Christine Lowe’s Inspiring Journey Through Incredible Art

Artist Weekly Staff

By: Tracy Lamouri

The Artist’s Eye: Introduction to Christine Lowe

Christine Lowe is an artist whose work captures attention across the globe. Her creations are vibrant, multi-dimensional pieces that reflect a complex world shaped by personal experience. Living with epilepsy since birth, she faces unique challenges that inform her artistic expression. Regardless of her circumstance, Lowe channels her energy into her craft, producing eye-catching images that resonate deeply with viewers. The stories woven into her work highlight her resilience, marking her as a significant rising figure in contemporary art.

Epilepsy: A Constant Companion in Creative Expression

For Christine, epilepsy is a part of daily life. She experiences 25 to 30 seizures each month, a reality that many might find crippling. However, she approaches her condition with honesty and humor. Rather than allowing her health issues to define her, Lowe turns her experiences into art, navigating the interplay of fear and creativity. This duality shapes her work, ensuring her artistic voice remains authentic and powerful.

Artistic Influences: From Warhol to Anime

Reflecting Canada’s rich artistic heritage, Lowe draws inspiration from various elements. Growing up in the vibrant culture of the 1970s, she was surrounded by notable figures like Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, and Georgia O’Keeffe. This exposure shaped her understanding of color and form. Comic books, anime, and graphic novels further influenced her vision, creating a style that merges nostalgic elements with modern aesthetics. Her eclectic influences blend seamlessly, creating a unique artistic language for a broad audience.

A New Aesthetic Vocabulary: The Evolution of Her Work

In recent years, Christine has developed an aesthetic vocabulary that distills her experiences into captivating visuals. Since 2018, she has focused on merging abstraction with whimsical imagery, resulting in art that evokes emotions tied to nostalgia and memory. Her innovative combination of flat colors with defined outlines gives the final piece depth and vibrancy. Viewers can feel an emotional connection transcending mere visuals, resulting from the well-crafted dialogue between the artwork and its audience.

Creating a Quasi-Reality: Nostalgia and Memory in Art

Lowe’s works often explore the boundaries between nostalgia and lived experience. Her paintings aim to create a quasi-reality, engaging viewers in a dance of memory. Incorporating bright colors and distinctive shapes, she induces a sense of whimsy, allowing people to feel and reflect. By doing so, her art generates an emotional resonance, encouraging reflection on personal experiences. Moments of clarity shine through the chaos, illustrating how diverse experiences can merge into a single, impactful artwork.

Craft Materials Elevated: The Unconventional Techniques of Christine Lowe

Employing unconventional materials is a hallmark of Christine’s work. She elevates her art using techniques typically found in crafts, allowing her to create bold textures and striking visual effects. She transforms ordinary mediums into spectacular creations using Cerne relief outliner, metal leaf, and glitter. Christine’s philosophy challenges traditional notions of art, asserting that creativity has no strict boundaries. In her hands, even the simplest materials become vibrant art pieces that engage audiences on multiple levels.

Living with Epilepsy: Balancing Creativity and Care

Living with epilepsy comes with its own set of challenges, including memory issues and direction loss. Yet Christine navigates these hurdles with resilience. Encouraged by her husband, Russell, she focuses on creating art while leaning on him for daily care. Their partnership serves as a foundation, enabling Christine to pursue her artistic vision while managing the complexities of her life.

She has recently developed a new aesthetic vocabulary and has been producing a lot of work since 2018. Combining influences from favorite painters and illustrators with a sort of birthday cake/stained glass feeling, she explores nostalgia, memory, and experience through the prism of epilepsy.

Intended to produce works that depict a quasi-reality that stimulates an indistinct sense of whimsy and nostalgia in the viewer, she uses expansive areas of flat colour to create a vague kind of abstraction, but the heavy outliner allows the image depicted to impose itself onto the canvas.

By working with materials usually associated with crafts—like the cener relief outliner, metal leaf, glitter, and metallic paints—she also intends to elevate these humble materials to a higher level. Her works are paintings but also art ‘objects’.

The paintings, meanwhile, especially in person, are imposing. Rendered on canvas with mainly acrylic paint, certain aspects of the image are outlined with the Cerne Relief acrylic, leaving a raised, shiny, wavering line that makes the image shimmer and twitch. Combined with other mediums like glitter, glitter-infused craft paints, and silver leaf, the works drift away from standard “painting” and into “object d’art” territory.