Painter and animalier Christine Hyde is known for her scrumptious layers of brushwork, creating rich fur, one coat over another, so deep and so luscious you’d think a bear or fox might bound off her canvas and skitter into the Glenville woodland.
Asking Christine how she gets such depth, life, and beauty into her texture, she answers, “Tweaking, tweaking, tweaking.” She compares that to shifting… upshifting… downshifting.
She says, “When you’re driving in a super cool car, you sense every hum, whirr, and whine through every twist and turn of these mountain roads. When creating, you sense the vibe in hand with paintbrush, and these are equivalent indicators.”
Christine loves all kinds of shifting and tweaking, and that’s why her passions — things like power‑driving and painting — are so fluid and vivid. And equal in painting is a bear that levels up the fluidity at each rendition she paints of him.
In painting, oils are her focus, but she loves acrylic and watercolors for their layering qualities. Practicing with them helps her refine oil washes, underpainting, mists, veils, shadows, glow, glaze, and that aforementioned delicious furry depth.
It’s not uncommon for Christine to be working on maybe a dozen paintings at once.
The stunning series of African animal commissions that she is now painting is as exciting as negotiating a racecar and the bends, turns, twists, and danger. It’s life at its most exciting.
When she studies photographs, she looks for the photo’s star — an elk sniffing crisp air; a mustang (four hooves, or four tires); a mother and noncompliant cub; or a rooster with attitude – her kind of people.
Every painting Christine creates must have at least one compelling tale to tell.
“It’s the goal to get a viewer lost in calmness, let their imagination initiate something in the images,” she says.
And with all that energy and edginess in Christine’s enthusiasm for adventure, she’s appropriately titled the article, “Painter Unleashed.” She says, “It’s time to go for it!”
If you’ve experienced an amazing adventure in Africa or elsewhere, and you are loaded with phenomenal photos, approach Christine about your chronicle of creatures. Visit her at artistchristinehyde.com, call her at (828) 806‑6436, or drop her an email at artistchristinehyde@gmail.com.
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