An Artist You Should Know: Ana Cristina

Images provided by Ana Cristina.

New York City-based painter Ana Cristina is particularly interesting to me for a number of reasons.

To name a few, I’ll begin with the how struck I am by how welcoming and unpretentious she is when discussing her work. She is thoughtful, and very far from trite. She is self-taught in her craft and methodology, which is something that a lot of artists say about themselves but don’t actually mean. She is daring enough to have lived an exciting life and competent enough to be living it well. She’s an artist that one can truly get behind.

Her work as of late draws heavily on the scenery and tone of the Dutch masters of the 17th and 18th centuries, but with a sort of brisk humor and naturalism that gives new life to the beloved style. At her debut solo exhibition in the summer of 2025 was met with enormous acclaim, and sold out - quite a feat for a new painter, and so we thought we’d say a quick hello.

So, just to be clear, painting is your full-time gig?

Yes. As of last year, it became my full-time gig. I was doing odd jobs to support myself and painting in my free time just because it was something that I loved so much and really wanted to do professionally. I got my first show last year in August, and I took it as a sign and quit my job and crossed my fingers, hoping things would work out.

Was it like a throw-your-apron-on-the-ground moment? How did that feel?

Absolutely. I was working in this god-awful nightclub as a bottle girl.

Oh my God.

And my personality, my whole vibe, is so not that. I’m not a bottles-and-models club girly.

A lot of money, though.

Yeah, it was extremely liberating. I got offered the show, walked in the next day, and was like, ‘See you guys.’

Hell yeah. Did you go to school for this?

No, I didn’t go to college at all. I grew up in Minnesota, and then I moved to California when I was seventeen on a sort of rebellious teenage stint. I ended up in LA and was just kind of being crazy, making money in whatever way I could, running around and doing stuff.

Then I moved to New York when I was twenty because I got kind of bored of LA. That was also sort of wild; I didn’t know what I was going to do. But my neighbors were painters. They were these two young boys, and I just loved being able to see more of who they were than their corporeal form was representing. I felt like seeing them from the inside out was so attractive, and I really wanted to be understood in that way.

They would come over and we would draw and paint and play music and smoke weed and hang out. I just kept at it for ten years. Then last year it started to take off.

Ten years makes sense. The style is very specific and seems really developed, and there’s not a lot of pigment wasted. There’s a lot of thoughtfulness even behind the scale choices. Can you talk about how you developed your specific style and what you draw on for inspiration? How did you land on this?

I think being isolated in a way - not going to art school - I had to go through a lot of experimentation to teach myself how to paint, but also what I wanted to paint. That was a really big question: Why am I doing this? What are my subjects? What do I want to do? I started just copying photographs. My work from five or six years ago was almost photorealistic. It kind of looks like what you might see coming out of art schools nowadays, where it’s very clean and calculated.

I think as painters get older, there’s almost a breakdown in the method. It becomes less precise and less perfect, and that was always a goal of mine. Last year, I started studying more technique from the old Dutch masters. I loved how the way they paint, it’s almost like there are no mistakes. Like you were saying, the way the paint is applied is super methodical. They’re not wasting any pigment. They’re not really painting over areas.

They usually start with a wash of a sort of ochre ground and, from there, very delicately build up the environment. If you look at a lot of those older paintings, you can see the ground in them. I think that’s such a beautiful thing - the restraint of not overpainting, of not just piling on as much as you can.

There’s also beauty in piling on and destroying a canvas, and that push and pull that comes with it. Maybe in the future my work will reflect that. But as of now, that really delicate application is very satisfying to me because it’s really difficult. It’s a challenge.

I was studying the Dutch masters and it got some attention from collectors. They were like, ‘This is really special. You should maybe explore this a little bit more.’ And the more I explored that - putting in these little narratives, or even having the sky become an emotional representation of what I was feeling that day - it felt very freeing to work within these limitations of landscape painting. You have figures in this landscape, and the question becomes: How can I evoke the most emotion and personality through these limitations?

Do you experience that sort of thriving within parameters in your other creative capacities? You play in a band as well. Do you operate better when there are no bounds and the world is your oyster, or when you have a kind of playpen to create within?

Definitely. I think putting limitations on myself really helps. I limited my palette to only five colors, and then obviously I limit what the subject matter is going to be. When you sit down to paint, you’re like, okay, I already know I’m going to paint a landscape. I already know the starting point. I usually don’t plan anything out. I just start with a wash, and then however I’m feeling that day, it’s like: Is it going to be a blue-sky day? Or, as cheesy as it sounds, is it going to be a cloudy day? Because I have those limitations, I know where to start.

What you’re saying makes me curious about the timeframe. If the sky is being determined by how you feel that day, how long is a painting taking you?

It’s quick.

How quick are you working through a painting?

All of my favorite paintings I’ve completed from beginning to end within a week, usually a couple of days. Because of the paints and pigments that I use, some pigments dry faster than others. I don’t use white. White dries extremely slowly. I use a sort of titanium buff, which dries much quicker.

The layers generally dry within a day, and then I usually do three to four layers on each painting.

Oh, wow. That’s a very well-practiced method. There’s so much detail for that amount of time. How much of it is forethought, and how much is just, “I feel this, so I’m going to put this here”?

I feel like I’m a very emotional person, and I go through a lot of existential crises on a daily basis, or even just in my own interpersonal relationships. I care so much about so many things, and that plagues me in a way. Painting is really the only thing that alleviates that feeling in my heart.

