It is the sensorial that drives Wolheim. And the profundity of learning by doing.

Ambitious, creative, and curious, this is an artist of many hats. A pluralist.

Her professional life as a creative began at 14, in a strict French kitchen. The dance with fire, the adrenaline, and the multisensory potential of food as a medium intrigued her. Intellectually food is an infinite font culturally, socially, politically and emotionally. A fertile period ensued. Immersed in weights and measures of semolinas, meats, oils and acrylics, Christine thrived in kitchens both humble and starred, with hardscramble crews who became family in far corners of the world….

Wanting to pursue less temporal art forms, Wolheim returned to her native California, where she pursued painting and photography, at the San Francisco Art Institute.  There, she developed a distinctive style of collage as both a medium and painterly compositional strategy. In parallel, and inspired by the varied tradition of abstract expressionism, her intuitive relationship to color and mark-making played out in large abstract canvases. 

For Wolheim the work always derives from phenomenological experience. Painting is energy. Cuts and scraps. Textural pleasures of paint. Saturation of colour. Ingredients, their measures, their pairings, their smells. Dense forests. Back alleys. Stammering in new languages. Humble encounters. Collaborations. The gravitas of a warm, crusty pull of bread. The consequence of a found, vintage silver spoon. Dinners and seats at the table. Getting lost. Discovery.

It’s not about translating an idea or image, but rather magnifying the energy of that experience whether through abstract or representational forms.

This notion itself is magnified in Wolheim’s approach to the canvas, particularly her abstract paintings: “There’s something about the verticals. It’s what my body does when it meets the canvas. The physicality of the paint is in direct relationship to how my body is interacting with the canvas and paint”. The immersive scale and gesture is important for the maker and subsequently the viewer. The abstract paintings emerge out of a collaborative effort between the artist and her materials, and the limiting parameters she sets forth for the painting to realize “itself.”

Whereas her palpable gestures annunciate her physicality in her abstract paintings, they rather seamlessly paint the ground upon which the figure nests or abounds, drawing attention to their figure-ground relationship that is so slippery and essential in her image based, collage style compositions. There, and in her actual collages, pattern and repetition, whether painted, collaged, or perceived within compositions, is an essential element in these works. They not only reference interior physical spaces, but internal, psychological spaces as well, eliciting Christine’s belief that our biography becomes our biology, on a cellular level, thus determining our behavior patterns.

Wolheim’s vocabulary employs colour, shape, movement, erosion, images, layering and placement. Her palette, whether working in pure abstraction or selected iconic images, ranges in rich, saturated, often incongruent hues to soothingly spare uses of what, at first glance, appear to be black and white on raw canvas. In reality these contain much nuance in color, texture, and sheen.

Christine Wolheim lives in San Francisco and she’s restoring a log cabin in her hometown of Kings Beach, Lake Tahoe. She works per assignment as a Food and Prop Stylist and set designer for her day job. She also teaches art workshops, and mentors junior artists. She loves hunting for source inspiration, vintage textiles, cultural artifacts and props, to add to her large prop and surface collection. As an ex-chef, Christine still cooks for friends, drinks wine, makes runners, bags, clothing, and custom fragrances. She has a habit of re-doing orphan chairs, loves riding her Vintage Vespa, which reminds her of her years living in Italy. Christine practices Reiki as a way to help herself and others regulate their nervous system in a chaotic world.

To see her commercial work go to: www.wolheimstyle.com

Read Interview / See Modeling Session with Christine