From Plural Art Mag:

• “FA Flight into Fairyland Darkness : The Art of Christine Bay

To me — and I’ll call it like it is– Christine R. Bay’s paintings read like little excerpts from fairy tales written by gnomes who were high on shrooms.

Except that there are no gnomes at play here; it is simply Christine herself, an ex-programmer in digital advertising, turned full-time artist. For the first few years of her practice, she balanced her day job with painting at night, channelling all her pent-up creative impulses onto her canvases. Scrolling through her portfolio, it is clear that Christine is never short on wild imagination, the kind that makes you wonder what she’s been consuming intellectually.

The self-professed pop surrealist paints mainly portraits and her figurative paintings are delicate, with the intimacy of a dream diary.

In her portraits, you find a girl cradling a bee the size of a baby, a face appearing at the heart of a bisected onion, adolescent faces peeping out beneath the beaks of birds, and many more enigmatic amalgamations.

All-Seeing, 2023. Oil on primed wood panel

Onion and Moths, 2023. Oils on Primed Wood Panel

Recurring motifs serve as an anchor to the otherwise bizarre choice of subjects, forming a set of visual vocabularies unique to the artist. Moths, black-naped orioles, long tresses and heavy bangs– these are phrases that hardly belong in the same sentence. But together, in Christine’s paintings, they speak to a journey of self-discovery and healing.”