Christy Higgins is an artist and essayist based in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. She holds a B.A. in Psychology from California State University – Fullerton and an M.A. in Spiritual Psychology from University of Santa Monica.

Before moving to Mexico with her husband in 2016, she lived in the Los Angeles area of southern California. Raised in Fullerton, CA, she relocated to Los Angeles after graduating college where she meandered somewhat aimlessly through various administrative and management positions in education, entertainment, and the arts.

Although she had been surrounded by art and artists all her life, she did not begin creating art of her own until the early days of the pandemic in 2020. Following a suggestion in a magazine article, she began making small collages. Almost immediately, the images, that seemed to naturally spring forth from unknown depths of her unconscious, surprised her. She was inspired to continue making art and it eventually led her to explore these surreal and uncanny images by writing about them in thought-provoking essays, essays that aim to weave a narrative around identity, art-making, and healing through the lens of mythology and depth psychology.

She enjoys exploring the crossroads where nature and spiritual ideas coalesce in mythological themes. "I'm not trying to say anything specific with the images or objects I create, but I feel strongly that my art has something to say to me (and to us). Both my artwork and essays are expressions of my ongoing exploration of the intersection between the inner dimensions and the outer world. Being a Seeker is an integral part of who I am and what fuels my interest in art, travel, and writing, as well as psycho-spiritual exploration. However, my seeking is not just about my own healing journey. I engage with my artwork, my essays, and my spiritual practices as all existing on the same continuum—interrelated and in service to healing on a collective level."

"For personal reasons which I've written about in my blog The Seeker's Notebook (christyhiggins.com) I did not begin making art until midlife. It has since become a way of life that feels more authentic and meaningful to me than anything I've ever done. It's a way for me to make my essential contribution to the collective creative expression of the human tribe for the purpose of connecting, healing, and evolving together. I finally feel like I'm participating in my real life."

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The last two lines of the poem closing Baudelaire's opus encapsulate graphically and vividly the urge driving the creative process.

Le Voyage calls on Death to help the poet transition from life to death in order for him to experience new emotions.

To create is to surrender to an attraction, to descend into a rabbit hole in pursuit of a promised heightening of one's consciousness while risking one's demise in the process.

Or it is answering a bewitching siren call: alluring and mysterious, hypnotic and not without danger. It overwhelms one's reason by appealing to the randomness of being the one forced to an encounter with Destiny.

Whether done compulsively or deliberately, the act of creation solicits a fateful date with an inchoate notion that demands structure and order and texture to then stand alone, independent, viable, complete: a breathing creation!

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Ann Chamberlin's paintings are presented in the manner and scale of dollhouses where people are caught, like deer in the headlights, in narratives of havoc, mayhem or myth. The scenes are often set at the edge of something - a jagged seashore, falling into a pond of snakes, or beset by bandits on the roadside. There are marauders on the horizon, obtrusive thought bubbles about handsome sailors, or written pronouncements that say "I have NOTHING to wear" or "go back!" The style is naïve --though never innocent—and values our uncertainties about these most awkward moments of an examined life.

Chamberlin has lived and worked for most of the past 20 years in Mexico, from the coast of Nayarit to San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato. She has exhibited continuously in the Los Angeles area since 1989, including solo gallery shows at Jan Baum, Lora Schlesinger , and Craig Krull, and major group shows at the Gallery at REDCAT, the L.A. Municipal Art Gallery, and the Laguna Art Museum. Elsewhere, she has had solo exhibitions at Galeria Arte AC, Monterrey, Mexico, Mia Gallery, Seattle, and the Centro Colombo Americano, Medellín Colombia. Awards include MAA/NEA grant in painting, the California Community Foundation/ Getty Trust Fund for the Arts Individual Artist grant, City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship, artist residency at La Muse, La Bastide Espairbairenque, France and a Fulbright Scholar award to Medellín, Colombia. She has a B.F.A. from the Universidad de las Américas, Puebla, Mexico and an M.F.A from the University of Texas, Austin. Currently she shows at Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica and the the Chapel of Jimmy Ray in La Cieneguita, Mexico.

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