Melancholy, Myth, and Mania Ana Christinas Earth Eidolon Opens at Corner Gallery in Andes

ANDES — In a solo exhibition that hums with quiet emotional force, Ana Christina has filled the Corner Gallery in Andes with a body of work that feels at once deeply personal and profoundly universal. Titled ‘Earth Eidolon’, the show opened Saturday during a weekend of summer bustle in the Catskills hamlet, yet it offered a retreat into dreamlike stillness and inward terrain.

This marks Ana Christina’s first solo exhibition, and it’s a remarkable debut. A self-taught painter based in Brooklyn, Christina crafted the entire show in just six weeks, working in a fast, emotionally driven process that she describes as a form of survival. “Most of the work is a direct interpretation of my emotional landscapes of that day,” she said during the opening reception. “I tend to paint pretty quickly just because feelings can pass so quickly.”

That immediacy is present in every painting, where symbolic creatures—dogs, stags, lambs, doves, inhabit scenes drawn from memory, dream, and raw emotion. While the paintings nod toward classical and religious symbolism, Christina actively inverts those meanings. “A lot of the dogs in my paintings are malicious creatures,” she said, referencing a work titled Don’t Worry, Dear, Your Angel Is Near in which a dove swoops in to rescue a figure from a violent, chaotic horde of animals. “The idea is that this dove is actually an angel coming to save it from impending doom.”

This dynamic interplay of darkness and hope courses through the show. Christina’s narratives are sometimes surreal and mythic, but they are always rooted in lived emotion. In one piece, two lambs stand on the edge of a winding path, one injured, the other burdened by a vulture perched on its back. “They’re meant to be me and my sister,” she said. “She was going through something really hard. I couldn’t help her. That’s what the vulture represents, it’s not me causing harm, but harboring the harm by my inability to help.”

Though the subject matter is weighty, the paintings feel buoyant, thanks in large part to Christina’s palette, an earthy range of sienna, ochre, gray-blue, and pale umber. “I paint with five colors,” she explained. “To me, they seem very colorful. But if you pulled any of these tones out into a swatch, you’d find they’re actually quite muted, until you place them in relationship to each other.”

That restricted palette creates a kind of visual quietude, which lets the symbolic storytelling speak louder. The use of raw linen adds texture and warmth; Christina stretches and prepares all her own canvases, allowing the material itself to contribute to the painting’s emotional timbre. “A lot of the color coming through is just that beautiful, natural linen toned with a little umber,” she said. “There’s beauty in subtlety.”

What’s equally striking is the painter’s intuitive sense of composition and movement. In multiple pieces, sweeping skies and sloping terrain guide the eye in gentle spirals and arcs, leading the viewer not just across the canvas but into it. “I start with the sky,” she said. “It’s like a direct expression of how I’m feeling when I wake up. If I’m melancholic, I paint a storm. From there I build the world around it.”

Though her technique feels instinctive, Christina’s artistic foundation is built on obsessive learning and a decade of struggle. “I’ve been painting for 10 years,” she said candidly. “I was a horrible painter for eight of them. It wasn’t until a really painful breakup two years ago that things changed. Painting became a necessity. It was the only time I felt relief from that pain.”

That emotional urgency bleeds into the canvas, yet the work never feels indulgent or one-note. It invites reflection. “Every person brings their own experiences into the room,” Christina said. “That’s what I think good art does. People feel what I felt but filtered through their own lives.”

Though untrained in the academic sense, Christina is a voracious student of art history and technique, largely self-taught through lectures, YouTube tutorials, and critique from artist friends. “YouTube University, honestly,” she laughed. “And feedback from older painters. Every little tip they gave me, I took seriously.”

Despite her modesty, the results are arresting. One painting, with its windswept trees and mirrored pools, evokes the palette and brushwork of Florida’s legendary Highwaymen painters, a reference not lost on viewers. Like those artists, Christina produces work with urgency, intuition, and a fierce need to say something true, right now.

Her connection to the gallery came through local artist and owner of the Corner Gallery Jeff Bliumis, who had quietly followed her work over the years. “We met at a dinner party, he was wearing sunglasses indoors, very cool,” she recalled with a laugh. “We stayed in touch. I never expected this to happen, but a few months ago he reached out and said, ‘Let’s do a show.’ And here we are.”

Here we are indeed, with Earth Eidolon, Ana Christina has delivered a debut that feels both timeless and entirely of the moment. The spirit of the show, its “eidolon”, lingers well after you leave the room, like a breeze that brushes past but never quite disappears.