Mawrter Made: The Power of Play

Christine Lafuente ’90 is a still life and landscape oil painter, known for her alla prima (in one sitting) wet-into-wet technique focusing on the interplay of color and light. Subsequent to finishing her Bryn Mawr degree, she completed the certificate program from the Pennsylvania Academy of the  Fine Arts and earned her MFA at Brooklyn College. Her work has been exhibited in the U.S. and internationally and has been the subject of 35 solo shows and numerous group shows. Through the course of her career, she has been the recipient of many grants, awards, and artist residencies, including the Philadelphia Sketch Club Medal for Achievement in Visual Arts and two full fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center.  Based in Brooklyn, N.Y., Lafuente also teaches painting workshops, paints during summers in Maine, and has painted in residence in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Venice, Italy.

“As a child, I drew and painted and did a lot of theater, and those were passions for me. But I came to Bryn Mawr thinking that I was going to be a math major, until my freshman English class, The Disappearance of God, hooked me. I loved being an English major. I went away for my junior year, and when I came back, after all those years of writing papers, I had this craving to think and solve problems in a more visceral, creative way, by drawing and painting and sculpting from life. It connected me again with the power of play and creative expression.

I remember being in the Barnes Collection, experiencing the physicality of the objects in the museum, and realizing I could make things with my hands. I felt really insane—my friends were taking the GRE and the LSAT— but I applied to the Certificate Program at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Bryn Mawr had taught me how to be deeply interested in what I was studying. I brought that with me into the program and thrived there.

Right after the program, I married. A year later, the marriage fell apart, which was tragic for me, but I applied to be artist-in-residence at Fleisher Art Memorial and moved in there. The residency, which was supposed to be two years, lasted five. Eventually, I decided to apply to graduate school and came to Brooklyn. 

That year, my dad was killed at the World Trade Center on 9/11. At times like the divorce, losing my dad, the grief around that, it was so hard to go back to the studio. My teacher, Seymour Remenick, told me to draw like a fiend and paint like a fiend and don't judge anything that comes out. Just by sitting down at the easel, we start to remember why we're doing it. Drawing and painting from life brings me the joy of visual experience. There's a buoyancy, a transcendence. It’s helped me get through grief and self-doubt and depression.

Oil is endlessly experimental. There's a way that it can be built and layered and played with; it's very sensuous. There's a pleasure in handling the paint.  But it’s also disgusting and clunky, putting this stuff on a hairy stick. And a painting is a crude approximation of an experience. I usually can't appreciate my work until I look at it like a year later; then I can see it on its own terms, have a little bit of detachment. Teaching for me is like theater—it's performing. I always have stage fright beforehand, but once I'm with people, it has a life of its own. I love when I can give somebody understanding of the craft, watch them have breakthroughs. When I teach, it also ends up being a way for me to learn something that could be useful to me as an artist. It's nourishing to the work. I taught a class on oil painting, on how different mediums layer and blend. After doing that work and then teaching it, I had a whole new understanding.  

Bryn Mawr was not a competitive environment between women. At Bryn Mawr, we experienced each other in relation to the work we did together. All of the galleries that I work with are owned and run by women. Many of my collectors are women. A lot of my students are women. Women working together can do amazing things. And I feel very proud of that.”