Joseph Christiana
An award-winning filmmaker, published (and optioned) author, podcast producer, award-winning architectural designer, and an accomplished painter whose art is currently exhibited at Main Ave Galleria in Ocean Grove, NJ, represented by Plogix Gallery, and has been featured recently at George Segale Studios in Lake Mohawk, NJ and at Bishop’s Stock Fine Art Gallery in Snow Hill, MD, Joe currently serves as Creative Director for a New York based architectural design firm and lives in the New Jersey Skylands with his family.
A detailed list of his achievements available upon request.
Abstract expressionist works drawing inspiration from natural elements in an attempt to capture an instant of movement, an urgency, in the fleeting moment of expression afforded by the nature of the medium’s unique mixing and setting process, which allows for a furious 30-60 minutes for working the surface.
From the artist: “Each of these works is a taut negotiation. I set out with my vision, and then must come to terms with how the moment, the medium, and the process alter that vision. It’s humbling. I make concessions. I guide the work to what it tells me it wants to be, using a blow torch, a palette knife, and gravity to coax it, sometimes to trick it.
I find making these works, then, an analog for the act of living itself- expectation vs reality, coming to terms with the limits of your control over circumstance. Or akin to what I imagine performing improvisational music is like- your subservience to the moment.
When all is right, we (the painting and I) find peace with one another, even as the end result often evinces tumult. I find the aftermath of the conflict beautiful, almost always.”
The body entanglements are interpretive transmogrifications of the female form, though the works suggest a greater interest in psychological complexities (the painter’s? the subject’s?) than in the fundamental mechanics of physical order.
From the artist: “I’ve begun to wonder what it will mean when we shed our bodies altogether. What do we embody then? A manifestation of expression, an extension of the forgotten face, the still hoped for (existence of the) heart. I am currently interested in seeing that yet unseen fate of the bodyburden re-purposed, the possibility of the human form yet to come, sex-driven sexless, when we might invent our self-image unhindered by vanity, to become an amorphous expression informed mainly by emotion, which is, I believe, the entanglement and conflict of (at least) two impulses, sometimes opposing, sometimes rhyming aslant: love and fear; hate and triumph; desire and inhibition; and so on. The resulting form, at least as it looks to me from my view in the corner of my home where I sling my paint in the darkest hours, is not unlike the dreamvision creatures of ancients, the ghosts or our personal mythologies who wear their ghosthood only to obfuscate their true identity as pure reflection. Ultimately, that’s what this is, an attempt at recording that reflection.”
From the artist: “No, I’d rather not over-think these. They, for me, are the purity of paint, which is pure joy, inspired by walks through the woods behind my home. Nature is an Abstract Expressionist wielding not a brush but a palette knife.”
Joseph Christiana
An award-winning filmmaker, published (and optioned) author, podcast producer, award-winning architectural designer, and an accomplished painter whose art is currently exhibited at Main Ave Galleria in Ocean Grove, NJ, represented by Plogix Gallery, and has been featured and sold at George Segale Studios in Lake Mohawk, NJ and through the curated Gallery Today website, Joe currently serves as Creative Director for a New York based architectural design firm and lives in the New Jersey Skylands with his family.
A detailed list of his achievements available upon request.