About
Christine So is a painter, photographer and printmaker living across the San Francisco Bay in the hills of Oakland, California. Her works are heavily inspired by the woods where she has lived and hiked for decades. She works in acrylic and in the antique photographic process of cyanotypes. She creates botanical monotypes and abstract prints without a camera lens, as well as hand-printed landscape photographs of the foggy woods where she lives. Whether it’s painting, printmaking, or photography, her work is always nature-inspired and nearly always monochromatic.
Cyanotypes are a 19th century form of lensless photography also known as photograms, blueprints and sun prints. They resemble block prints or etchings but use no ink nor printing press. Light “etches” the image on paper previously painted with light-sensitive chemicals that will turn blue when exposed to sunlight. The artist’s botanical cyanotypes are each unique monotypes. They are slow camera-less photographs made outdoors using freshly cut branches of plants and natural light and no film negative. There is no lens, no etched plate, no ink and no printing press to be able to make a second identical print. The cyanotype process can also be used to print photographs originally taken with a camera by using giant negatives printed on plastic the same size as the final print on paper. Only Christine So’s landscape photographs printed using the cyanotype process are replicable. Most have a very limited run of just 10 prints printed by hand outdoors in sunlight on hand-coated watercolor paper.
Christine has worked in a dozen mediums across the decades, cycling back and forth from painting to sculpture to printmaking to cyanotype, applying effects from one medium to the next. In her works on paper, she bridges the mediums of photography, monoprinting and painting. She improves her composition skills for painting by practicing photography, and she expands the uses of photography chemicals with results resembling paintings. Her favorite question when working in cyanotypes is “What would happen if…?” She has devised a range of atypical techniques using the blue and white photographic process.
Arguably the most striking of her unique methods are her cyanotype paintings in her Delft Garden series. The painted silhouettes of plants each contain an intricate blue and white pattern within them when viewed up close.The lengthy process begins as a pencil drawing which is then painted in–not with ink or paint–but with the cyanotype light-sensitive mixture in a dark room. It’s a tricky process as it’s hard to see what one is painting in very dim light. Days later once the photography chemicals have dried in the painting, she lays plants on top of the painted silhouette in a pattern that will leave gaps similar to lace. She then carefully moves the entire bundle outside and exposes the pattern to sunlight to create the image-within-the-image. The blue and white pattern seen in each leaf resembles painted Delft pottery, thus the title of this series: Delft Garden.
Another of the artist’s innovative techniques is her series of completely abstract cyanotypes printed without photo negatives or stencils. She immerses paper painted with light-sensitive chemicals in water outdoors using the line of the water’s surface to block light, letting sunlight etch lines where one shade of blue ends and the next begins. Those sections of the light-sensitive paper exposed to sunlight for less time stay lighter blue, while those exposed for longer turn darker. She forms deliberate patterns of subtle gradations counting the seconds, holding the paper still, then turning, bending or lifting the paper and holding it still again as long as needed to etch the each new shape and shade with sunlight. The resulting luminous gradations look more like an abstract watercolor than a photograph. Each is entirely unique, a blend of practiced controlled movements and chance.
Through more trial and error, Christine figured out a way to print soft gray, slate blue and mint green cyanotypes, rather than the normal dark blue, by altering the ratio of the two chemicals used in the 170-year-old cyanotype recipe. There are virtually no other artists printing cyanotypes these colors. Her recipe remains proprietary.
The artist’s background in printmaking also led to her unusual method employed in her acrylic paintings of trees on canvas. What the viewer sees is essentially a painting of the negative space, the air around the tree, the pale sky, leaving the portion of the dark undercoat still visible to take the shape of tree branches. The process of carving away all that is not the tree, all the negative space, is the same one a printmaker uses in carving a block print. This translucent effect that allows one to see two layers of paint at once mimics the effect of using a light shade of printmaking ink to print on dark paper.
Christine attended The California College of Arts in Oakland, California, then lived in Madrid and studied at La Facultad de Bellas Artes of La Universidad Complutense. It was in Madrid that she discovered printmaking using a traditional printing press and ink decades before she taught herself the cyanotype process. She went on to earn degrees from San Francisco State University in Spanish and English. For years she worked part-time as an artist while also as a college language instructor. She began to exhibit her artwork in galleries in 2019 and currently works as an artist full-time, taking commissions from the hospitality industry, exhibiting in galleries and selling her work online.
Christine So’s works have been commissioned by Starbucks, Mayo Clinic, Evercore, The Limelight Mammoth Hotel and Residence, Kimpton Hotel Monaco, Wyndham Worldmark Hotels, Jumaira Luxhabitat Resort of Sotheby’s International Realty in Dubai, MD Anderson Hospital in Houston, UTMB Hospital in Galveston, MD Anderson Oncology Center, Houston Methodist Hospital, and Oakland International Airport. Her paintings and works on paper are in private collections in over 10 countries, among them, that of actor Timothée Chalamet.
Photo: Jonathan Botkin
Painting using light-sensitive cyanotype chemicals
A painting/photograph hybrid: First a drawing is filled in with light-sensitive emulsion in a dark room. A day later once dry, delicate plants are laid over the painted areas and it is exposed to sunlight for multiple exposures to yield a blue and white pattern within the silhouette of the agapanthus flowers.