page_title: Christian Rex van Minnen
section_title: Influences
hierarchical_section_title: Christian Rex van Minnen / Influences
caption_attribution_description: Horatius Cocles (from the series The Roman Heroes).
context_page_description: Christian Rex van Minnen is an American contemporary artist. He was born in Providence, RI, in 1980 and received his BA from Regis University, Denver, in 2002.
context_section_description: Van Minnen's favorite artist is Otto Marseus van Schrieck, a Dutch master painter, best known for his paintings of forest flora and fauna.
  Van Minnen has studied the following artists: Nicole Duennebier, Ryan Riss, Judy Pfaff, Jenny Morgan, Barnaby Furnas, Skinner, Erik Parker, Judy Fox, Kenny Scharf, Ryan Schneider, Amir Fallah, Martin Wittfooth, Gregory Jacobsen, Sinisa Kukec, Liz Craft, Wayne White, Ryan Travis Christian, Seamus Conley, Fulvio di Piazza, Mark Dean Veca, Tomoe Gokita, Robin Williams, Barnaby Whitfield, Julie Heffernan, Nicola Verlato, David Altmejd, Robert Hardgrave, Kim Keever, Aaron Johnson, Brendan Danielsson, Wangechi Mutu, Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Pieter Aertsen.
  Hendrik Goltzius and the line work from Grotius can be seen in some of the tattooed skins.  
  
  Influential authors have been  John Steinbeck, Cormac McCarthy and the Mark Frost book, The Secret History of Twin Peaks   
  Rembrandt and the old masters have also been a major influence. Much of his color mixing and painting go back to this for technique.  
  His colorful gummy bears go back to the Venetian school of mixing grays and colors along with complementary debt coloring. The gummy bears he paints are painted in reverse in that he paints the brightest colors first on a white oil background and then adds color on top. These gummy bears balance the heavy dark background.  He enjoyed working in New York because of the environment and the competitiveness and pressure. New York to him represents ideas but he had a chance to go back to Colorado each summer for mountain biking, fishing and camping with his son. He has since gone to live in California to continue his surfing which comes through in his most recent paintings in painting tattoos of surfers on portraits. 
  While painting he puts on audio books and podcasts in the background. What he plays depends on the state of mind of what he wants to paint. His listening tastes are very eclectic from country, to classical opera to rap. He has a playlist that shuffles Anya and Ministry. His preference in podcasts is for comedy. Van Minnen is a hard worker who doesn't wait for inspiration to paint but just shows up every day. He has a routine and works a regular work week.
  Film directors such as David Lynch (especially his 1990s series Twin Peaks). Werner Herzog and David Cronenberg have influenced van Minnen. But the greatest cinematic influence was the film series Alien especially Alien 2. Van Minnen saw this when he was young and the character Ellen Ripley to him represents his mother trying to save the kids from the parasites of anger, addiction and the environment. Van Minnen likes the early two movies more than the ones that came after it.  One of the influences is a book he read when he was young was a nature field guide with drawings of parasites.
caption: An influence on van Minnen for the tattoos and use of the "swelling line", where the burin is manipulated to make lines thicker or thinner to create a tonal effect from a distance
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