Christen's paintings explore our relationship with the landscape as well as its flora and fauna. Focusing on the Blue Ridge Mountain area of central Virginia, she uses loose and suggestive strokes that imply an immediacy of experience within which she wants the viewer to linger. Painting for her is a process of paying attention, of looking at the layers of meaning we ascribe to our placed-ness and hopefully evoking moments of re-humanizing connections. Christen lives and works by the mountains just outside of Charlottesville, Virginia with her husband, four kids and flock of hens.