Christine Kinsey

Christine Kinsey was born in October 1942 in Pontypool, when it was part of Monmouthshire, Wales. She is an established Welsh painter now based in Pembrokeshire.She was Co-Founder and Artistic Director of Chapter Workshops and Centre of the Arts, Cardiff, now called Chapter Arts Centre.

Kinsey has developed a group of female characters who emerge repeatedly in her paintings. These characters enact roles within the themes that she explores in her work including what it was like to grow up female in the industrial valleys of south east Wales;and Cymreictod (a sense of feeling, being Welsh). Her touring solo show "Cymreictod – Women of Wales” 1989-91 was reviewed in the iconic feminist magazine Spare Rib. Kinsey also examines the depiction of women within a western Christian culture.

Words and poetry have always been an important influence in Kinsey’s work. In 2014, she curated the exhibition "Correspondences – contemporary painting in response to the life and writing of R. S. Thomas” at Plas Glyn-y-Weddw, Pwllheli. The exhibition included work by 14 contemporary artists based in Wales including Kinsey, Osi Rhys Osmond, Iwan Bala, Ivor Davies and Mary Lloyd Jones. The catalogue for the exhibition included poetry by Menna Elfyn and Myrddin ap Dafydd. Later the same year, the exhibition was then amalgamated by curator Lynne Crompton with work from artists responding to Dylan Thomas at Oriel Q Gallery, Narberth.At an event to mark R. S. Thomas’ centenary in 2013, Kinsey was invited by event organisers the University of Wales Press and Swansea University professor M Wynn Thomas (R. S. Thomas’ biographer and executor of his unpublished literary estate) to talk about the ways in which the poetry of R. S. Thomas has influenced her art.

Her work is represented in Victoria and Albert Museum, London; National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth; Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea; Contemporary Art Society of Wales, Cardiff; and Newport Museum, Newport, Gwent.