Christine Richman is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, drawing, sculpture, and design. Working in oil, acrylic, charcoal, and plaster, she investigates the structural correspondences between the human body and the natural world — the way bone and branch, neuron and root, cast shadows that are startlingly alike. Her work, ranging from large-scale organic abstractions to illuminated plaster sculptures and precise charcoal drawings, is held together by an abiding attention to pattern, light, and the hidden geometry connecting all living things.

Richman holds a BFA in Painting from Indiana University (2001) where she studied classical technique in the university's Florence Painting Program. Before returning to her studio full-time, she spent over fifteen years as an art and creative director — work that deepened her understanding of visual storytelling and formal clarity.

Her work has been exhibited nationally, with recent and upcoming shows at UNREPD (Los Angeles), Laughlin Gallery (Highland Park, IL), and Evanston Art Center (Evanston, IL).

Her work has been featured in House Beautiful, Sheridan Road Magazine, and DuJour, and is held in private and institutional collections, including Indiana University. Richman lives and works in Wilmette, IL.

Artist Statement

2025

Light doesn't just illuminate — it reveals structure. The shadow a bone casts through skin rhymes with the silhouette of a winter branch. A neuron's branching pattern rhymes with the root system of a tree, or the fractal edge of a coastline. I make work about these correspondences. Not metaphors, but genuine structural kinships: the insistence of the universe to return, at every scale, to the same essential forms.

My paintings begin with looking — at the cellular architecture inside a plant stem, the grid of light a window throws across a floor, the strange geometry of a human body at rest. I work in oil, acrylic, charcoal, and alcohol ink, building surfaces where organic abstraction and observation meet. My plaster sculptures trace the shadow-forms of bone: luminous, quiet objects that ask what the body holds in common with a tree.

The female figure runs through all of it — not as subject, exactly, but as evidence. A body is made of the same matter and the same structures as the world it moves through. I look for the moment when a viewer feels its presence, not because she is told it exists but because it is already there.