Serpentine Gold

Named for the serpentine rock beneath my feet, and the winding path of return, this work follows the shape of transformation—layered, imperfect, alive.

This show marks a return—to the neighborhood where my painting practice began 25 years ago, and to the elemental forces that continue to shape it. Painted outdoors where I now live, on serpentine rock beneath native oak trees in Marin, these works hold the presence of place, memory, and time.

Working with rainwater, gold, and gravity, I collaborate with the environment to create layered compositions. Circular patterns echo Coast Miwok petroglyphs etched into stone, as well as the cycles of healing. My paintings explore forces beyond our control in the natural landscape—wind, water, fog—and how they mirror what moves within us: breath, emotion, the body’s own tides.

Iridescent pigments evoke sea mist and evaporating fog—transient, luminous, alive. Through texture and movement, oak leaves, pine needles, and weather become part of the work itself. This is a practice of return, of listening, and of transformation.

Christa’s paintings explore the forces out of our control in the vast natural landscape and how they are tied to the air we breathe and the cells in our bodies. She paints outside on the ground overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Northern California and Kauai. Her kinesthetic response to the confrontation between the cliffs and the crashing waves is a meditation on the relationship between land and sea. 

She paints spontaneous cycles, both generative and destructive. She tracks details from a plastic bag howling in the wind by the ocean to a decomposing whale at Point Reyes. Beauty can be found in the toxicity of the environment.  Elements of water, soil, and air enter bodies resulting in health or harm: ocean mist, water, particulate pollution, and microbes impact the shape and development of cells. 

For the past decade, she’s focused on acrylic paint—plastic on canvas—to share an emotional response to the natural environment. Being outside, allowing her body to move with the wind and water, she searches to find something tangible in the chaos to recover the lost sense of meaning.

The land is painted with metallic copper pigments connecting the iron in the soil to the blood cells in the body. The iridescent pigments represent the spray of the sea against the shore connecting it to oxygenating breath in the lungs.  Through texture, layering and movement of paint, the material in the environment is brought into the work itself.  Ocean water, rain, sand, grass, and dirt pigment are included with the paint. She further explores layers, painting cellular forms in her studio.  She uses gold, charcoal, and plastics as representational of the beauty and trauma of our time.  

The past few years have been framed by environmental disruption—from floods, fires and smoke to toxic air and virus—navigating a new way to move through the world.  During shelter in place, she printed reflections on the computer screen and windows, layering images to navigate the uncertainty of being separated from natural environments.  The past and future virtual vision obscures a present need to connect.