Chris is an illustrator and visual story teller. She is inspired from life lived in the Pacific Northwest and Hawaii. Chris spent most of her childhood exploring a pine forest near her home in North Idaho where she found a connection to the land and native people.
Her Grandfather was the head forest ranger in Sisters, Oregon. She learned to respect our natural environment from her grandparents teaching when they took her hiking, camping, canoeing and skiing.
Chris' biggest influence is her father, a Hall of Fame stunt pilot and airplane builder. Growing up she experienced the world from many different viewpoints including being upside down in the sky, helping on airshow sidelines and spending time in her Dad's shop watching the incredible process of hand building airplanes.
Her passions have included competitive gymnastics, slow-pitch softball, and snowboarding. She loves spending time with her family and also gardening, photography, camping, hiking, baking, and beautiful cars.
Chris' innate talent for drawing and painting encouraged creativity from an early age and sparked a long artistic career. She professionally mixed and tinted paint, acquired various skills including hand lettering, airbrush and spray work, ran a business painting window advertisements and wall murals, worked for a small business making all types of commercial signs, happily acted as lead creative sign designer and fabricator for a theme park, and managed a sign shop on Maui running large complex projects for multinational companies.
Chris loves to create using any material but is mostly attracted to glass. She worked with glass for 15 years on her own, then spent three years learning from Italian born glass maestro Narcissus Quagliata. She is now ready to create beautiful art pieces and promote environmental awareness using glass in a way it's never been used before. She strives to create public art for everyone to enjoy through illuminated glass panels and sculpture.