Christina Coscia
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Sep 26
- 5 min read
Christina Coscia works with acrylics and textured pastes, building her paintings layer by layer. Color and surface shift as she works, giving each canvas its own rhythm. Since becoming a mother, she has found a faster, more pressing beat in her practice, shaped by everyday routines and the push and pull of care and exhaustion. In works like “Secrets of the Forest,” she holds on to that mix of strength and fragility, while still leaving space for quiet pauses. For Coscia, painting is a way to keep track of time and feeling, something close to a diary that grows page by page.
Q: A lot of your work starts from small, hard-to-name feelings. How do you know when one of those needs to turn into a painting?
A: A lot of my work comes from feelings I can’t always name or fully understand. After losing someone very close to me at a relatively young age, I realized that doing anything in art form, whether sketching, painting, creating... was the only way I could express what I was feeling when I didn’t have the words or simply felt unheard. It was a way of getting lost in my thoughts and almost feeling connected... a part of my healing journey. Even now, it’s still how I process things, how I make sense of life’s moments. I know it’s time to start a painting when something inside me pulls—when I need to move a feeling out of my head and onto the canvas, to explore it and connect with it, even if I don’t have all the answers yet.
Q: You use acrylics and textured pastes to build your surfaces. What makes those materials feel right for you?
A: I love texture. I love movement. I love the physicality of it—using my hands, carving, layering, almost sculpting with paint. I feel as though it is the best release of my mind and thoughts. Acrylic lets me move quickly, to follow my impulses before they slip away. The textured paste gives me freedom to create depth, to hide things beneath the surface or bring them to life. It feels alive in itself, and it connects so deeply to the stories I want to tell.
Q: Becoming a mother changed your daily life. How did it change the way you approach your art?
A: Motherhood completely transformed the way I experience life—and the way I create. It awakened a deep passion in me, a reminder of who I am and what truly matters. My children inspire me every day, pushing me to bring out the best in myself, to show them that following your heart and pursuing what you love is worth everything. Becoming a mother changed my daily life in ways
I could never have imagined. Time became precious, fleeting, and that urgency made me fearless in my art. I no longer second-guess my instincts—I trust them. At the same time, motherhood revealed a tenderness and a wildness within me I didn’t know existed. That duality—the calm and the chaos, the fragility and the strength—finds its way into every layer of my paintings.
Creating is no longer just an escape; it’s how I ground myself, how I reconnect with who I am beneath all the noise of daily life. It’s a reminder to live fully, feel deeply, and pursue passion relentlessly—and to show my children that following your heart isn’t just possible, it’s necessary.
Q: Your paintings often move between calm and chaos, fragile and strong. Do you feel one side usually takes over?
A: For me, they’re always intertwined. There are days when chaos takes over the canvas, and others where calmness feels like the only truth. But I don’t see them as opposites—I see them as a conversation. Fragility can hold incredible strength, and chaos can carry its own kind of peace.
In motherhood, I’ve learned that all of these things can be felt within the same hour—the calm before the storm, the strength found in moments of fragility. It’s a constant dance of being present, being needed, being a caregiver to your entire heart. In those overwhelming moments you think will never pass, when you feel at your most fragile, you discover how strong and resilient you truly are.
And at the end of it all, you realize how beautiful it is—how chaos and calm, fragility and strength, all belong together.
Q: You’ve called your works sanctuaries. What do you hope people feel when they stand in front of them?
A: I hope they feel like they’ve stepped into a place where they can simply be. A sanctuary isn’t about silence—it’s about presence. I truly feel that when someone connects with my painting, they instantly become calm. Their mind gets lost in the texture, in the shades of color. They begin to create and see a story within themselves—sometimes even reconnecting to a moment in their own lives. They see something they want to see, something they long to feel again. And if they don’t, that’s okay too... because even in that quiet distance, the painting has offered them a space to pause and reflect.
Q: Abstraction leaves room for personal readings. Has anyone ever told you something about a piece that really surprised you?
A: Yes—and those are my favorite moments. It's absolutely fascinating to me that when people are viewing my pieces, they end up telling me, unconsciously, things about themselves as they describe what they see and how they feel. It’s like I’m able to see inside their mind and soul as they speak. When one of my recent pieces was displayed and sold at an art symposium, "Secrets of the Forest," several people told me they felt the depth, the mystery, the hidden world of the forest—before they even knew the title of the piece. That kind of connection gives me chills, because it’s exactly what I felt while creating it. Seeing others connect with a piece the way I did is astonishing—it’s like they’ve stepped into my inner world without me saying a word. The collector who purchased the painting had left the exhibition without the painting, only to come back minutes before the art exhibition ended because she couldn't stop thinking of the painting and needed it in her home. That feeling is simply unexplainable. It is an actual honour to have my piece with her in her home... in her space. Selling a painting is always bittersweet for me, because each one carries a piece of my thoughts, my emotions, my story. But when someone connects with it so deeply that they want it to live with them, it becomes a proud moment. The painting begins its own life in their hands, and that connection—that passing of the torch—is what makes it all worthwhile.
