Maxine Christensen

Maxine Christensen is a freelance illustrator, painter, artist and designer.  Maxine speaks English and French fluently.  She is a published book Illustrator, an exhibited painter and has taught at the Superior Fine Arts School of Avignon.  Maxine is an American residing in the South of France.  She works from her studio in Avignon, France. 

Always lurking in the back of my mind, even as a young girl, was the power of a pencil to disfigure an ordinary face into something intensely beautiful and odd. I loved how one small slur of the line changed a nose, an eye, or turned a simple expression into one of pain. I didn’t know anyone else had done this; I had few art books to consult as a child. My father is a poet, and there were lots of books around, but few of them had pictures, which is how my imagination was wired. I sometimes think I learned about the world only through my eyes and not my other senses. And reading, while fun at times, was so abstract and arbitrary, I couldn’t learn as much from words as from the power of a face drawn by a single wandering line of ink.

School was all about words and numbers and it was a difficult time for me. I learned, but my learning was always half-way. My father once told a teacher by way of introducing me for the first time, that one side of my mind was cooked and sophisticated, and the other side was raw, difficult to work with. The teacher may have noted this, but when it came to the rules, I was lumped in with all the other students and treated more or less as ordinary. But I could draw, and in my wrist are all these tiny muscles and nerves that read my thoughts so exactly, I was sometimes astonished to see what my hand was doing, as if without any will of my own. Drawing liberated me; it was like having wings. It took me places no other power could provide. I could draw and my dreams began. My beautiful wrist and fingers were as sure of other worlds as if they had always lived there.

Disfigurement of the body and the face were the dark side of the beautiful. A fat woman was the hidden side of the moon, the side where ugliness ruled and deformity had its imagination and its powers of speech. To behold such oddities of nature and the body was to expand one’s vocabulary, and to discover the humor in mistakes, in misjudgments and experiments gone bad. The withered arm was a door leading into a fantasy land of alternative reality, and a birth mark or a crooked leg took you to the door of the house of fables. When beauty crumbles, a hidden palace reveals itself for the first time, where black magic and nightmares are the furniture, and the kitchen is filled with jars of enchanted liquors and poisons. I was not afraid to open such doors, or to stare at freaks and misfits. They were all part of some feared and rejected language of the soul, my soul in particular.

But who is to say what is beautiful? It is only a perception of balance and symmetry, or order. Disorder begins the boundary of the ugly and the damned, but it is also the beginning of a winding path that leads to  higher order and to more mysterious forms of expression, both of the world and of the human imagination. Failure and rejection are the ruling spirits of this world; it keeps away the shallow and the cowardly souls, who cling to what they know. This other world is the kingdom of the wolf, and the monsters that move freely in the dark of the haunted woods. The road out of the conventional world, with its blinding illumination and its white walls, its swept floors and timid chairs, this road knows the way to the back of the mind, which remains untouched by any civilization or language. It is the place of silence and of brooding; it is the origin of unpredictability and miracles. It is where women have no boundaries or restraints. It is where odd love, and the perverse are mine shafts into the unknown. It is where gold falls out of the earth and lies there ready to be made into figurines of the Venus of infinite love. It is where fertility mixes its sperm with the spittle of devils and makes tiny djinns who rise on their transparent wings into the upper world to sit on the fair skin of virginity and trouble it.

Not until I happened upon Hieronymous Bosch did I discover a kindred spirit, a second father to my own imagination. The great triptychs of hell laid out a map of this region wandering behind thought and word, and where all consciousness became these images of a second world. I couldn’t have known that Diane Arbus was waiting for me a few years later, or that I would be adopted by Francisco Goya the moment I turned a page and found myself in Spain, witnessing the execution of frightened peasant soldiers. I was there, and I was also holding a brush painting the hideously ugly, obese duchesses who sat impatiently in their soiled splendor. I smelled Goya’s sweat and felt the grit of his skin when he made love to me. I stole his brushes and sneaked back to my bedroom to paint the same faces until I had memorized everything he could teach me. He was my lord and savior, my redeemer. He told me one thing over and over again: the grotesque is the beginning of wisdom.

My awakening took, not too final form when my parents took me to the Fondation Maeght, near St. Paul de Vence, on the  French Riviera, which was hosting a retrospective on the work of Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud. My eyes feasted on Freud’s portrait of a human whale sprawled on a red sofa, eyes full of passion and openness, the painter’s brush licking at every inch of the woman’s corpulence. Bacon’s faces were in the first shock of being punched; his bodies writhed in pain on mysterious beds in rooms that were made of screams and helpless sobbing. In the bowels of torment lay human subjects that had come to life for the first time, having been flung out of all predictability. They shined; they were red with life, excitement. They were horrible, and they were beautiful simultaneously.

I continue to find my nurture in the human face, the tensed muscles, the sagging lips, the fierce and insulted eyes, the rage of the accused, the surprise of the murderer, the astonished and haughty air of the shoplifter. I am the devil’s secretary when I am inspired. I love the line that knows no master, and longs like a stray dog for its freedom in the gutters and the ditches, in the slums, in the woods where no one dares to go. I am only a child in this world; I learn every day something new that delights me, teaches me, leads me on further into the place that has been rejected, surrounded by the high walls of dread and cringing emotions. I have already built a house in that region, and consider it my summer place.  I do not reject the beautiful because it is perfect; I love the well-made universe as much as anyone. I just feel another universe, equally demanding and thoughtful, lies just below it, to the right of it, like the moon next to the earth.

Many thanks to Paul Christensen, my father, published author and professor at Texas A&M University for his loving help.