A Palette for Wine: Santa Barbara Artist Paints with What She Sips

by Gabe Saglie, Senior Editor, Travelzoo
story published in the Santa Barbara News-Press on 12/9/18

The complete wine experience is always visual. Wine buffs know that examining a wine’s hue, just like sniffing its scents, can enhance its enjoyment. It’s a fleeting glance, though, since the important part –the quaffing – is what matters most.

But it’s different for Christina LoCascio, a UCSB arts major who lives on her family’s vineyard along Ballard Canyon. For her, the potential of wine lies squarely in its colors, and in all the lovely things they inspire her to paint.

Ms. LoCascio has been painting with wine – wine straight out of the bottle – since 2002, just after she graduated. She got a job at Artiste, Sunstone Winery’s art-inspired sister venture, where she worked for eight years, organizing painting parties; she’d go on to paint nine of their wine labels. And wine is certainly all around her today; Ms. LoCascio’s husband, Michael Larner, is a wine grower and winemaker behind the family’s Larner Vineyard.
 “Michael is the one who’s taught me about wine and color,” says the artist. “Wine is the darkest color it will ever be right after fermentation, when no oxygen’s hit it yet. Oxygen and light affect color over time,” which means the images she paints with wine will inevitably evolve, even if subtly, over time.
The spectrum of mostly Santa Barbara-grown wine grape varietals is the rainbow of colors at Ms. LoCascio’s disposal. “I have six wines in my tray right now,” she says during an interview with the News-Press last week. She’s in her home studio, where the tiny pools of wine have been sitting for a few days, allowing water to evaporate and color to distillate.

Two of her colors are wines by her husband – a Larner syrah and a Larner grenache. There’s a pinot noir from Wild Horse, a cabernet franc from Lucas & Lewellen and a petit sirah from Andrew Murray’s E11even label. “The zinfandel was a gift,” she adds, “we just didn’t finish it.” 
Depth of color is defined by the grapes themselves: grenache, pinot and mourvedre are usually lighter, while petit sirah and cabernet sauvignon “can be really dark,” Ms. LoCascio says. Then again, “there’s always variation from bottle to bottle.”

White wines help lighten things up – as the artist puts it, “they can lift the color if something is too dark.”

Ms. LoCascio will often use watercolor pencils to help define lines, and she’s been turning to pastel colors lately to “add more impact.” But wine remains her primary medium, and she’ll often start by “spilling it right on the paper,” she says. The initial splash “creates darker colors than using a brush to apply. It dries, it’s nice and dark, and I can build a painting around it.”

Bright white and heavyweight watercolor paper stock is Ms. LoCascio’s surface of choice because “it showcases color best” and because it absorbs wine better than canvas or cloth.  Her paintings, which are framed in UV-resistant glass, range in size from 11-by-14 inches to 22-by-30. And her subject matter is a cavalcade of the world around her, from vineyard scenes outside her window and what she calls “surrealist grapevines” to depictions of architecture and street scenes spotted during her family’s European travels. She paints celestial images “inspired by the harvest moons” and human figures in a variety of poses. Her pieces suggest a soft, subtle feel, they can border on the abstract, and they all feature variations on the ruby, crimson hues that only wine grapes can conjure.

Check out a large selection of Ms. LoCascio’s work on her Instagram account, @wineartistry.

More than 20 of her recent pieces are also on display at the Artiste tasting room in Los Olivos during a show that launched this past weekend and will remain in place through January 30^th. Originals are on sale, ranging from $400 to $1200, and prints are available for $100 to $300 apiece. When the show wraps up, the remaining pieces will go up at the Los Olivos General Store, which Ms. LoCascio and her husband own.

The woman who paints with wine, it turns out, does not sip on wine while she’s working. “It’s mainly coffee when I’m trying to get work done,” she says. “But I’ll be honest – I do reward myself with a glass or two of wine toward the end!”

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