Christine Young, MA, CMI, FAMI

As a young child growing up in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, surrounded by C Jac Young’s paintings and etchings (her grandfather), Christine exhibited a drive to create pictures on every piece of unattended paper lying about the house. It was a Christmas present of an easel made by her father that cemented her passion for drawing. She was quite unsuccessful in begging for art lessons like her older sisters who were studying with Carolyn Wyeth, yet she drew and painted constantly. Curiously, a first formal art lesson was in tempera where as a teenager she learned to carefully release egg yolks from their dried membrane and mix pigment.

Failing to negotiate art school as a post high school destination, she submitted to four years of college as a premed and fine art major with the arrangement of attending art school on successful completion. It was there that Tom Sternal, a monumental sculptor, who planted the idea of medical illustration as a pathway to cadaver dissection. Studying with Charles Vincent during the summers enabled admission to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts where she studied classical painting with Arthur DeCosta, Louis Sloan, cast drawing, and relished the anatomy lectures of Robert Hale.

Subsequent admission to the master’s program in the Department of Art as Applied to Medicine at Johns Hopkins Medical School and the lengthy medical cadaver dissection became an exercise in making money as a medical illustrator to fund trips abroad, to further study painting at Vitruvian Studio, and miniature painting with Johannes Landsman. After years of visualizing medical science in New York at Hurd Studios, teaching in the graduate program in Biomedical Visualization at University of Illinois at Chicago, and receiving awards from the Association of Medical Illustrators she has returned to her first love of painting.