Chris Ballantyne is a landscape painter, though not in the traditional sense. He captures emptiness in his flat depictions of urban and rural scenes. Typically working on a small scale, Ballantyne’s images spill off the edge but still feel expansive and infinite. Often devoid of human presence, his landscapes are viewed from high vantage points, abstracting his subjects: housing developments transform into elements of textile patterns, while urban sprawl is snapped into ordered clarity, or vice versa. Ballantyne’s masterful use of subtle, reserved color schemes lends his images extra veracity despite their comic nature.

He was the recipient of several awards including the Tournesol Award and Residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts in 2004, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 2005, and a Tamarind Institute Invitational Residency in 2013. His work is included in public collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Art Rotterdam Foundation, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, and the Judith Rothschild Foundation, New York, among others. Ballantyne received his BA from the University of South Florida, Tampa in 1997 and his MFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 2002. Ballantyne lives and works in Manhattan, New York.

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