"The World Is Blue: Hand-Printed Botanical, Landscape and Abstract Cyanotypes"
Christine So is a native San Franciscan painter, photographer and printmaker living across the bay in the hills of Oakland, California. Her paintings and cyanotypes have been commissioned by Starbucks, Mayo Clinic, Kimpton Hotels, Wyndham Worldmark Hotels, MD Anderson Hospital in Houston, UTMB Hospital in Galveston and purchased by private collectors in 10 countries, among them, Timothée Chalamet.
Her calm, monochromatic, nature-inspired works on paper are not printed with ink but are actually a form of photography from the 1800s. She works in the antique photographic process of cyanotypes, creating abstract and botanical monotypes in shades of blue as well as landscape photographs of the foggy woods where she lives. The plants used in her one-off prints are cut from her own garden or found in the woods nearby and printed on pure cotton watercolor paper. No two are alike. Only her landscape photographs developed using giant negatives and the same cyanotype chemicals are replicable, yet even those hand-printed photographs each differ slightly.
She paints in acrylic on canvas and prints cyanotypes on paper. Most of her works on paper are sold unframed though the display photos may depict them as framed on a virtual wall to give a sense of their size. There are some paintings listed as unframed and others as framed. Take not of the description before purchasing.