Crista Pisano was born and raised in northern New Jersey. In 1989 she began studying portrait, still life and landscape painting at the Ridgewood Art Institute in Ridgewood, NJ. In the fall of 1996, Pisano began the BFA program at the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts in Old Lyme, CT. She graduated from Lyme Academy in the spring of 2000, receiving a Bachelors degree of Fine Arts in Painting. In 2003 she received a Masters Degree of Fine Arts in Painting from the New York Academy Graduate School of Figurative Art in Downtown Manhatten. She is a member of numerous art organizations including Artists in the Parks, a program of the Palisades Interstate Park Commission that positions artists as essential partners in the conservation, education, and community initiatives of parks.
Crista participates in various plein air events throughout the year, and for the past three years has been juried into Plein Air Easton, the largest and most prestigious juried plein air painting competition in the United States. Artists from all over the United States and beyond will apply to this competition. She has become much recognized for her almost miniature-in-size paintings at the plein air competitions and in 2021 winning the “Petite Plein Air, Artists Choice Award” at Olmstead Plein Air Invitational in Atlanta, GA. She usually prefers to focus on distant views, and her many collectors have made the observation that there is as much going on in her small paintings as what one usually sees in much larger-sized works.
Recent awards that Crista Pisano has achieved include:
Plein Air Magazine included Pisano as one of their featured artists in their December/January 2016 issue.
Her paintings hang in public and private collections throughout the country.
It is vital for a landscape painter to study outdoors in order to fully understand how to interpret nature. I am very grateful that I was taught this at an early age. The ability to experience light, value, color and atmospheric changes within nature firsthand has been crucial in my development as a landscape painter. The unpredictability of light phenomenon during each outing is the most exciting part of each painting I produce. These phenomena and other changes in nature force me to make important decisions about the mood and composition of every one of my works. It is the consistent study of natural elements and every-changing atmospheric conditions that keep me returning to the outdoors and ultimately applying it to canvas.