Christina ; an independent spirit.

 

Even at age 3 she made an attempt for freedom. In true escapee style she burrowed under a fence and toddled to the bus stop. This girl was going to town!. She smartly attached herself to a woman and child, and got on the bus. Much later, her worried parents found her enjoying ice cream with the police and unwilling to return to captivity.

 

This early escape set the pattern for more exploration. Funded by a doting aunt she went to England to be taught the ways of polite society. (After learning how to fold a napkin, which knife and fork to use, and how to address serving staff, she went to look after a doctor’s children). From here she enrolled in Ravensbourne College of Art and Design, to study Fine Art; drawing, painting and  sculpture;. She left with the requisite Diploma, impatient to discover more of the art world. She found she could sell illustrations to greetings card companies and proceeded to mine this rich field. 

 

Meanwhile she had married Barry and took an apartment in Beckenham. Barry’s childhood friend  the aspiring musician, David Bowie, moved in with them,. David later moved downstairs for more space into Mary Finnegan’s apartment. Christina’s husband drove around the licence-less David to gigs and to pick up his new wife Angie. To further their joint vision of an arts hub discussed over many evenings, with friends they set up the Beckenham Arts Lab in what was then the Three Tuns pub, already a folk-singing friendly venue. A friend from College, George Underwood, a gifted illustrator and artist, produced artwork for David’s album covers. By this time, Christina had had a son. When Bowie moved to London to pursue his burgeoning career, the thought of nappies, nipples and vegetable slurry in suburbia awakened the old desire to escape.

 

Selling the impedimenta of suburban flat living, in 1972 the couple bought an old London taxi and drove in the direction of Marrakech with their young son. On the way to Morocco, a chance suggestion found them lifting the cab in a net onto the deck of a ferry bound for an unknown Ibiza. On reaching Ibiza town and unloading the cab, they tossed a coin, left or right? The coin said right, so they took the camino, and ended up in San Carlos in the north of the island and pitched their home-made tent.

 

In the village shop a chance encounter with a BBC employee who had to return to England early turned up a more comfortable camp-site offer; two weeks remaining in the girl’s rented house, behind Anita's Bar. The new landlords were the film actors Denholm Elliott and Terry Thomas! Christina suggested setting up a gallery with Susie, Denholm’s wife. This arrangement was to continue for several years with Christina painting at every opportunity. With a friend from Sweden, Annie Brobeck, she set up a children’s clothes shop in Santa Eulalia. The Yves St. Laurent franchise opened up shops in Barcelona and Madrid, with Annie and Christina designing the interiors and designing the clothes and shops.

 

After separating from her then partner, in 1982 she returned to Sweden She successfully got a job in fashion design. As her work became known, she was headhunted and went on to design clothing for Marc O’Polo the fashion brand. She designed and commissioned lines; designed fabrics and oversaw their production in India and their manufacture in Portugal. 

 

1987 saw her return to England, with a productive period of painting to commission and painting bespoke kitchen furniture. She and her then partner set up a business refurbishing and hand-painting antique furniture.

 

A trip to Kenya decided her, on impulse, to stay and paint in a house on the coast in Mombasa. This was a busy 3 year period of painting, surviving malaria and absorbing colourful Kenya (including surviving a near-death experience at the hands of superstitious locals, who associated a white woman with a black dog and a black friend with child kidnap practices, which left her more than a little shaky!).

 

The fruits of her African labours were hailed in a sell-out show in Cork Street in London’s Mayfair in 1998. She remained in England  becoming “artist in residence” for Raymond Blanc at Le Petit Blanc in Oxford until its sale. She painted commissions and exhibited in various galleries in the Cotswolds.

 

She has painted her own unique record of her escape into a special imagined parallel universe until the present day.