About the Artist
Dana Christensen
Dana Christensen is a visual artist who lives in Sausalito, California, and works in a studio in the historic ICB building on the Sausalito waterfront. Her art began with a camera. She grew up on the East Coast, and while in graduate school in Connecticut she was fascinated by the old mill towns that were still everywhere at the time, places full of a sense of loss and decay. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in Psychology and spent much of her professional life in advertising in New York. Coming West, she fell in love with the vast open spaces and the contrast between the sea, the mountains and the inland deserts. In 2017 she left the corporate world to devote herself full time to art. Largely self-taught, she has spent many hours learning from established artists who generously shared their techniques and processes. Her photography grew into a deep exploration of historic processes: photogravure, platinum/palladium printing, cyanotype and the hand coloring of monochrome images. Her photographs are made in limited editions of one to ten, and they use the contrast between lights and darks to tell a simple story and make an emotional connection with the viewer. Over time her work moved beyond representational imagery into tactile, multi-medium pieces, combining photography with silk, vellum, paints, pastels and gold and palladium leaf to create depth and luminescence. Today she also paints in oil, building transparent layers that turn impressions and memories into expressive landscapes, always with a photographer's sensitivity to light and space. Her subject throughout is the natural world, beautiful as well as distressed, because everything tells a story. Her series include Color & Form, The Natural World and Altered Images, with works such as Road to Acadia, The Long View, Hokkaido Dream and Waterlilies on Silk. Dana has exhibited widely, including at the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, Sausalito Center for the Arts, A. Smith Gallery in Texas, Fenix Arts in Arkansas and VanderMoot Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as in a juried exhibition in Tokushima, Japan. She was an artist in residence at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley in 2024 and 2025, and her work has appeared in The Hand and Analog Forever magazines.
“Dana Christensen is a Sausalito artist who moves between oil painting, mixed media and historic photographic processes. Her landscapes and nature studies, from Acadia to Hokkaido, use a photographer's feel for light to show the natural world, beautiful as well as distressed.”
The Process
Inside the Studio
The Painting Process
Dana's process starts with what she learned as a photographer: how light falls, how darks hold a picture together, and how a simple contrast can carry a story. For years she printed her images by hand with historic processes, photogravure, platinum/palladium and cyanotype, and hand colored monochrome prints. Each of these slow techniques gives soft, deep tones that suit images about time and the impermanence of the natural world. From there her work became more physical. She prints or transfers photographs onto unusual surfaces such as silk and vellum, then works into them with paint and pastel and adds gold and palladium leaf, so the piece gains depth, dimension and a quiet glow. Works like Waterlilies on Silk, Quietude on Silk and Iceland Night on Silk come from this way of working, as do the Altered Images series of plants and found forms. In her paintings she uses oil in transparent layers, building color slowly so that impressions and memories of a place, a road in Acadia, a stretch of coast, a desert storm, turn into expressive landscapes. Some pieces mix oil with paper or other media, and she also makes monotypes. Whatever the medium, the aim stays the same: to interpret time and place with emotional depth while keeping a photographer's sensitivity to light and space.
