biography | statement

Christi Furnas was born in Wichita, Kansas in 1972. She was a bright-eyed shoebox baby with big ideas. Growing up in Topeka, she would spend her time listening to bad 80’s glam rock and drawing pictures of anything and everything. After eighteen years in Kansas she moved to Excelsior, MN.

The first art school Christi attended fulltime was the Atelier Le Sueur. The school was in an old church with hardwood floors and wonderful natural light; it had the distinct smell of oil paint. Her classes were an apprenticeship; four hours a day were dedicated to figure drawing and another four to a cast drawing. Her work moved from cartoons—line drawings accompanied by poems in rhyme, to classical realism—portraiture that shifts and develops upon study. Christi reflects it was at the Atelier that she came to consider herself an artist. This meant paint on her clothes, bill money spent on brushes, and sustaining the discipline necessary to perfect each image. It meant a vigilant evaluation of her visual narrative, and learning to convey emotion and ideas in two dimensions.

At twenty-one Christi moved to downtown Minneapolis. She began to show at aesthetically oriented coffee shops such as Café Zev and Café Wyrd. Working fulltime at the American Cancer Society, Christi spent every free moment on her art. She always kept a sketch pad handy, often jotting down quick portraits of her friends to maintain her eye and ability to tell a story in lines.

In 1997 Christi was struck with schizoaffective disorder. Art became that much more important as she found refuge in ink, paper, canvas and paint. She continued to show in Minneapolis at coffee shops, hair salons, and galleries. For a long time after her diagnosis, Christi explored the ideas of surrealism, well-suited to the distrust of reality intrinsic to both paranoid delusions and auditory hallucinations. The vocabulary of abstract expressionism now allows Christi to create both an image of the “real” and an image of each emotional moment she shares with her subject. Call it a conversation between moods. Recently Christi has worked with oils and ink. Movement, the love of line, and a sense of play continue to dominate her art.

Christi finds inspiration what she knows. Friends who nag her to just paint, and use more paint, her Siamese, Gepetto, whose eyes glow bluer as he guards his towel bed, the curve of her lover’s shoulder when she chops garlic. The beauty of simplicity moves Christi to draw.

Christi has had solo exhibitions at The Warren, Olive Salon, Clubhouse Jager, and Vera’s Café. She has also shown at Outsiders and Others, Barbette, The Art Major, and Stevens Square Community for the Arts.

Christi Furnas currently works in Minneapolis and continues to show in the Twin Cities.

[Visit Christ Furnas's web page at Spectrum ArtWorks]

“A Two-Dimensional Look at Three-Dimensional People”

My first goal is to make a beautiful piece of art. I am an artist. There is no hyphen acceptable, no qualifying label (woman, with mental illness, with disability . . .) that adds to the history, discipline and passion of who I am. I feel that if the viewer isn’t captivated by the artwork and compelled to study it, there is little else that will be accomplished.

With this installation I want to show the viewer a black and white look at people with mental illnesses, rendered in bold lines—an expression that matches our existence. We are strong, and “capturable” in the sense that like anyone else, something essential can be revealed with a simple composition of lines. I choose black and white because I’m presenting one moment, frozen in time. The facts of our lives are anything but, they fracture into infinite shades of gray. A keen sense of irony is not lost on the mentally ill. We are an invisible community, us crazies. We see crazy on television, glorified to something glamorous, fun or strikingly violent. Most literature does just as poorly. Hollywood has not helped to break down the stigma. Maybe I can. What does crazy look like? With sumi ink and a watercolor brush, I aim to answer that question. Within these gestures I invite you to see a truer portrait of normal, everyday people that happen to be living with a mental illness.

The arrangement of my portraits necessitates the viewers walk amongst us. Here you are deliberately surrounded by people of this community, much like you do everyday without realizing it. Almost everyone has a relative or friend that has fought with some form of mental illness, known, acknowledged, treated, or not.

Having been psychotic, I feel a bond to others who have had a similar experience of psychosis. At the same time, I know that no psychotic break is the same, and each one moves its sufferer into a state that is profoundly separate from the world at large and as such, is desperately and absolutely alone. This might be the one aspect of our lives that is absolutely cut into black and white.

One of the worst “symptoms” is “isolation.” I believe that breaking down stigma is crucial. I hope that by revealing how you can walk amongst us, by showing how we are common, not some Hollywood monster, slowly the isolation (and some of our perceived need for it) will dissipate and our symptoms will become more bearable.