Christina Ballantyne’s work, encompassing both painting and sculpture, is deeply rooted in her personal experiences, particularly her experience with temporal lobe epilepsy, which has fueled her interest in examining the role of feelings, perception, and sensory experience in her life. Her paintings employ rich colors, symbolism, and deliberate layering techniques to evoke a sense of emotion and spirituality. The process of layering, which allows old images to inform new ones, mirrors how past experiences shape our present ways of acting and perceiving the world. Ballantyne emphasizes her process of free association, a lack of preliminary drawings, and painting without brushes, viewing the process itself as a mirror reflecting her inner life and recurrent existential questions. She highlights the feeling of wholeness she experiences when her painting process is true and honest to herself, connecting this to psychological and spiritual concepts like attachment theory, codependency, and Zen Buddhism.

Christina Ballantyne (b.1990, Houston, TX) is a Los Angeles-based artist. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021, where she was a recipient of the Helen Frankenthaler award. Solo and two-person exhibitions include Untitled Houston, Julius Caesar (Chicago), Hair & Nails (Minneapolis, MN), Sulk (Chicago, IL), and Martha’s Contemporary (Austin, TX). Group exhibitions include NADA Miami, Felix Art Fair (Los Angeles, CA), Chez Max et Dorothea (Los Angeles), Make Room LA (Los Angeles, CA), and Andrew Raefacz (Chicago, IL). Her work has been featured in Hyperallergic, Artsy, and the Austin Chronicle. In 2025, she began Ouroboros, an artist critique program, alongside Ish Lipman.