Artist of the Month 2022

I am delighted to have an artist who specialises in pencil work as my Artist of the Month for February. I hope she inspired you to draw more as I feel her work is exquisite.

Cristina Celestini RBSA, ASGFA

Cristina was born in Rome, Italy but has been living in Birmingham for over 30 years. She is a self-taught artist whose work is inspired by the nature of memory, the passage of time, and human feelings. She works within a classical figurative tradition with a love of detail, realism and the rendering of light and shade. Cristina’s main medium is pencil and coloured pencils, as she tries to explore and experiment with line and the layering of colour to achieve unexpected effects.

The need to keep a record and remember the fleeting moments are the themes of her portraits in this collection: one is a celebration of whimsy and youth while the other is a reflection on the feelings of loneliness and uncertainty we all felt during the lockdowns. Loss and longing are at the heart of her latest pieces: a series of drawings of clothes her adult children left behind at home, which she began drawing to feel closer to them, when they could not visit due to the pandemic. Some of the clothes are worn, and though we do not see the faces of those depicted, the bodies, hands and clothings tell us all we need to know, offering an alternative insight to the traditional notion of a portrait.

Cristina regularly exhibits in London and her pieces are in private collections in the UK and in Europe and part of the permanent collection at the New Art Gallery Walsall.

For more details you can find Cristina on Twitter @Celestini62 and Instagram @cristina_celestini