"Domestic" by Christine Bush Roman

Christine Bush Roman (b. 1983) is an artist and educator in Charleston, SC. She earned her MFA from the University of Georgia in 2013 and strives to combine visual art with storytelling. Christine actively exhibits her mixed media paintings nationally, locally, and with digital publications. You can find her work at Miller Gallery and through the artist’s website. When Christine is not in her studio, she stays busy homeschooling her children, writing stories, and hanging out with animals.

Christine Bush Roman creates mixed media paintings reflecting how one’s private, internal world intersects with the requirements and expectations of society. Through this lens, Christine explores themes of neurodiversity, womanhood, parenthood, and human bonds with nature. In Domestic, the artist focuses on the themes of caretaking, family life, and parenthood. For this exhibit, she has chosen her favorite pieces that depict different narratives of modern domestic life. Her whimsical and playful mixed media paintings incorporate subtle imagery that is dark or disquieting to highlight the contrast of extremes in caretaking. In a domestic environment, abundant joy, love, and gratitude are cut with feelings of resentment, regret, and confinement. Emphasizing the reality of modern life, the work can be chaotic and busy with elements of surrealism.

In these works, the artist uses traditional water-based drawing and painting materials and incorporates collaged papers and textiles. Her studio worktables are filled with trays of deconstructed drawings, handmade paper, and pictures pilfered from old books that will be used for collage. Each painting is unique and contains its own narrative, but Christine’s style is unified by a distinctive approach to color and mark-making that combines anthropomorphized creatures, geometry, sprawling organic shapes, and pattern.