Christine So

Wild Mugwort (hand-printed botanical cyanotype, 24 x 12 inches)

2024

Christine So is an American printmaker, photographer and painter living in the hills across the bay from her hometown, San Francisco. She is best known for her blue and white cyanotype photographs of forests shrouded in fog. The Foggy Woods series is ever-growing as the artist continually hikes these hills which are often foggy at dawn. She explores radically different ways to use this antique photographic medium with and without out a camera. At times her blue prints look like screen prints. At others like abstract watercolors. Besides printing photographs from negatives, botanicals using entire branches, altering the chemical recipe to obtain novel colors, and creating abstract cyanotypes of deliberate patterns, she also paints images using the light-sensitive solution and prints a pattern within them. These last works she calls “cyanotype paintings”. The multiple-day process depends on being able to see while painting in a dark room so as to not expose the light-sensitive painted silhouette before it’s time. She named her series of botanical paintings which have a fine blue and white pattern “Delft Garden” after the Dutch painted porcelain. Clients include: Timothée Chalamet, Starbucks, Mayo Clinic (Jacksonville), Jumaira Resort, Lux Habitat Sotheby’s International (Dubai), Wyndham Worldmark Hotels, Kimpton Hotel Monaco (Salt Lake City) , Mazars Accounting, Limelight Hotel Mammoth (California), MD Anderson Hospital (Houston), Oncology Center, Houston Methodist Hospital.