Christine Stoddard is the 'Artist of the Month' at Baldwin Public Library

Brooklyn-based Christine Stoddard, a Salvadoran-American interdisciplinary artist, was selected as the Artist of the Month for August at the Baldwin Public Library.

Named one of Brooklyn Magazine’s Top 50 Fascinating People, Stoddard will showcase her diverse portfolio at the library throughout the month.

Raised in Arlington, Virginia, to a Salvadoran mom and Scottish father, much of her work has focused on storytelling, whether through writing, performance pieces, film, or a combination of the three. Her subject matter includes gender, folklore, the environment, technology, immigration and disability.

“I’ve had a parallel of careers,” Stoddard said. “I am about to enter the Documentary Film Program at Columbia’s School of Journalism, so I will be returning to journalism in a more concentrated way and bringing my visual skills to that.”

Her work often incorporates anything from mixed media to sculpt abstract forms. She draws inspiration from a tapestry of influences: her Salvadoran mother’s heritage, her father’s Scottish roots, her upbringing in Virginia, and her current life in New York City. While her art frequently explores themes of plants, animals and nature, it delves deeply into the realms of fairy tales, folklore and magic as well.

“I’ve always been interested in magic, even if I don’t actually believe in magic,” she said. “I like the concept of creating your own ritual and finding power in that.

“I’ve always been influenced by plants and animals from Virginia, the wildlife here in New York and also my travels to Scotland and El Salvador,” she added.

She first gained inspiration for drawing at a young age through her mother and used her mother’s experiences growing up in El Salvador as a starting point — things that brought her happiness like its plants, animals and food. Her father would recount to her European folklore as well.

But it wasn’t always happiness for her mother, whose name Stoddard declined to provide out of respect for her privacy. Eventually, her mother fled her homeland due to the Salvadoran Civil War, which lasted from 1979 to 1992. Stoddard’s father, a retired broadcast journalist, covered the conflict, and it was there that the pair met.

“I didn’t get to know as much firsthand growing up as I would have liked to,” Stoddard said, “such as things that my mother experienced and things that my father experienced when he went to cover the conflicts in Central America.

“They both saw a lot of terrible things,” she added.

In one of her art pieces, she described connecting both countries’ roots through Scotland’s national animal, the unicorn, and El Salvador’s national animal, the turquoise-browed motmot.

“This painting shows a unicorn and a bird,” she said. “So I have the turquoise on a tree branch just above the unicorn, and they’re looking at each other. It’s like a union of these cultures coming together, and maybe it’s not obvious in some other pieces, but you see the national animals interacting with each other.”

Fresh off her exhibit at the Queens Botanical Garden, which lasted from December to March, Stoddard will present roughly 40 of her pieces to the Baldwin community. In addition to holding more than a dozen exhibits throughout New York City, she hosted a solo show at the Syosset Public Library during last summer’s season.

“I think they will enjoy the vibrant colors and the unusual color combinations,” she said of the Baldwin community. “I hope they notice the different use of materials. People often will look at the paintings and ask what I’ve used here and there.”

A feature of her art many of the library patrons will notice is the different techniques she uses, one being reusing recycled paper.

“One of my favorite techniques is to make paper pulp from recycled paper, and that’s something that I incorporate,” Stoddard said. “I also use glass in some of my paintings and bits and pieces of beads from old jewelry, broken jewelry that serves a purpose.

“I hope that it will inspire some people to think about reuse and recycling,” she added.