Chrissy McIntyre has an extensive history creating art, and has worked in a variety of jobs within the art field. Before becoming her own boss just under eight years ago, Chrissy attended the University of Richmond, and started off her career doing photo research for book publishers. Chrissy then worked as a radio producer, a voiceover artist, and a blogger, before ultimately starting her own business selling her collage and mixed media art. Chrissy has always been interested in mosaics and ceramics, but wanted a medium she could work with in her own home studio. With this in mind, Chrissy decided to use paper, mainly cut up magazines, as a central material in her work. She also uses watercolor, gouache and acrylic paints to add other elements to her art as well, and hopes to include fabric and other found objects in her work in the future.
Travel is one of Chrissy's main sources of inspiration for her collages, and her time spent living in New York City, Virginia, London, and Germany, is reflected in many of her landscapes. Despite her many travels however, Chrissy has lived most of her life in New Jersey, and says she is still a Jersey Girl at heart. In fact, many of her works feature locations in her town of Maplewood, located in Essex county, where she lives with her husband.
In January 2022 Chrissy teamed up with Just Jersey to create 90 framed prints for the New Jersey State Assembly Speaker's Office. Speaker Coughlin gave each member. of his caucus a collage to mark the annual reorganization of the Assembly. The prints were created from a collage depicting each of the state's 30 legislative districts.
When creating a local scene, landscape or cityscape, Chrissy works off of photographs from the places she's been from the safety of her home studio; she explained that “it's very hard to do plein air collage with thousands of tiny squares of paper,” and that if there is “even a little breeze[,] there goes [her] whole palette!” Beyond the works influenced by her travels, Chrissy also turns pet portraits, pop culture images, and British designs into collages.
Shop Just Jersey's current collection of Chrissy McIntyre art here.
