"First Rays of Light" Print

Clients include: Timothée Chalamet, Starbucks, Ritz Carlton, Mayo Clinic, Jumaira Resort (Dubai), Wyndham Worldmark Hotels, Kimpton Hotel Monaco, Evercore NY, Apollo Global Management, NY, Mazars Accounting NY, Limelight Mammoth Hotel & Residences, MD Anderson Hospital, Houston Methodist Hospital, Oakland International Airport.

Christine So is a painter, photographer and printmaker living across the San Francisco Bay in the hills of Oakland, California. Her works are heavily inspired by the woods where she has lived and hiked for decades. She works in acrylic and in the antique photographic process of cyanotypes. She creates botanical and abstract prints without a camera lens, as well as hand-printed landscape photographs of the foggy woods where she lives. Whether it’s painting, printmaking, or photography, her work is always nature-inspired and nearly always monochromatic.

She has worked in a dozen mediums, cycling back and forth from painting to printmaking to cyanotype, applying effects from one medium to the next. She bridges the mediums of photography, monoprinting and painting. Her favorite question when working in the antique photographic process of cyanotypes is “What would happen if…?” She has devised a range of atypical techniques using the cyanotype process.

Arguably the most striking of her unique methods are her cyanotype paintings in her Delft Garden series. The painted silhouettes of plants each contain an intricate blue and white pattern within them when viewed up close.The lengthy process begins as a pencil drawing which is then painted in–not with ink or paint–but with the cyanotype light-sensitive mixture in a dark room. It’s a tricky process as it’s hard to see what one is painting in very dim light. Days later once the photography chemicals have dried in the painting, she lays plants on top of the painted silhouette in a pattern that will leave gaps similar to lace. She then carefully moves the entire bundle outside and exposes the pattern to sunlight to create the image-within-the-image. The blue and white pattern seen in each leaf resembles painted Delft pottery, thus the title of this series: Delft Garden.

Another of the artist’s innovative techniques is her series of completely abstract cyanotypes printed without photo negatives or stencils.