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Chris Barnickel is a painter from Point Pleasant, New Jersey. He holds a BFA in Illustration and an MFA in Drawing and Painting from Laguna College of Art and Design, with thesis work in Italy studying portrait painting.
His practice has moved with him — between New Jersey and California, with extended periods in Portland, Los Angeles, and Huntington Beach — and the coast has remained its center.
Chris paints landscapes that hold two truths at once: the quiet grandeur of the natural world and the marks left on it by human hands. Working between plein-air observation and constructed composition, he builds images that feel at once familiar and slightly displaced — a coastline rendered with reverent attention, then nudged toward the surreal by a single intrusion or absence. Figurative work threads through the practice as well, a counterweight to the landscapes that grounds the larger questions in human scale. The result is painting that doesn't sermonize about what's being lost, but lets the viewer sit with it.
Inquiries about exhibitions, commissions, or available work — send a note and Chris will get back to you.