Christopher English was practically born in St. Louis, Missouri, with a paint brush in his hand. He had a talented grandmother who painted on china and her fíne work was on display when the World’s Fair was in St. Louis in 1904.
She had a keen eye and she saw something in young Christopher that pleased her and she taught him how to paint. By the time he was in kindergarden, he was painting in oils. After receiving his BFA degree in Kansas, he did graduate work at the University of Washington and was immediately hired to teach art in that university.
He entered and won fírst prize in the prestigious Pacific Northwest Arts and Crafts Show. The show is one of the creme de la creme’s of the art and craft world. They wrote about him and his work in a Seattle newspaper, but when an article appeared about him in the magazine, Art in America, he said people began to talk to him.
His free and searching soul on a quest for harmony emerged in his paintings and he began to find teaching mundane and restrictive, so he left it and struck out on his own. Twenty some odd years ago, the airport between Tacoma and Seattle purchased several of his paintings (even that long ago humping past the thousand dollar range) to grace the new wing and you can see his artwork on the busy main floor where they sell tickets.
Christopher is a sensitive, articulate man who thinks and dreams about what he will paint. His childhood dream of a special place sent him to Hawaii, but he soon realízed that was not the place of his painting dreams. He stayed there for a year, searching. He finally found the place he had been seeking in Guatemala at Lake Atitlan and began his “Kalpa” series. I asked what Kalpa meant. It means a period of time wíth no end and then to illustrate what he meant, he quoted a moving passage from the “Three Pillars of Zen” by Philip Kapleau as “the period of time it takes an angel descending from the heavens once a year, making one flap of its wings across the top of a mile-high mountain to wear it down level with the ground.”
He paints Mandalas. A simple mandala is flowing symmetry emanating from a point. His “Hoop of Life,” drawn with graphite, was inspired after seeing a small picture of Sitting Bull on a postcard. English feels each person is a mandala or a point of awareness. The Oxford dictionary says a mandala is a circular figure as a religious symbol of the universe.
While dealing with such lyrical and ethereal thoughts, his paintings are defined. They are bold and arresting, bursting with color. Christopher says paintings are a visual illusion. That may be, but the artist himself is certainly multi dimensional. His show opened at the New Millennium, located at number 13, 16th of September, on the 19th of March. If you missed it, his works will continue to be shown until the 22nd of April.
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