Meet the Street Artist Spray Painting Faces and Forgotten Landscapes
The Creator's Project highlights Christina Angelina '08 (B.A., Art)
Christina Angelina '08 (B.A., Art) reveals her creative process in this Creator's Project feature, calling it "emotional, intuitive, and reflexive."
"For anyone visiting Los Angeles, Venice Beach is a two-and-a-half-mile pedestrian boardwalk stringing together a motley group of vendors, bodybuilders, psychics, medical marijuana advocates, and other offbeat characters. For Christina Angelina, however, the beachfront tourist attraction has always been home. The artist describes her spray painted creations as 'expressive, large-scale, figurative, site-specific, public work,' mostly populated with photorealistic portraits of faces reflecting a range of emotions such as pathos, fear, hope, and serenity.
With a studio still based in Venice, Angelina continues to draw inspiration from her hometown, as well as from other lesser-known, far-flung destinations far off the beaten path. A prolific street artist, Angelina created more than 80 murals last year alone, and since graduating UCLA with a BFA in Fine Art back in 2008, she's painted murals in Asia, South America, Europe, and all over the United States. Angelina is particularly attracted to locations with a unique spirit and strong creative energy like Venice, as well as more isolated locales like the Salton Sea.
Angelina's artworks have evolved from the smaller-scale wheatpastes she created as a teenager and young adult, into the large-scale spray-painted murals they are today. She describes her own painting style as 'physical and performative,' and the process is fairly straightforward and unencumbered, beginning with Angelina's onsite arrival where she creates her design, followed by relentless, nonstop painting until she's completely done. 'My work is emotional, intuitive, reflective, and I try to always consider the location, both aesthetically and energetically,' she says. 'I am mostly inspired by personal experience: people and places and artwork that I come in contact with.'"— The Creator's Project, June 17, 2016
Read the full article at The Creators Project website.