Christine Holub Carrig

Christine Holub Carrig spent her childhood beneath the wide Kansas sky, watching colors dance and flute across its ever-changing expanse. Those wild skies and their glorious, shifting palettes shaped her creative mind and kindled a lifelong love of color — a love that still animates everything she makes.

She pursued that passion at the University of California, Santa Cruz, earning a 60-unit certificate in graphic design and visual communication, where she honed the skills in design, composition, and color theory that became the foundation of her visual voice. She went on to study marketing at St. Mary’s College, graduating with honors.

Christine’s work is known for its analogous color palettes, asymmetrical compositions, and a keen sensitivity to negative space. A deep connection to the natural world runs as a current through everything she creates. Yet her curiosity is restless, and her practice ranges freely across media, from eucalyptus-leaf monoprints and shell-embedded coastal paintings to bold, mixed-media experiments in texture and sound.

Her newest series, Bringing the Thunder, carries her back to her Kansas roots in spirit, fusing monoprints, posterized photography, and printed cassette tape into charged, tactile works that pulse with the energy of rock ‘n’ roll. The series is a loving homage to her nephew, musician Jonathon Carter Hess of Salina, Kansas — and the colors she first chased across the prairie sky now return to her as rhythm, movement, and light.

Artist’s Website » https://chriscarrig4.wixsite.com/coastal-paintings/portfolio

On Display at the Ocean Blue Art Gallery July – Sept 2026 – Bringing the Thunder

Bringing the Thunder is an exploration of musical concepts and a loving homage to my gifted nephew. In this body of work I fuse mixed media, layering monoprints with posterized photography, to conjure a raw, visceral energy that crackles across each surface. I print with cassette tapes, those humble keepers of sound, and then embellish the work by hand, building dimensional, tactile pieces that ask to be felt as much as seen. The interplay of textures creates a charged atmosphere, electric and almost alive, echoing the rebellious grit and swagger of rock culture.

At the heart of the series is Carter Hess — my muse, my rock ‘n’ roller — whose musical spirit reverberates through every piece, infusing the work with rhythm, movement, and a defiant luminosity. A talented young musician, Carter has written and produced several albums with his band, the House of Artifacts, out of Salina, Kansas. If you love rock ‘n’ roll and want to hear Carter’s own twist on ’70s-inspired sound, take a listen here » https://gryphonswing.com/pages/jahbulon-records