercolor, finding those stock characters in layered passages of line and color. Now I will be participating in a new show opening July 2 2025 at a gallery called LichtundFire, in New York’s Lower East Side: the show is curated in homage to Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’ I will be showing a watercolor and ink on paper, ‘Scaramouche Scaramouche will you do the Fandango’. The title is a line from Freddy Mercury’s lyric (see image of a drawing in reds on white).

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.christina-mcphee.com
• Instagram: @xtinamcphee
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/naxsmash/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christina-mcphee-8a0aa76/
• Other: https://vimeo.com/christinamcphee

Image Credits

Chika Kobari, Pepe Lopez Reus, Terry Hargrave, Christina McPhee