Chris Hagie took years of art classes when she was younger, focusing on drawing, painting, portraits, landscape, oils and other mediums. What she realized early on was that she loved colors, shapes, lines and textures and how they intersect. As an educator most of her career as a professor (training special-ed teachers), she can put words to anything, yet what she creates now no words suffice as art is a different part of her brain and is wholly visual…. she indicates with a sparkle in her eye.
She and her husband moved to the coast a few years ago and her focus morphed into mixed media/collage using acrylic paints, soft pastels and incorporating collage, photographs, mesh, textiles and other mediums ‘she likes to look at’ into her striking work. She is inspired by many abstract artists, the coast, the redwood forest she lives in where she sees shapes, lines and shadows.
Before she starts on a piece, she identifies a background (wood panel, heavy watercolor paper, etc), she then picks out the colors she wants to incorporate and finally envisions a general compositional format. Slowly she adds layer upon layer to the work until as she says “when my eye looks and is smiling will I know a piece in finished and a voice says ‘I like it!”
A unique inspiration to her work comes when she is flying over Vancouver Island to visit relatives and she sees the many logging channels in the water below with the myriad of shapes and lines, in different clumps. The visual aspect of these visuals inspires some of her work.
“I loved being part of a team developing educational content and now at Edgewater, I love being around art and artists. It is so inspiring.”
