“I am trying to make paintings that look not like a child painted them, but like a child imagined them."
Christine Lowe has lived with spontaneous epileptic seizures since birth — more than twenty a month. She was not expected to survive this long. She spends most of her time at home in Cape Breton with her husband, her dogs, and her iPad, making paintings.
Born in Perth, Ontario in 1969 and raised in nearby Almonte, she studied Graphic Design at Algonquin College. Her childhood was saturated in the Warhol, Yellow Submarine, and Peter Max-inflected visual culture of 1970s North America — the magazine illustrations, TV commercials, and cartoons that made that decade visually unlike any other.
Those early influences expanded over time: Lichtenstein, Dalí, O'Keeffe, Art Nouveau, Mœbius, Patrick Nagel, 70s anime, comic books and graphic novels, and more recently A Scanner Darkly, Archer, and Black Dynamite. The thread running through all of it — bold outlines, flat colour, images that feel simultaneously familiar and slightly wrong.
Since 2018 she has been producing work at a sustained pace. Her paintings combine the stained-glass vibrancy of her early influences with something harder to name — a brightness that carries real weight underneath. She uses expansive flat colour to push toward abstraction, but the heavy outliner pulls the image back: you always know what you're looking at, even when it doesn't quite feel real.
The materials are part of the work. Cerne relief outliner. Metal leaf. Glitter. Metallic paints. Things usually found in craft stores, used here to make something that sits on the wall like a painting but reads in the hand like a sculpture. She is not interested in the boundary between the two.
The fear of sudden death, she says, is what drives her to keep working every day. The work itself — disjointed, luminous, slightly beyond reach — reflects a relationship with reality that most people will never have to understand from the inside.
Her art and story have been covered internationally, including features in Women's Journal, Artist Weekly, The London News, The Sun, and The Mirror.
She is currently exploring gallery partnership options.