Christine Di Staola: Abstract Prints

I love the flatness of the picture plane. I put everything up front: horizonless compositions, eloquent materiality and highly saturated colors. I rely heavily on the power and magnetism of color which I use to make stark contrasts - dark vs light, warm vs cool, contour vs field – and produce a riotous harmony. I always work from reality, whether you see it, or you don’t.

Inspiration is like strangers meeting on a train. The fleeting landscape, conversations between patterned fabric shapes and wrapped sandwiches, churning minds in static bodies. Everything in transit, yet all in one place. When I work, my mind randomly sifts through my memory’s collection of sights, sounds and tactile sensations while my hands congregate color, texture and gesture on the canvas. At times my mind comes up with an idea and waits for the right image to present itself; other times it’s the image that has been there all along, and the rest that has to catch up. Whether that image appears as figuration or abstraction, there is the same push and pull between explicit action and implicit thoughts as there is between one color and another. There is an overlapping boundary between one story and the next as there is between the figure and the ground. The interconnectedness of my process is like being on a train, things enter and exit all the time. 

There is excitement in that connection. I still tend to process experiences with a bilingual mind, I’m used to things coming at me simultaneously in clarity and confusion, close up and all at once. I see a natural coupling and uncoupling of the visual and the conceptual, the physical and the mental, the logical and the instinctive. I look for a thread to pull that will either anchor things or unravel them. Or do both." 

Christine Di Staola received her BFA from Miami University (Ohio) and lived and worked in Italy until 2016 when she returned to the United States to obtain her MFA in painting and printmaking from the University of Miami (Florida). She has exhibited extensively and won several awards in Florida. Her paintings and prints have been selected for numerous national juried exhibitions in galleries across the United States including the Zhou B Center in Chicago, the Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati and the Ellington-White Contemporary Gallery in Fayetteville, North Carolina where she received first place in the Immersed in Abstraction juried exhibit. She participated in the Gongju Invitational Art Exhibition at the Limlip Art Museum in Gongju, South Korea and her work is collected privately in the United States and around the world. Her paintings and prints have appeared in online galleries as well as in video and print publications, including Studio Visit Magazine Winter 2018 and Summer 2019. She currently resides in Miami, Florida.