Claire Christinel is a Victoria painter specializing in still life. I have admired her work on many occasions — the Moss Street Paint-In, at the Community Arts Council’s annual Look Show and the Sidney Fine Art Show, to name a few. When I recently caught up with her at the Bowker Creek Brush Up, I realized it was about time I interviewed her. She’s just about to hang the annual exhibit of her work, during September, at the Marina Restaurant on Oak Bay.
We met at Christinel’s home in Oak Bay. Of course the walls are hung with her pictures, a wide view of Mount Baker in the place of honour. Though she has a work room in the basement, the dining room table is her studio at the moment, and the light pours in. Her kit of acrylic paints, brushes, canvas and easel couldn’t be more orderly. As we settled into conversation, I noticed intriguing bits of pottery and textiles, and the gleaming wooden furniture which has served as a backdrop to many a painting.
“I’ve loved art my entire life,” Christinel told me, recalling the times spent painting watercolours at Stanley Park with a friend when she was 12 or 13. In high school she took all the art options, but upon graduating in 1972 she “didn’t see a possibility to become an artist and make a living at it.” So she followed an intensive two-year program at Langara College, which gave her a good basis in all phases of design: display, graphics, interior decoration, business and communication, as well as fine art. “I’ve actually worked in all the fields,” she noted, “but specialized in display design.” For the past 14 years Christinel has been the in-house designer for the Royal British Columbia Museum’s shops, both the regular and special-exhibit locations.
Motherhood inevitably got in the way of her art development until, in 2001, her husband, who is French and a school teacher, took his wife and two children to Toulouse, France for a year’s exchange. There Claire enrolled for year at the fine-art centre and “from that moment I have been painting again regularly,” she reported. The training was traditional — black-and-white drawing in charcoal, studies of form and perspective, watercolour, acrylic, and a bit of oil — but the students were only given red, yellow, blue, and white. “It was a really good foundation, but the biggest effect was to motivate and stimulate me,” Christinel explained. “Painting is something I absolutely love.”
Her concentration on still life as subject matter also came from that experience. Visiting her husband’s family brought her close to French culture, where the centre of the culture is the table. “In some homes,” she explained, “they don’t even have a living room. You’re shown right into the dining room.” There was décor from many different places, and “of course the food from the local market, the produce is sun-kissed and so gorgeous.” Thus began her first series, Mediterranean Moments, for which she painted all the Mediterranean things — food, ceramics, textiles — which she was seeing on a day-to-day basis. “I am drawn to light and how light effects form,” she said. “Light and shadow, the chiaroscuro is what inspires and captures my eye.”
While the artist feels that landscapes must be discovered, and caught as they are, she finds still life to be “a totally creative mode of painting, because you have to choose what you are going to put in it, set the whole thing up, create the lighting effect, and from there you start your painting process. In the quiet of my own space,” she said, “I create what is for me a really interesting thing to look at.”
Christinel’s paintings don’t have secret subjects or a political message. “Mostly for me it has to point to what I see as beauty, and I hope that other people will be drawn to it,” she said. Her paintings readily find buyers, but clearly she paints — patiently, diligently — for her own pleasure.
Even someone as skilled as Christinel can’t easily find a space in a commercial gallery, so she takes lots of opportunities to show locally. In particular, she appreciates the Community Arts Council of Greater Victoria and the role it plays, with its annual Look show, in helping the hobby artist become an emerging artist and then, perhaps, a professional. She’ll be participating in their Paint In on the grounds of the Cedar Hill Recreation Centre Sunday, Sept. 14, and she is a member of the Federation of Canadian Artists, whose exhibitions inspire some of her best work.
She also takes part in the two studio tours presented annually by the Oak Bay Art Society, and participates in the Moss Street Paint-In, the Bowker Creek Brush Up, the Sidney Fine Art Show and the Artishow events at downtown hotels. If that’s not enough, she is looking forward to membership in the Saanich Peninsula Arts and Crafts Society, the Victoria Sketch Club and the Al Frescos outdoor painting group when she retires in a few years.
As she says, “it’s a wonderful life being a person who likes to create.”
Claire Christinel, paintings at the Marina Restaurant, 1327 Beach Dr., 250-598-8555, through September, and at Padella Italian Bistro, 2524 Estvan Ave., ongoing.