So it has to not be planned. I can’t sit down and think, ‘This is what the narrative is going to be. This is what it’s going to look like.’ I have to sit down in this almost disembodied state where I start to go into a trance, in a way.

I’ve painted both ways, where it’s more planned and methodical. That can be really nice because it’s almost more of a meditation. The other way is a little more manic, where you’re really tapping into those feelings.

I’ll build up the sky, build up the landscape. I usually have a bunch of reference books around me, so if I need a clear reference for a cloud formation or a tree or something like that, I can use it to spark inspiration.

I might have an idea like, ‘Oh, I’m going to have a dog massacring a bull,’ or something like that. But as the painting develops, if that changes - if I start to see something else, or feel like something else will work better in the composition - then it changes. It’s not so rigid from the get-go.

The artist in studio.

I grew up in Honolulu, and there were a lot of Dutch painters there. I remember reading about them being like, ‘Wow, there’s volcanic action here, so we get to use red.’ They were really excited about it. I’m wondering if you grew up with something similar.

It’s weird. I grew up in a house of engineers. My parents are engineers. I was very math- and science-oriented in school. I really loved calculus because it felt like it was the language of nature.

I grew up in the woods, very much in love with the earth. I was always climbing trees and going swimming. I remember spending hours lying in the grass, looking up and seeing the patterns the sunlight would make through the leaves and imagining shapes and animals through them.

So I definitely grew up very close to the earth and close to nature. I think the way I’m painting now comes around to that. It’s less about studying or seeing certain artists I loved who were painting that way and more that it’s such a part of me. That’s when I feel the most whole. That’s when I feel the most peaceful—when I’m surrounded by trees or in the ocean or something like that.

It’s nice for me to be painting these nature scenes because I was kind of a misanthropic young woman who connected more with plants and animals than people. Now, being able to paint these nature scenes and animals feels very close to home.

Do you feel comfortable talking about the career aspect - the business aspect - of being an artist? Because that sounds extraordinarily challenging. I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to a painter who wasn’t like, ‘This is a racket. This is tough.’ Can you speak to how this is possible?

I think I’m a little bit naive, and maybe that makes me better able to do this. I think it’s also just my personality. Running away from home, not going to college, never having a plan or knowing where my next paycheck comes from - I’ve been doing that for a long time.

I think I’m very well suited to be a painter because it’s very similar to how I’ve lived for pretty much half my life. I’ve always had this very naive and stupid belief that things will just work out somehow.

Now that I’m getting a little more informed about the business aspect of it, it’s tough, for sure. I feel like I’ve been incredibly lucky so far. This is technically kind of my first year showing, and the response has been really incredible. I’ve been really lucky to sell out all the shows I’ve had so far.

Oh, amazing.

Yeah. And I think a lot of it, too, is - I’m not dumb. I understand that selling small paintings that are kind of shiny and digestible… I’m making paintings that are easy to sell, essentially. I didn’t know that in the beginning, but yeah.

I love them, but when you say ‘easy to sell,’ I’m looking at a painting you did of Adam and Eve and Steve. I could see that not going over well in certain circles, so it’s interesting to hear you describe your paintings as accessible in that way.

That was an old one. I think that was from a couple of years ago. I actually had people fighting over that painting. Max Levi, who runs the ranch out in Montauk, bought that painting. That was the first painting I ever sold.

I mean, it’s sick. I could just see people in Tribeca - collectors - being like, ‘I don’t know…’

Honestly, I feel like collectors want to be edgy. They want to be seen as cool and edgy, so they’ll buy a little orgy painting because they think it makes them seem cooler or something like that.

You’re actually the first person I’ve spoken to in a long time who’s been optimistic, or at least has had a positive experience as a working artist. So my final question is: What advice would you give someone who wants to be a successful painter, attitudinally?

I’m not all stars and roses about this whole art-world thing. The last show that I did, I felt like the time constraint and the pressure to produce work actually really harmed the output because I wasn’t able to connect. I didn’t have time to emotionally put something into the work. I was just executing. It was the first time I had done that, and it was the worst feeling in the world. I came to the realization that a lot of people are going to tell you how to do this, what to do, what to paint, how big to paint - all these things.

The most important thing is - and it’s cliché, I’ve heard it before - but really, the most important thing is to do what you want to do. It’s not always going to be popular. It’s not always going to be trendy. But you have to paint from your heart. You have to paint things regardless of what’s going on in the art market, regardless of what your gallery is telling you to do. You have to do it from your own personal space, because the most personal is the most relatable.

If you’re trying to do something that you think will be successful, it won’t be. And even if it’s not successful in the moment, look at Helen Frankenthaler. She was painting these washed-out, dreamy things at a time when very thick, heavy, abstract things were in. You always read about these artists who were doing something they wanted to do that, at the time, was extremely unpopular. Because of that, they rose into this prominent place in culture.

I feel like maybe the reason my work is getting any attention right now is because it is so different and it is so personal. I wasn’t worried about what was trending or what was cool or what collectors wanted. I was just painting because I felt like I would die if I didn’t. I think that’s the point of being an artist. It shouldn’t be in the pursuit of money or fame or any of these things. It should be a sort of dissection of who you are, what you’ve been through, how you’re feeling—all those things that go into making us human. So, yeah. Mostly just don’t listen to other people.