Jennifer McChristian | Ordinary Beauty

By Bonnie Gangelhoff

In her painting LATE NIGHT BARBECUE, Jennifer McChristian captures a quintessential slice of life. A man dressed in Bermuda shorts and sandals stands over a barbecue grill and pokes a long-handled fork into the fire. The flames lick skyward and cast a pink glow across his face. The artwork is a perfect example of one of the mantras that guides McChristian’s creative process: “You don’t have to travel to distant lands to get a beautiful painting,” she says. “It’s out your back door.”

McChristian walks her talk. The man depicted in the painting is her husband, who regularly handles dinner duties outside the studio they share in Los Angeles. Last year, LATE NIGHT BARBECUE was selected as a finalist in the Art Renewal Center’s annual competition, and in the fall it was on view in the American Impressionist Society’s National Juried Exhibition at Illume Gallery in St. George, UT.

Known for finding beauty in the ordinary, McChristian is the first to admit that she relishes mundane subjects—traffic cones, utility poles, run-down sheds, lonely back alleys, and the postapocalyptic feel of a deserted street. She has a fondness for painting condemned buildings on the verge of demolition. The magical is in the marginal. “I want to translate the mundane into a visual feast,” she says. “Sometimes there is no reverence for history. And I want to leave the younger generation with something to see from the past. I always try to convey a sense of timelessness in my work.”

But don’t get the wrong idea. It’s not like McChristian always sticks close to home. Travel, for her, is a beloved source of inspiration and joy. The nooks and crannies of everyday life in far-flung locales, from South Africa to southern China, have captivated her creative eye throughout her career. “It’s a way to explore new ways of thinking and seeing,” she says of these experiences. “It’s a way to free myself from the myopia that stationary existence produces.”

McChristian frequently plays with opposites and contrasts, both in her painting technique and in her subject matter. For example, the artist believes her most successful paintings contain a combination of thick and thin paint, soft and hard edges, and warm and cool colors. In a recent work, CATALYST, she chooses subject matter that evokes contrasts: old versus new and past versus future. A personal favorite of the artist, the piece depicts two dilapidated houseboats floating side by side on a river in China. She recalls that the scene struck her as overflowing with visual stimulation. There were signs of life everywhere—one deck featured a jumble of dogs, chickens, and potted plants that belonged to the old couple who called the ramshackle vessel home. Locals call the houseboats “junks.”

Across the river and in the background, the painting captures an urban skyline dotted with modern buildings. The size and scale of the buildings evoke a sense of encroaching doom. “The Chinese government considers the houseboats eyesores and wants to demolish them because they are impinging on the path to modernization,” McChristian says. “I want to immortalize them before they vanish. And I want to nudge people toward the importance of tradition and the past.”

McChristian grew up in Montreal and is fluent in both French and English. Her mother is Canadian and her father is American. Both sides of her family feature long lines of relatives who pursued music and the visual arts. Her mother was an artist who planned to attend the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris but opted to raise family instead. Her father is a talented saxophone player. As a child, her birthday and Christmas gifts often included colored pencils, sketchbooks, and watercolor sets.

When she was 18 years old, McChristian’s family pulled up stakes and moved to Los Angeles. The budding artist enrolled in a four-year illustration and design program at the city’s prestigious Otis College of Art and Design. After receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with honors in 1990, McChristian plunged into the film industry. For about a decade, she worked as an animation artist for Walt Disney Studios, Nickelodeon, and Film Roman, which has produced a host of popular shows like The Simpsons. Before computers invaded the industry, animation artists drew every story element frame by frame—a painstaking process. “We typically worked 40 to 50 hours a week just hammering out cartoons,” McChristian says.

In her spare time, mostly on the weekends, the artist created her own paintings. And she also enrolled in refresher courses, including painting workshops taught by Karl Dempwolf, Robert Blue, and Steve Huston. “Working in animation was a great source of income. And it was somewhat creative,” she says. “But I was drawing other people’s designs.”Around 2000, computers invaded the industry, and McChristian viewed their arrival as an opportunity to pursue a full-time career in fine art. Wasting no time, she began entering art shows, plein-air events, and competitions. “That’s when things started taking off for me,” she says.

