Cristina Pilar Acosta was born in the Los Angeles coastal community of Playa del Rey, California. She has always lived close to nature -- in the mountains, rural ranch land, deserts and beaches of the West Coast, in California and Oregon. Her paintings are filled with sentient beings living in the last wild places. Her love of color, line, and form infuse her work with a sense of inner life. Nostalgic magic realism weaves among her images of people, plants and animals caught for an ephemeral moment within layers of paint. The spirit within her brushstrokes intertwines with image. In her fourth decade as an artist, Cristina is a sunbird, living in the Southern California desert during the winter and wandering among forests and beaches most summers. These paintings are some of the sums of her life. The natural world is her place.