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Bryan Christie was born on May 5, 1973, in New York City, toward the end of the sexual revolution, in a city very different from today’s. His family moved to Seattle to experience the suburban middle-class American dream; within a year his parents were separated. Bryan and his mother returned to New York, where he grew up surrounded by his mother’s oil paintings, the smell of turpentine, the constant presence of her artist friends, and a deep and abiding sense of the spiritual in the natural world and the chaos of our human sensibilities. He was a gifted musician, playing saxophone in LaGuardia High School of the Arts, gigging in Manhattan jazz clubs by the time he was 19 and then attending the Manhattan School of Music.
Realizing that music was not the medium through which to express his muse but desiring to eschew his mother’s vocation and the volatile lifestyle he assumed it required, Bryan began working at his father’s studio as a scientific/medical illustrator and then, in 1998, took a job as an assistant art director at Scientific American magazine. He fell in love with science, witnessing in the editors the same passion he had seen both in his mother’s art and his own music. He started to join his artistic and scientific pursuits, coming to believe, as Einstein did, that “all religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree … directed toward ennobling man’s life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence.” It was here that Bryan began to produce his first anatomical illustrations.
In 2000, Mr. Christie left Scientific American to pursue a freelance career. His first award-winning illustration was for Newsweek in 2001. He continued to define his aesthetic, focusing on the essential structures of the body, until he came to the look of his black-and-white anatomical work. In 2004, his piece for Marie Claire on breast cancer won an SPD award; that piece was the DNA for his first body of work, “Flesh and Blood.”
All of Mr. Christie’s graphic work, a body of work that spans 14 years, was like a long apprenticeship for his 3-D fine art. He spent years perfecting bodies, understanding light as an emotional tool, experimenting with camera angle and perspective. An early formative experience came with his viewing of an exhibition of Mark Rothko’s art at the Whitney museum 15 years ago, where he “felt like aliens had come from outer space to put art on the walls.” Rothko’s ability to infuse his fields of color with such emotional force has had a deep influence in Bryan’s emerging fine art work. Recently he had an intensely spiritual experience when he saw Michelangelo’s first Pieta for the first time, solidifying his belief that the body can be used to express spiritual truths and propelling him forward into his own art and the search for the visceral experience of the truth and beauty of the world.