Christie Lee R.

Christie Lee R. is a self-taught artist and aspiring writer whose practice is defined by variation. Rather than developing a single recurring visual style, she changes her technique according to the subject of each work. Her current projects include digital drawings, mermaid compositions, and a planned book.

Christie was homeschooled in an environment that encouraged reading, drawing, and creative writing. Her mother covered an entire wall with the family’s artwork and regularly assigned writing exercises, which helped establish Christie’s interest in storytelling.

Television provided another early introduction to visual art. Watching Bob Ross paint made the process appear both accessible and absorbing. School assignments led her to research Salvador Dalí and Vincent van Gogh, expanding her understanding of what an artist’s work could look like.

Aside from three days at an art camp when she was approximately eight years old, Christie has no formal training. She developed her skills independently through repeated drawing, observation, and trial and error. Her mother had taken an art class in high school and could draw from direct observation, but Christie was more interested in constructing images from imagination.

That distinction remains important to her practice. She does not begin with a commitment to a recognizable texture or established method. Each idea presents a different visual problem.

“I don’t have one permanent style, and I prefer it that way,” she says.

Christie views her work as an ongoing search for new methods and perspectives. The subject determines whether a piece requires realism, fantasy, detailed rendering, or another approach. She considers versatility itself the consistent feature across the work.

This also means her portfolio can appear markedly different from one piece to the next. She does not regard that variation as a lack of direction. It reflects her preference for developing a technique in response to a particular image rather than applying the same treatment repeatedly.

Mermaids are among her favorite recurring subjects. Women with long, elegant nails also appear throughout her drawings. Christie associates both motifs with beauty and grace, using fantasy to extend familiar features into more elaborate forms.

Although she does not identify one artist as a direct stylistic influence, she follows the work of many artists and studies their handling of detail, light, and shadow. These examples encourage her to refine the technical aspects of her drawings and create a greater sense of realism within imagined scenes.

Her working process is rarely linear. Christie often has numerous projects underway at once and moves among them according to energy and interest. She describes a typical day as a combination of procrastination, project switching, and an excess of ideas competing for limited time and space.

This abundance helps her manage periods of low inspiration. Instead of forcing progress on one stalled work, she changes projects. She also keeps a written list of drawing ideas, recording enough information to return to an image later. If no unfinished project feels productive, she selects something from the list and begins again.

One of her most difficult works, The Temple of Medusa, tested that persistence. The project originated with a face she had drawn on paper approximately eight years earlier. She later recreated the figure digitally, beginning with a black-and-white study of the head and hair before expanding it into a full composition.

After hours of work and substantial progress, the digital file disappeared while she was drawing. The project had not simply failed to save. The entire file appeared to have been deleted.

Christie began the work again, but the loss changed her relationship with the piece. Progress became slower, and the process was accompanied by frustration and reduced motivation. The replacement drawing eventually required nearly a year to complete.

She also changed her technical habits, saving multiple copies frequently to avoid another loss. The experience made file management part of her creative process rather than an administrative step performed afterward.

When she finally signed the completed drawing, Christie continued searching for unfinished sections because she had become accustomed to the project remaining unresolved. She eventually turned to her husband and said, “I think I finally finished it.”

The Temple of Medusa remains the work of which she is most proud, partly because its completion required her to reconstruct a major project after losing the original. The experience reinforced a practical lesson: persistence matters as much as the first idea.

Christie does not organize her work around one fixed message. Her primary interest is in creating images that reflect imagination and offer viewers a different angle on familiar subjects. She wants the work to be appreciated even when its meaning is not immediately clear.

A successful piece, for Christie, is one that reaches completion in a form close to what she envisioned. Recognition remains one of her ambitions, but the immediate measure is whether she continues producing work and improving through practice.

She hopes eventually to operate her own gallery or have her work presented in galleries and museums. She is also interested in leaving a body of work through which future members of her family can understand her interests and imagination.

Maintaining an independent visual identity is central to that goal. Christie admires popular studio styles and the artists who adapt them successfully, but she does not want imitation to determine her practice. Her priority is to develop work that remains recognizably connected to her own ideas.

This independence is complicated by the practical limits on her time. Christie works on art after meeting the demands of employment and daily life, often drawing while tired. Some sessions last only a few hours, and she has occasionally fallen asleep while working on a line.

Her response is not to maintain an idealized studio schedule. She works when she can and resumes the following day when she cannot. Time with her husband and their dogs provides a break from the creative work and supports the life around it.

Christie’s advice to beginning artists follows the same practical approach. Difficulty is not evidence that a project should be abandoned. Repeated attempts develop skill, even when progress is slow or a work must be restarted.

Her current plans include completing several mermaid concepts and continuing work on her book. The two projects extend the interests present since childhood: inventing images, developing stories, and moving between visual and written forms.