Meet Christine Wardenburg-Skinner

As a teacher and art specialist in public schools, I have taught students from early elementary education to university over the past 40 years. For thirty of those years, I directed a summer art camp for children, Patterns in Nature, co-teaching with poets and musicians, exploring the connections between art and nature, and from 2010-2014, directed the Museum of Northwest Art’s MoNA Link Program, serving teachers expanding the arts into their academic curriculum, and artistic enrichment for their students. 

I have taught workshops for teachers through the Education Service District 109, emphasizing art making, art history and enhanced visual awareness through Visual Thinking Strategies, a process of looking at and discussing art as a narrative, based on individual impressions, expressing responses to visual creation, thereby enriching each person's unique response to art.

For the past decade, I have worked in my small studio in Edison, and for the past seven years supported Catholic Community Service Farmworker’s Art Studio in Mt. Vernon, Centro de Trabajadores del Campo, providing a supportive environment for the parents and children of local farmworkers. 

Visual mentors have played a vital role in my creative sensibility: the German Expressionist painters of the early 20th century for the power of their line and emotional expression; the landscape and still life paintings of Cezanne, Braque, Matisse and Manet; Vincent van Gogh’s unrestrained passion, especially the beauty of his drawings; Ben Shaun’s drawings and political sensibility; Joan Michell’s color and evocative abstractions; the brushwork and grace of Japanese Sumi-e art.

I am mentored deeply by artists here in the Skagit Valley, those who bring powerful artistic expression to our world: their creative interaction with place, political awareness, personal remembrance, and emotional power; working variably in sculpture, oil paint, watercolor and printmaking. I am daily inspired by their talent, vision, commitment, empathy, and truth. 

Christine Wardenburg-Skinner writes of Art's Alive's 'Web of Life' 

My work as an artist, as in life, is connected to place, family and the concept of neighborhood. John Muir described the Web of Life with these words: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find that it is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe.”

An artist is a “self” in the great expanse of ecology as well as in the small neighborhood of one’s personal reality - individual, yet always connected. My neighborhood has been the Skagit Valley, mostly in Edison; this small village near Samish Bay, on a tidal slough, near large fields, at the foot of the Chuckanut Mountains, has shaped my artwork profoundly.

Before moving here from Seattle, I lived alone in a cabin for the winter months on the Skagit River. There, I neither drew, painted, nor wrote, I simply absorbed; and in that stillness, a time of true change in my life, I fell in love with this river and the valley which it formed. And since that time, I have interacted with this landscape physically, mentally and spiritually and with those individuals with whom I share it.  

I have sought to express this self, so inextricably connected to all that surrounds me, in a quiet celebration of the beauty of what is close. I draw a great deal, always walking with my sketchbook and supplies; when I lived in the cities, I drew the streets, people and architecture; when I traveI, I draw places I see, their color, climate, terrain, and somehow, their sensibility. Here in the Skagit, over the past forty years of walking, drawing and painting, I have built a language seeking to evoke the beauty of this place as I see it.

Evolutionary biologist Alan Rayner writes that the individual consciousness is a vital inclusion of the wide collective realm from which we all emerge and flow, like ripples at the interface of water and air. As an artist, in the stillness and reception of this, I have created a body of work over many years. It is this that I share with you, my interconnected, visual web.

                                    Simply to live does not justify existence,