CLR Creations
Your Place. Your Story.
Mapping the Places That Shape Our Stories.
Original paintings by Christina Leigh exploring place, memory, and connection through abstract cartography and portraiture.
The Places We Carry
A virtual exhibition exploring how places become part of us through color, landscape, memory, and story.
Featuring works from Back to Life: A Journey Through Aotearoa, the Savannah Cartography Series: Mapping the Lowcountry, and Sevilla Soul: Streets and Stories.
Selected Works
Christina Leigh is a Savannah-based artist and founder of CLR Creations whose work explores the relationship between place, memory, and identity. Her abstract cartography paintings begin with real geography, transforming coastlines, waterways, streets, and boundaries through layers of color, texture, and movement informed by the history, culture, ecology, and personal experiences held within a landscape. This same philosophy extends into portraiture, murals, and live painting, preserving the people and moments that become part of our stories. Through each work, Christina considers how art can give memory a physical place to remain, honoring the places, people, and moments we carry with us.
Savannah Cartography Series: Mapping the Lowcountry
The Savannah Cartography Series is a love letter to Savannah and the Georgia coast, exploring a landscape shaped by water, history, culture, and memory. Through layered maps, flowing color, textured impasto, and materials inspired by the land itself, each painting traces the stories held within Savannah's rivers, marshes, islands, and communities. From the shifting shores and ancient oaks of Ossabaw Island to the oyster traditions and Gullah-Geechee heritage of Pin Point and the candy-colored nostalgia of River Street, the series honors the people and places that have shaped the Lowcountry across generations.
Commission a Painting
CLR Creations accepts a limited number of portrait commissions each year, specializing in engagements, weddings, newborns, and family milestones.
Each portrait is individually painted from your photographs and developed through conversation and artistic interpretation. Rather than simply reproducing a photograph, the goal is to preserve the people, atmosphere, setting, and details that make the moment meaningful.
Engagement & Wedding Portraits: Transform a favorite photograph into an original painting. Portraits may focus closely on the couple or incorporate the landscape, architecture, florals, light, and other details surrounding the day.
Newborn & Family Portraits: Preserve a fleeting season through an intimate portrait of a newborn, child, or family. These works are created as contemporary heirlooms intended to remain within the family for generations.
Materials
Choose from:
Archival Oil Paper: An intimate, heavyweight oil-painting surface intended for professional framing.
Archival ACM Panel: A smooth, rigid and highly stable surface with a contemporary presentation.
Oil-Primed Linen: A traditional fine-art surface with subtle texture, particularly suited to portraiture and expressive brushwork.
Birchwood Panel: A substantial rigid surface with a warm, tactile character.
Oil or acrylic paint is selected according to the surface and desired character of the painting. Available materials vary by size.
Sizes
Small: 9" × 12" to 11" × 14"
Newborns, single subjects, and intimate compositions.
Medium: 12" × 18" to 18" × 24"
Couples, parent and child, and portraits incorporating more of the setting.
Large: 24" × 30" to 30" × 40"
Wedding, family, and statement portraits.
Gallery: 36" × 36"+
Large-scale heirloom and portrait-landscape compositions.
Pricing & Consultation
The listed price reflects a 50% deposit toward your commission. Final pricing is based on the selected size, material, and composition and will be confirmed during your consultation before the commission agreement is signed.
Multiple subjects, complex settings, extensive detail, specialty materials, or significant reconstruction from several photographs may require an additional fee.
Any adjustment is discussed and approved before your commission agreement is signed and before painting begins. You may approve the revised price, adjust the concept to remain within your original budget, or request a refund before signing the agreement.
How It Works
1. Reserve — Select your size, material, and payment option.
2. Share — Send several high-resolution photographs and tell me about the people and moment you would like preserved.
3. Consult — Within 24–48 hours, I will reach out to begin the collaboration process. We will discuss setting, color, atmosphere, materials, and meaningful details.
4. Approve — I’ll confirm the final scope, price, and timeline. Your commission begins after the agreement is signed.
5. Create — Your portrait is painted individually by hand, with progress images shared at key stages.
6. Deliver — Once complete and sufficiently cured, your painting is carefully prepared for delivery.
Timeline
Allow approximately 10–12 weeks from signing the commission agreement, including approximately 10–12 weeks for painting and 2–8 business days for shipping.
Oil paintings may require additional drying time. Larger or more complex commissions may require longer. For weddings, anniversaries, holidays, or other time-sensitive gifts, please reserve early.
Photography
Clients are responsible for providing photographs they own or have permission to use. Professional wedding, engagement, or newborn photography may require permission from the photographer.
