While earning her Fine Arts degree from UC Santa Barbara, an internship with Touring and Tasting magazine led Christina into the world of wine, searching for the information that would later find its way onto the pages of the magazine. Her love of wine took root and began to flourish, and after moving to Temecula, near San Diego, Christina found herself working at a winery in all aspects of production. This planted the seed of a desire to become a winemaker herself.Christina found her way back to the Central Coast after taking a job at Artiste Winery in Santa Ynez. Her Fine Arts degree along with additional experience at the Laguna College of Art and the Otis Institute for Art and Design eventually led her to become an integral part of Artiste Winery and
Art Studio. Surrounded by two of her greatest passions, art and wine, Christina’s tenure at Artiste has brought her into the heart of a project which encompasses an idea she wholeheartedly believes in: that winemaking itself is an art, and that the two are interrelated.
While she never ceased to paint and even showed some of her work while down in Temecula, a by-chance incident involving a glass of spilled wine and an experimental brushstroke of genius began what has become for this Central Coast artist a wildly explosive career centered around both the art and wine industries. Through playful experimentation, Christina developed various techniques using wine as her palette, and in the process she has opened an entirely new niche for herself in the world of art.
Christina utilizes different grape varietals to achieve an expansive array of colors, and by playing with wine reductions and various wines, she finds shades which provide her work with some of its darkest, most earthly tones.
Christina's creations represent the ultimate synthesis of wine and art: paintings born from the brushstrokes of wine. With her masterful blending of various wines to create painted treasures that are rapidly catching the attention of the art world at large.
by Patrick McMillan