Christine Hutson is a painter specializing in images of the natural world, as well as lettering art and book illustration. Her art is finely-detailed hand work using traditional art materials and classic techniques to produce pieces that will last for generations.
Her work is done in watercolor, primarily made by hand from raw pigments, painted on calfskin vellum, goatskin parchment and fine paper. Her artwork is made using a historic painting technique called limning, which uses tiny brushstrokes and dots to build up an image out of thin layers of paint. This method has been used for hundreds of years to paint locket portraits, miniature manuscript illuminations, and botanical and nature illustrations. It is Christine's aim not just to keep this ancient technique alive, but to bring it into the modern age. Her art is meant to bring attention to the little things in nature, the things often passed by in our hurried lives; the leaf, the flower, the small insect that we would not normally notice. She chose limning for her art because it is so perfectly suited to showing the details of these small subjects.
She learned her painting technique by studying the work of Joris Hoefnagel, a renaissance illuminator and painter who worked in the late 1500's in Europe. She has also learned from the work of Marie Angel, a modern illuminator and calligrapher from Britain. In fact, it was Marie Angel's book, Painting For Calligraphers, that inspired Christine to learn this painting technique. And after she stumbled upon a facsimile of Hoefnagel's Model Book of Calligraphy in a university library, she brought the old manuscript and the modern world together into one style that she calls her own. She still studies the works of masters up close, visiting the art collection at the Hunt Botanical Institute at Carnegie Mellon University; at the Hunt Institute, the work of painters such as Marie Angel, Pierre-Joseph Redoute and many others are shown in their art gallery.
Christine also does calligraphy, and has made manuscript books containing poems, medieval accounts of werewolves, and descriptions of astronomical phenomena. She has done calligraphy work for the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, as well as numerous other private and corporate clients. Christine has recently been training in mural painting, and has been involved in a collaborative project with a professional painter in the decoration of a castle home in Pennsylvania. She is a member of the Allegheny Highlands Botanical Art Society, and the American Society of Botanical Artists, and enjoys teaching and creating art in the Society For Creative Anachronism.