Written by Miles Stemp

Christina Boyer is a painter that is working herself out of painting within painting. If that description is confusing, that’s alright, but it really isn’t that difficult to comprehend. Think of it as if you were a pediatrician that doesn’t like working with kids, but all your training is in that field.
What makes Boyer’s work interesting is that she is thinking about painting in a completely different way. Her source materials are photographs, though she relies on them minimally. She translates the photograph from a real to an abstracted painting, yet still maintains elements of the image. Primarily, Boyer uses pictures taken from Facebook, which is, in and of itself, not unique. What makes Boyer unique is her ability to make the subject matter engaging by developing a disconnect between the subject and painter. Furthermore, she brings the ownership of the image into question, while facilitating a dialogue concerning the façade of our personal identity that we create and censor. She engages our perceived notions of self versus our actual selves.
I would describe Boyer’s practice as loose and free flowing, allowing her to develop her paintings intuitively. It becomes the mixture of the shear joy of painting with the agony and frustration of it, yet it all works out in the end. She leaves unprimed sections of the canvas that create a dialogue between the picture plane and the physical surface. This is similar to a technique used by Vancouver painter Ben Reeves, who engages with the painting on both surfaces. Boyer and Reeves blot out the image and create importance in not only the subject, but in the paint, the painting style, and the process.