Today we’d like to introduce you to Paul Cristina.
Hi Paul, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
Most of the things I did and focused on creatively at a young age were mostly music related with a lot of sporadic childhood drawing on the side, which continued into my teens. Music was the primary focus which mainly included sound manipulation and sound collage with turntables and stereo tape decks in the late 90s and throughout the 2000s. I later incorporated and taught myself keyboards, software programming and using them with other effects hardware, which led to making more elaborate multitrack compositions and playing live shows with some bandmates. During that time, let’s say late 2009, I went back to school and eventually began working as an EMT/Paramedic in 2010 and continued that work until 2017. I first started to mess around with painting and mixed-media collage on canvas during 2008/9, but never committed myself to it in any serious way. Then around 2014/15, for one reason or another, I developed a renewed interest in making larger-scale, more ambitious paintings and drawings. It was then that I started drawing in charcoal, which opened a massive door of new capabilities that I previously hadn’t been aware of, which started a new ball rolling into many different artistic directions and much experimentation where I was just trying to understand what I was capable of, understanding what I liked and didn’t like and attempting to find some sort of way forward. Gradually I began to show my work publicly, in physical spaces and online around 2015/16, which led to selling some work here and there, getting offered more shows, connecting with other artists, having an audience of interested viewers and then the trajectory and creative momentum gradually grew out of all that over the course of a few years and, much to my surprise, has continued into the present day.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Nothing worth loving and being dedicated to is ever smooth. The so-called struggles are small daily things that you strengthen yourself towards. Hurdles are always in front of you, but how well you pass over them depends on the strength of your legs, how high you can jump and your mental focus on the task at hand. So it’s about gradually getting stronger, which means being more mentally and physically equipped to deal with life as a whole in order to become a better problem solver day after day.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
My visual art has shifted around over the years throughout different stages of development, but most of it has been focused around figurative mixed-media collage, working with layers using charcoal, glue and oil paints. It’s an ongoing process of making crap, looking for interesting combinations of ideas to form and go from there into someplace unknown, for better or worse.
Do you have any memories from childhood that you can share with us?
I don’t have a favorite, but maybe a funny short story that happened to me in 7th grade: I was at school in the later part of the day in between classes. I was taking a pee in the bathroom by myself in the wall urinal. As I was using the bathroom, I heard a large fight and yelling suddenly going on right outside the bathroom door in the hallway. I thought to myself, “What the hell is going on out there?” I finished up doing my business and went towards the door, which pushed outward into the hallway when you exited. Little did I know that there was these two boys fighting and wresting super hard on the hallway floor directly in front of the bathroom door exactly at the time that I exited. So on my way out the bathroom, I apparently pushed the door open so hard that it flung with a loud crash like a baseball bat and struck both of the kids directly in their heads while they were wrestling, which basically stopped the fight for a second because both kids went tumbling across the floor like rag dolls from the door slamming into their heads.
So I immediately looked down at my feet and saw both kids sprawled out on the floor squirming around in front of me, dizzy from the hit. I didn’t know what the hell just happened, so I quickly looked up and saw that the entire hallway was packed with about a hundred kids watching the fight. Everyone was standing there frozen in shock and staring at me in confusion as I suddenly found myself in the center and surrounded by this large crowd of students after just having exited the bathroom. The whole crowd was dead silent for that brief moment, the bathroom door slowly closes behind me, the two kids are still squirming around the floor and you could hear a pin drop in the hall. So I immediately looked around with a smile on my face and started waving to everybody and just very casually said, “Hey, how’s everybody doing!?… Nothing to see here, I was just taking a piss!” Then the whole crowd busted out laughing and I just walked away down the hall like nothing happened. True story.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.paulcristina.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paul_cristina/?hl=en
Image Credits
IMAGES: 1) Visions of Tokyo, 2018 2) Body Exchange, 2020 3) Midnight Jungle Attack, 2022 4) Bending Bunraku, 2021 5) Man with Tits Eating Cereal, 2019 6) Hiding and Seeking in Hypnagogia, 2023 7) Memorygraphs, 2021 8) Prefabricated Face Selector, 2022 *all images courtesy of Paul Cristina