Today McChristian has no regrets about her decision. She sees her stint at the film studios as key to her artistic development. The discipline of consistent drawing sharpened her hand-eye coordination, helped her judge proportions, and instilled discipline. “Not only was I surrounded by top-notch artists from different parts of the world, but some studios, like Film Roman, provided free weekly figure-drawing workshops,” she says. “And drawing every day during those animation years improved my painting.”

To step inside McChristian’s studio in the heart of the Los Feliz neighborhood in Los Angeles is to leave the hustle, bustle, and noise of the city behind. McChristian is fond of calling the studio her “sanctuary” where she experiences a “magical, mystical, and healing” atmosphere. McChristian shares the 1,100-square-foot space with her husband, artist Ben Fried, whom she met while working at Film Roman. Visitors often observe that their studio has a bohemian vibe. Vintage chandeliers hang from the ceiling. Shelves are packed with clay sculptures and quirky artifacts from the couple’s travels. Books are stacked up on all the tables. A reddish Oriental rug is draped over a platform for models. In a nearby area, a violet sofa, a rocking chair, and lots of pillows welcome visitors.

Over the years many artists have passed through these studio doors. For 20 years the couple has hosted thrice-weekly life-drawing sessions here. “It certainly has been a place of social gatherings, and the space exudes a meditative energy from years of large, quiet gatherings of like-minded artists singularly focused on capturing the likeness of the figure,” McChristian says.

In March, when Los Angeles went into lockdown, McChristian was forced to cancel the weekly events. For two months, daily news about the pandemic took its toll on her spirits. She admits to struggling with depression, lethargy, and the inability to focus on painting. In June, the city lifted some restrictions, and gradually she found her way out of the malaise. She agreed to teach a plein-air painting workshop in Cinque Terre, Italy, in May 2021. The weekly drawing sessions resumed in the couple’s studio, albeit with fewer participants. McChristian also joined a few artist friends who agreed to wearing masks and social distancing on their plein-air painting excursions. In September she won a top award for a colorful urbanscape at Oil Painters of America’s National Juried Exhibition at RS Hanna Gallery in Fredericksburg, TX.

When she returned to the easel, McChristian noticed that her subject matter wasn’t quite the same as it had been. She describes it as an organic evolution that transpired due to her experiences this past year. “I now wanted to create paintings that bring me peace and offer other people solace in this crazy time,” she says.

A recent painting makes her point. In LIMINAL LIGHT, the artist depicts the interior of a Gothic-style cathedral in Barcelona, Spain. Dark shadows in the sanctuary cast a mysterious spell over the space. Empty pews echo themes of quarantine and isolation. But the massive pillars also suggest a sense of power and perseverance in the face of adversity. A shaft of light evokes the possibility of hope in the future, McChristian says. “There’s something about the peaceful sanctuary of churches that always makes me feel a sense of serenity and hope,” she says. “I find church a welcoming oasis in times of despair, when my wavering faith needs a place to restore stability in the ever-changing landscape of transitory times.”

Portraying churches in her artwork today often causes her to reflect on treasured childhood memories when her family trooped off to Sunday Mass at their Montreal church. “When the church doors closed behind me, traffic noise disappeared and a deafening quiet enveloped me like a warm blanket.”

The church’s grand interior, the intoxicating smell of incense, the soft chants of the choir, and the dimly lit chandeliers made her feel as if she was in a magical place infused with a sense of serenity and invulnerability. It’s a feeling not unlike creating fine art. “Whatever the subject matter is, painting has always been somewhat of a spiritual experience,” McChristian says. “The end result evokes a sense of elation, nostalgia, and harmony in me.”

representationwww.jennifermcchristian.com

This story appeared in the December 2020/January 2021 issue of Southwest Art magazine.

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