Christy Savage Biography
United States, born 1970
Christy Savage is a Sacramento-based mid-career artist with over 30 years professional experience, working primarily in visual and media arts. She specializes in creating horrific watercolor and acrylic paintings and she produces independent exploitation horror films. She is an accomplished artist and filmmaker, as well as producer of a successful film festival and many community events. She has also spent time as an art teacher and has curated many arts festivals for students.
Since a young age, Christy was driven to create fantastic images of terror and death. From the time she won her first art contest at age 4, she knew she was destined to pursue a career in the arts and she has worked hard to hone her skills. She sold her first painting at age 18 and has worked professionally in the arts since, exploring multiple disciplines. She has worked in the fields of commercial art, graphic design, portraits, murals and scenic design and she has participated in many exhibits and group shows as well as solo shows.
Christy’s love of genre cinema has been a driving factor in her art and she has simultaneously pursued a career in the world of low budget independent filmmaking, making feature horror films with her husband and collaborator, Darin Wood. She is skilled in set design and construction, photography, film and video production, cinematography, theatre production, film festival coordination and exhibition, and video editing.
Christy also has many years experience teaching art to children and working with the local community to bring arts programs to students. She firmly believes in the power of the arts to enhance and strengthen a community and works hard to promote, encourage and develop the arts in Sacramento.
At the current stage of her career, Christy is focusing more on painting and less on collaborative projects such as arts events and teaching. While her main focus will continue to shift from time to time, she is now concentrating on fine art paintings for exhibits and direct sales to private collectors. Her work is held in collections throughout the United States.
Artist Statement
Christy finds beauty in ghastly horror and has spent her entire life trying to capture and share that love of the horrific with others through her paintings and films. She finds magic in the macabre and beauty in brutality. She embraces the fun of adventuring into the forbidden and she chases after monsters into the very realms of nightmares.
She likes to explore the darkness and see what lies hidden in the shadows, often challenging conventional art norms and pushing the viewer to think and see more creatively while not turning away from the grotesque.
She believes that every image should tell a larger story and prompt the viewer to think, to feel and to explore. She is profoundly inspired by the juxtaposition between classic beauty and extreme brutality, as found throughout history and in many works of classic literature and this is a reoccurring theme in her work.
In addition to interpreting brutality in classic literature, common themes in Christy’s work include ridiculously bizarre accidents, tragic events in history, iconic moments in horror cinema, women in peril and the sad reality of murdered women being discarded like trash by callous madmen.
She works primarily in watercolor and acrylic and her ideas are heavily inspired by the art of horror films, horror comics, pulp art illustrations, pin-up art and twentieth century true crime magazines.
Her artistic influences include classic painters such as Goya and Carravaggio, comic artists such as Jack Davis, Graham Ingels and Berni Wrightson, pulp illustrators such as Norman Saunders, H.J Ward and Frank Frazetta, as well as cinematographers such as Dean Cundey and Mario Bava. These influences are highly visible in her artwork and in her cinematography.
Christy looks forward to continuing her artistic journey into nightmarish worlds of fantasy and encouraging young artists to follow.
