: Christine Labich

Forests, Farms, and Riverways: 50 Years of Kestrel Land Trust

 

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Christine Labich is a landscape painter working in pastel and oil, dedicated primarily to a continual exploration of outdoor methods. Her work has won numerous international and national awards and is held in hundreds of private collections. Trained as an evolutionary biologist, she brings a deep knowledge of the landscape to each painting, and she seeks to support human-nature relationships through her work in the arts.

 

How often do we look up from what we are doing and appreciate the world that we are part of? Everything in our landscape is commonplace—the trees, clouds, water, rocks and sky are absolutely ordinary, and yet they are also completely magical. I want people to enjoy the magic of our ordinary world—to have a place to gaze and remember that we are not just our jobs, or our stories about ourselves, or our worries. We are part of something inexplicable, ungraspable, and luminous. We need this point of balance in our culture of striving and busyness.

In my work, I spend time looking at and responding to our ordinary, magical world. Through attention, I offer a visible expression of feelings that are often invisible or unspoken–feelings of mystery, inspiration, connectedness, interdependence, the preciousness of life, and the sweet-sadness of the fleeting nature of all things.