Christina Nick is a multi-disciplinary artist whose intense interest in nature, travel and the environment are reflected in her artwork.
Since graduating from Mount Allison University in 1989 with a Bachelor
of Fine Arts with distinction, Christina has been living her vision of
bringing her experiences in nature to life through her art.

It
was in Southern France that Christina first gained international
recognition for her artwork, notably for her large welded steel
sculptures. She continues to maintain a studio there, and works in
welded steel, cire perdue bronze, carved stone and wood, and fiberglass
resin. When not creating in her sculpture studio, Christina is painting
in mixed media and drawing from life. While traveling, Christina
has worked with rare and endangered species trusts in Africa and
assisted in the rehabilitation of cheetahs and vultures in Namibia. She
assisted in two archaeological digs in the Andes of Peru, and assisted
biologists with the study of a rare species of hummingbird in
Pichincha, Ecuador.

Her most recent paintings focus on her many trip to Los Islas Encantatas, the Galapagos Islands.
Her first works were created after her initial voyage there in 2002.
Unbeknownst to Christina at the time, she would be travelling there
many more times in the future as a guide for Butterfield & Robinson,
and in consequence fills several books with on site sketches. These
repeated trips gave her an increasingly insightful understanding of
that truly strange land. Oddly, the more she understood about the
place, the more mysterious the islands became for her. This series of
work is by far the most challenging show she has ever created. She
grappled with her vision of what the islands are to her, and tried to
express her impressions of the area. She explored ideas ranging from
our relationship with the islands as tourists and the seemingly magical
ability of visitors to physically approach the animals. Later she
focused on the land itself and the sometimes stark, sometimes humbling,
always fascinating landscape of these volcanic islands.

Her
paintings are mixed media on canvas, paper and board. Sometimes she
adds a collage element, using old maps of Ecuador and the Galapagos and
text from The Origin of the Species or The Voyage of the Beagle by
Charles Darwin. Occasionally she will add encaustic wax in specific
areas of the painting to build up texture, or layer paint and color in
such a way as to add depth or atmosphere to the art. Wildlife might be
painted directly or simply hinted at in a landscape, but invariably
there are echoes of what lured her to the islands in the first
place…its fascinating ecosystem that has made it called 'nature's
laboratory'