Christina Renfer Vogel

Region: South

Website: http://www.christinarenfervogel.com

City / State: Chattanooga, TN

 I pursue interaction and perception from my role as observer, occupied by the unremarkable and informed by our everyday exchanges. Reflecting direct encounters within my environment, I work with still life, portraiture, and landscape—the pillars of perceptual painting. Drawing from the quotidian and familiar, I navigate the space between seeing and describing, interpretation and invention.

In recent paintings, houseplants are surrogates for figures, plant portraits that entangle with vivid backdrops or sit unadorned on studio furniture. Sweet or ostentatious motifs speak to the allover patterning found in nature while they recall bedsheets, wallpaper, or couch cushions—the stuff of home. In paintings of casual bunches and composed bouquets of flowers, I embrace affiliations with femininity. The flowers represent gestures, too, and a marking of time. Due to the overt beauty of this subject matter, I think of the work as nonthreatening and easily overlooked, benign but with the potential to seduce or disarm. I hope for these paintings to feel lush, verdant, and abundant, a restorative balm by way of pure visual pleasure.