Christine Lafuente

Trained in working from life, Christine takes inspiration from visual experiences of nature- living, breathing, changing nature. Whether painting outdoors by the sea or on a city rooftop, or indoors from the still life, she works exclusively by natural light because of the way it creates and dissolves forms into color fields and tonal notes. A painting can be a poetic response to a visual experience. She often works in series as a way to play with composition and has found that she often return to subjects again and again as a way to mark the passing of time.

Christine grew up in Poughkeepsie, NY. She received an A.B. in English from Bryn Mawr College in 1991. In 1995, she earned a Certificate in Painting and Printmaking from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and was awarded a Louis S. Ware Memorial Scholarship for European Travel. Soon after, Christine was awarded her first major exhibition through the Fleisher Challenge Competition in Philadelphia. While Artist-in-Residence at the Fleisher Art Memorial from 1997 to 2002, she began teaching painting.

She moved to Brooklyn, NY in early 2003, to earn a master’s degree in fine arts from Brooklyn College. Between 2009 and 2019, Christine traveled to and painted in Havana, Cuba; County Cork, Ireland; Oldwick, New Jersey; Mount Desert Island, Maine; Tuscany, Italy; and Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. In March 2020, she returned to Puerto Rico and sheltered-in-place there during the Coronavirus pandemic for five months.

In 2023, Christine received a grant from the Schaevitz Foundation and attended a printmaking residency at Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Italy. She lives and work in Brooklyn, NY and paints in Maine in the summers.