Shipping
Small and medium works are generally shipped flat and protected. Large works may require custom crating, freight, white-glove delivery, or installation. Additional delivery costs are quoted when applicable.
Commission Policy
Because each portrait is made specifically for you, commissions cannot be returned or exchanged once the agreement has been signed and painting has begun.
Before signing, you may adjust the scope, approve any price adjustment, or request a refund.
Reserve Your Portrait
Engagements become anniversaries. Wedding days become family histories. Newborns carry on legacies.
Transform a meaningful photograph into an original painting created by hand and made to remain within your family for generations.
Frame not included. Shipping, specialty crating, and installation may be quoted separately when applicable.
Commission an original painting of a place that has become part of your life.
Personal Cartography transforms meaningful geography into abstract, map-inspired artwork. A childhood neighborhood. The city where you met. A coastline returned to each summer. A honeymoon destination. A family property. A route traveled repeatedly. Or several places connected across years.
Each commission begins with the geography itself, then moves beyond the map. I research the location and consider its roads, waterways, boundaries, architecture, landscape, history, and other details that give the place its character. Through color, texture, line, and abstraction, that geography becomes something personal.
The finished painting is not intended to reproduce a conventional map. It is an interpretation of where your life unfolded and what remains of that place in memory.
Materials
Choose from:
Archival Oil Paper: An intimate, heavyweight oil-painting surface intended for professional framing.
Archival ACM Panel: A smooth, rigid and highly stable surface with a contemporary presentation.
Oil-Primed Linen: A traditional fine-art surface with subtle texture, particularly suited to expressive brushwork.
Birchwood Panel: A substantial rigid surface with a warm, tactile character.
Oil or acrylic paint is selected according to the surface and desired character of the painting. Available materials vary by size.
Sizes
Small: 9" × 12" to 11" × 14"
An intimate study of one meaningful place. Ideal for a neighborhood, property, coastline, landmark, or destinatio.
Medium: 12" × 18" to 18" × 24"
Offers more room for geographic detail, interconnected landmarks, waterways, roads, and the character of the surrounding landscape.
Large: 24" × 30" to 30" × 40"
Designed for more expansive compositions, complex geography, multiple connected locations, or a place explored through greater depth and detail.
Gallery: 36" × 36"+
Large-scale statement works created for significant personal narratives, expansive geography, and residential, hospitality, or commercial spaces.
Pricing & Consultation
The listed price reflects a 50% deposit toward your commission. Final pricing is based on the selected size, material, and composition and will be confirmed during your consultation before the commission agreement is signed.
Multiple subjects, complex settings, extensive detail, specialty materials, or significant reconstruction from several photographs may require an additional fee.
Any adjustment is discussed and approved before your commission agreement is signed and before painting begins. You may approve the revised price, adjust the concept to remain within your original budget, or request a refund before signing the agreement.
How It Works
1. Reserve — Select your size, material, and payment option.
2. Share — Send several high-resolution photographs and tell me about the people and moment you would like preserved.
3. Consult — Within 24–48 hours, I will reach out to begin the collaboration process. We will discuss setting, color, atmosphere, materials, and meaningful details.
4. Approve — I’ll confirm the final scope, price, and timeline. Your commission begins after the agreement is signed.
5. Create — Your cartography is painted individually by hand, with progress images shared at key stages.
6. Deliver — Once complete and sufficiently cured, your painting is carefully prepared for delivery.
Timeline
Allow approximately 10–12 weeks from signing the commission agreement, including approximately 10–12 weeks for painting and 2–8 business days for shipping.
Oil paintings may require additional drying time. Larger or more complex commissions may require longer. For weddings, anniversaries, holidays, or other time-sensitive gifts, please reserve early.
Photography
Clients are responsible for providing photographs they own or have permission to use. Professional wedding, engagement, or newborn photography may require permission from the photographer.
Shipping
Small and medium works are generally shipped flat and protected. Large works may require custom crating, freight, white-glove delivery, or installation. Additional delivery costs are quoted when applicable.
Commission Policy
Because each landscape is made specifically for you, commissions cannot be returned or exchanged once the agreement has been signed and painting has begun.
Before signing, you may adjust the scope, approve any price adjustment, or request a refund.
Reserve Your Personal Cartography
Some places become more than coordinates on a map. They hold the roads we traveled, the landscapes we remember, and the moments that unfolded there. A Personal Cartography commission transforms that geography into an original work of art, preserving a place that has become part of your story.
Frame not included. Shipping, specialty crating, and installation may be quoted separately when applicable.
