The artist's path began over two decades ago, when, following years of window design on Rodeo Drive and art direction in film, television and special events, Skaggs had the opportunity to study privately with master painter Mr. Gilbert Batty. Batty first arrived in the United States at the invitation of Sir Alfred Hitchcock to apply his decorative painting skills to the legendary director's new Beverly Hills mansion. Batty's study of painting began as a child in the great buildings of turn-of-the-century London helping his father and grandfather guild and paint to seamlessly match the finest stones of the day.

Batty was 92 when Christina began her two-year apprenticeship in centuries-old painting techniques, and she was his last student. Christina then studied with Battys' protege, master painter Carol Free, who specialized in painting furniture inspired by antique European and Asian pieces for designer showrooms in the Pacific Design Center and surrounding area.

Christina moved to Hawaii in 1990, and, for the last twelve years has been designing jewelry for galleries. This may explain her intimate knowledge of precious metals and how they look when they are ancient and worn and gleam with the patina of age.

Skaggs' work is the interplay of extremes, the juxtaposition of the primitive and the super modern. They are as much about shape and texture, the traditional preoccupations of sculpture as they are about color. The colors are suspiciously reminiscent of the shells, pearls, abalones, corals and stones extracted from the earth that she has been stringing along all these years.

"What I do:

This work is about hope. It is the vision, the dream, of a global dialogue, born of the inherent beauty in the blended languages of ancient cultures. The creative inspiration is from the earliest scripts, chants, carvings and petroglyphs of Hawaiian, Phoenician, Chinese, Japanese, Tibetan, Cambodian, Hebrew, Ethiopian, Mayan, Arabic, Indian, Javanese, Greek, Etruscan and roofs that rust. Given the 'mixed plate' of Pacific cultures in which we live here on these islands, my work more recently, has focused on Oceania".

"My artistic representations are of petroglyphs, tapas, Polynesian tattoos and Maori ocean designs. My intention as the artist is to bow deeply, to what touches me the most, and that is what has come before, and helped to pave my way."

"How I do it:

The process of the work is both art and science and lives under the difficult discipline of simplicity. It is the interplay of extremes, the juxtaposition of the primitive and the ultra modern."

"The paintings are as much about shape and texture, the traditional preoccupation of sculpture, as they are about color. The textures are seemingly topped with precious metals that suggest the patina of age and reflect an intimacy with metals from years in jewelry design. I use a renegade process of my own creation mixing glazes that are both oil and water (I often use beer or even champagne rather than water as the bubbles have a nice lift) in the same piece."

"I work on strong resilient Birch wood that has longevity even in the rain forest that I live in. The Mona Lisa was painted on wood. I always work in an overall se-metric design that reads as typography. It is my way of creating a beloved neutral order. I like that my work holds some mystery. My mentor always told me that if people could look at my work and KNOW how it was executed, then I had failed."

"Why I do it:

My parents were shocked when my first baby sentences reflected dissatisfaction with the way the drapes looked with the carpet in our NYC Queens apartment. I spent a good deal of my childhood rearranging their furniture. I do it because it never occurred to me that there was another choice."