Catalina Christensen on collecting pigments and painting - working with the memories of landscape

Dialogues with Nature

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In this episode I’m talking to Catalina Christensen who is an inspiring painter and pigment collector. Her work centres around a personal connection to landscape through the colours she finds and extracts from nature in the places she visits. Her inspiration comes from her early years, hearing of the great Italian Renaissance painters, of alchemy and the inherent human need to be creative and leave traces. She talks about her journey through many countries, coming from an architectural background and how she arrived at her current art practice in great detail. How and where it all started and what techniques and materials she uses in her work.

‘A painting begins with collecting the rocks for the pigments. The gathering and processing of pigments is an artistic endeavour in itself’

Catalina is also the co-founder of Wilderness Art Collective, a platform for artists whose work responds to the environment, for discussions about beauty and diversity in their creative work.

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Some references from our conversation:

- The place with the rock paintings in Colombia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A1chica

- Landlines exhibition at the Royal Geographical Society

https://www.rgs.org/

- Wilderness Art Collective https://www.wildernessart.org/

- Cornelissen - a quaint old place in London where you can buy pigments if you don’t want to make your own. https://www.cornelissen.com/

You can follow Catalina on instagram and on twitter

https://www.catalinachristensen.com/

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