Biography
Christina Grace Mastrangelo (b.1983) is a European-trained Classical Realist Painter who has dedicated herself to studying, teaching, and professionally painting figurative work for over 15 years. A 2009 graduate of the Angel Academy of Art in Florence, Italy, she has won awards for her work from the Art Renewal Center, Portrait Society of America, Oil Painters of America, the Salmagundi Club, and more. She has shown at notable venues, including a solo show at the St. Botolph Club in Boston, MA, the Villa Bardini in Florence, Italy, twice at both the European Museum of Modern Art (MEAM) in Barcelona, Spain and the Michele and Donald D'Amour Museum of Fine Arts in Springfield, Massachusetts, including a solo show at the latter. Most recently, in 2024 she exhibited forty-four pieces at the Guild of Boston Artists for a solo show and was featured in Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine as one of "Five Artists to Watch" and American Art Collector Magazine's "Artist Focus."
Click here to view her 2024 CV.
She is currently represented by the Guild of Boston Artists in Boston, Massachusetts, Susan Powell Fine Art in Madison, Connecticut, 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.