Cristina Toro presents large, detailed acrylic paintings alongside smaller pieces depicting scenes from a yet unknown epic fairy tale. Little Cakes will be showing her work in two parts to accommodate the number of large paintings Cristina has finished. We hope to have her show feel like a narrative play with Act One, Intermission, and an Act Two.

The paintings in The More She Saw – The Less She Spoke were created during the first year Cristina lived in the temperate North East. Having lived her whole life in tropical climates, she adjusted to her new surroundings by retreating into her new home, not unlike a sea creature retreating inside its shell, in order to make her secretive, personal paintings. She found comfort in surrounding herself with remnants of her childhood like the delicate vellum cards embossed and painted by her mother, her small collection of embroidered baby blankets and handkerchiefs, and old books on botany and science. At this time, Cristina also rediscovered her works of art made as a child and began to relate deeply to how she had rendered people, trees, and flowers. Much of this can been seen in the stylized simplicity she uses to paint some of the characters in her paintings that verge on standing alone as symbols and the way Cristina deliberately chooses to defy conventional perspective. This can been seen clearly in her larger works which at first trick many into believing that she is using collage to obtain the flattened effect of layered patterns when in fact she paints all of this by hand. Other influences that can be readily recognized are from the miniature paintings of India, Persia, and Turkey, The Unicorn Tapestries, and Chinese landscape paintings.