Christine Sullivan
Guest Artist - Nocturnes
About the Artist
Christine is an American landscape painter (b. 1957 Syracuse, NY). Her degree in physical geography and studio art from Plymouth State University (NH) supplied her with a unique and heightened appreciation for New England landforms. After college, Sullivan wanted to remain at her summer residence of Cape Cod and landed a job as a cartographer with the Butterworth Map Company. Here she also learned the graphic arts and publishing business. She then moved back to her hometown of Fayetteville, NY and took a job as a graphic artist in the corporate marketing department of Newhouse Broadcasting's Newchannels Corporation. She quickly expanded her creative skills to include newspaper, radio and television advertising.
In 2009, with her daughter off to college, she began her journey as a professional and ventured head-on into contemporary oil painting under the guidance of John J.J. Graham at his Hollingsworth Gallery / SECCA School of Art (Southeast Coalition of Contemporary Artists) in Palm Coast, FL. It was there that she spent an entire year experimenting with various techniques, mediums and tools while studying the works of the masters.
In 2011 her work was included in several prestigious regional group exhibitions including one at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, NY. Later that year she was awarded a 4-week artist residency by the Community Arts of Elmira to work on her conceptual "clothesline project" - paintings that celebrated the backyards of life in and around the Finger Lakes Region of NYS. She quickly built a new body of work based on the clothesline and in the Spring of 2012 had her first solo show back where it all began - at Hollingsworth Gallery in Palm Coast, FL.
In 2013, after several more group exhibitions, the Gargiulo Art Foundation, a not-for-profit organization whose purpose is to support the arts, artists and arts-in-public places, named Christine their "Artist of the Year" and awarded her a solo exhibition which helped to launch her emerging career into gallery representation as did the acceptance in the 2013 Rochester-Finger Lakes Exhibition.
In March of 2015 Sullivan was awarded a merit-based grant to attend The Vermont Studio Center's 4-Week Artist Residency program. In July Christine was juried into her third Rochester-Finger Lakes show and was awarded the Oxford Gallery Award by juror Michael Rooks, Wieland Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Atlanta's High Museum of Art. This was followed by her solo show in August at the Oils By The Sea / ROCCAPRIORE GALLERY in Provincetown, MA and in September she was awarded a jurors award for two of her large scale works in the Southern Tier Biennial and shortly after gave her first artist talk at the Memorial Art Gallery / Museum entitled, "The Geography of Color."
In February of 2016 Christine spent four weeks almost "off the grid" at the Vermont Studio Center Artist Residency Program experimenting with new ideas and concepts based on her explorations of the deep and historic granite rock quarries of Barre, Vermont and her early years studying local geography, topography and cartography.