Christine So was born and raised in California and its landscape still inspires her today. Her paintings and prints are always nature-inspired and nearly always monochromatic. After a decade spent as a printmaker making woodcuts, linocuts, etchings, aquatints and monotypes her mind works in monochrome. She focuses on a single color, composition, positive and negative space, pattern, lines and shape.

She currently works in two mediums: acrylic painting and cyanotypes in which light etches an image on paper she paints with light-sensitive chemicals. Her botanical cyanotypes are slow, camera-less photographs made outdoors using natural light and no film negative. There is no lens, etched plate, ink or printing press.

Her botanical cyanotypes of varying shades of blue are triple-exposure and sometimes quadruple-exposure cyanotypes. She arranges plant cuttings on paper coated with light-sensitive chemicals and then rearranges them in different locations on the same paper, re-exposing the paper to light multiple times to create ghostly overlapping images. The effect is like moonlight or sunlight through leaves.

In 2022 she invented her own technique for creating multiple-exposure abstract cyanotypes using water, rather than solid objects like plants, to create shapes and patterns. Her technique is a form of experimental photography, much like the action painter Morris Louis, who poured his veil paintings, or Jackson Pollock, who dripped and drizzled his. Her abstract cyanotypes are luminous like watercolor paintings but are actually photographs. Each is a multiple-exposure lensless photograph she makes through deliberate movements of the light-sensitive paper during its exposure to light. Different sections of the paper are exposed to light for a longer or shorter time to yield darker and lighter shades of blue.

Each abstract cyanotype can have up to 20 separate exposures in the print, each demarcated by a change in the shades of blue. Instead of creating a white silhouetted image by blocking light with solid objects on light-sensitive paper as in traditional single-exposure cyanotypes, So uses water to block the light, creating subtle gradations of darkening blue as she submerges the light-sensitive paper for different carefully timed exposures under water, turning, bending and lifting the paper as needed to shape the lines before they become permanently etched by the sun’s light.
She spends much time planning the exact composition and carefully timing the separate exposures.

In addition to her printmaking work, So has worked in other mediums including collage, encaustic, oils, acrylic, and bronze, clay and stone sculpture. Her works hang in hotels, hospitals, corporate offices and private collections in ten countries. Her cyanotypes have also been published in “The Hand” magazine, “Aeonian” photography magazine and featured online by “Analog Forever” magazine.