Biography
Christina Grace Mastrangelo (b. 1983, Jacksonville, FL, USA) grew up in Western Massachusetts. Always fascinated by figurative painting, her passion first ignited during a visit to the Norman Rockwell Museum and was further cultivated in her adolescent years amidst travels to the Louvre and Vatican Museums.
While pursuing her degree in Studio Art through the Honors College at James Madison University, Christina further developed her interests abroad, studying Humanism, Italian, and Art History at the British Institute in Florence, Italy. She painted and absorbed the abundance of art across Europe before graduating from JMU's Honors College in 2006.
Immediately following graduation she returned to Florence to attend the rigorous drawing and painting program at the Angel Academy of Art. In 2009, after three years of training and living in Florence, she graduated and returned to the U.S. where she has been pursing her painting career ever since.
Click here to view her 2024 CV.
An internationally recognized artist, Christina has shown at The European Museum of Modern Art in Barcelona, Spain, the Villa Bardini in Florence, Italy, and has had solo shows at the Michele and Donald D'Amour Museum of Fine Arts in Springfield, Massachusetts and the St. Botolph Club in Boston, MA. Her most recent awards were from the International Art Renewal Center, Portrait Society of America, Oil Painters of America, and the Salmagundi Club. She is currently represented by the Guild of Boston Artists in Boston and Williams Fine Art Dealers in Wenham, Massachusetts.
Throughout the year, Christina spends her time between Massachusetts and Florida. She teaches workshops at the Academy of Realist Art in Boston, Massachusetts, the Mill Studio of Fine Arts in Manchester, Connecticut, and the First Coast Cultural Center in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, amongst other venues. A teacher for over 15 years, Christina has also compiled her lessons and techniques in a Patreon library for online learning. She is married to Nicholas McNally, artist and Associate Professor of Illustration at Jacksonville University, and together they have a young son.
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Artist Statement
As a visual artist, I enjoy painting the natural world around me- landscapes, florals, still lifes, figures- but my main subjects are women. I am interested in making paintings that show the better parts of the human soul - acts of introspection, curiosity, conviction, connection - and it is my hope that when each portrait is viewed, it's the inner narrative one sees over the external beauty of the portrait.
My painting ideas live with me for a long time before they ever make it to canvas. They become refined and distilled through lengthy contemplation so as to show only what is absolutely necessary to communicate my sentiments. In this way, my figures are often wearing nothing to set them in a certain time or place, and there is very little around them. I am also not interested in magnifying details- my depictions hover in the space of what we see when we are a few steps away, aware of the whole. Here there is an intimacy and yet a distance, allowing for a reverence for the muse while at the same time showing her to the world.
Lately there has been an introduction of birds and bugs in my work. The communion of a bee with a flower, or a butterfly lingering as if gazing right back at the figure in front of it- to me it sparks the idea that the inner-landscape of these beings on the canvas are present and conversing, and we are witnesses to it. It's all imaginary, of course, but to the point of almost child-like wonder about our connection to the essence of other beings. I attribute this to being the mother of a toddler... an artist immersed in a child's pure world.