With her conviction that “paintings have the right to be what the painter wants them to be,” Cristina de Miguel operates outside of the social constraints of the worlds of work and art, producing exuberant, whimsical, humorous paintings about whatever strikes her fancy. Her creative process is intuitive and immediate; she avoids pre-planning, preferring to begin in front of the blank canvas, where the ideas and images gleaned from her engagement with the world coalesce. Accordingly, her subject matter ranges wildly, and includes cat’s heads, t-shirts, cartoonish faces, scenes of art openings, and the Nike “swoosh,” rendered expressively and at immense scale. De Miguel’s brushwork is apparent everywhere in her compositions, as are the marks of her fingers and, sometimes, bits of studio detritus—evidence, in her eyes, of painting as a direct extension of the artist herself.