Meet Christie
Meet Christie
Artist. Former professional snowboarder. Lifelong creator. Dedicated chaser of water, light, movement, and a good adventure.
Born and raised in South Lake Tahoe, Christie Marie Elder grew up surrounded by mountains, snow, forests, and one very big, very beautiful lake—which may explain why water has managed to flow through nearly every chapter of her life.
Creativity showed up early.
Inspired by her grandmother, “Mimi,” who worked in oils, watercolor, and charcoal, Christie began exploring those same mediums as a child. Mimi was also a longtime member of the Tahoe Art League, and years later Christie would become a member herself, serving as its president in 2012. 
By eleven, Christie had already completed her first solo mural for her elementary school.
Apparently, starting small was never really her thing.
After graduating a year early with college credits, Christie began traveling during the winters to compete professionally on the freestyle snowboarding circuit.
Christie spent eleven years traveling the world as a professional snowboarder and sponsored athlete, competing throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and Japan at events including the X Games, World Cup, World Championships, U.S. Open, Vans Triple Crown, and Nippon Open.
Those years shaped far more than her passport.
Snowboarding taught her to see movement—the rise and fall of terrain, the changing light across snow, the rhythm of a line through the mountains, and the strange magic of flowing with frozen water.
During those years, Christie’s life moved with the seasons.
Winters were filled with competitions, photo shoots, film projects, and plenty of time chasing snow around the world. Summers took her to Mt. Hood, Oregon, where she trained and taught snowboarding on Timberline’s glacier.
Then, in the spring and fall, she would return home to Lake Tahoe, trade her snowboard for a tattoo machine, and get back to creating in a completely different way.
Tattooing became a serious parallel career alongside snowboarding. Over the years, Christie worked in several tattoo shops and created thousands of tattoos before stepping away from the profession after becoming a mother.
Snowboarding gave her adventure, movement, and momentum.
Tattooing gave her creative challenge—playing with color and design, storytelling, and the quiet concentration of making something meaningful for one person at a time.
For years, she moved back and forth between the two worlds—one fast, cold, and airborne; the other intimate, artistic, and ink-stained.
Somehow, both felt like home.
Water in All Its Forms
Lake Tahoe's wonder. Snowstorms brewing. Clouds rolling over mountain peaks. Waterfalls disappearing into tropical valleys. Sunlight playing through the ocean wave.
Christie loves water in all its magical forms.
She is drawn not only to its beauty, but to its energy—its ability to move, transform, reflect, soothe, surprise, and connect us to something larger than ourselves.
Today, Christie lives and creates on Kauaʻi, Hawaiʻi, where the Pacific Ocean has become one of the strongest influences in her work.
Her paintings often begin with something she has actually experienced: a changing sky, a moment underwater, the light on a wave, a mountain after fresh snow, a place that stopped her in her tracks—or occasionally an adventure that turned into a painting before she even realized it.
Her goal is not simply to paint what a place looks like.
She wants to capture what it feels like to be in it.
The movement.
The light.
The energy.
The wonder.
And, when she’s lucky, a little of its magic too. 
A Life of Creating
Christie has never been particularly interested in staying inside one creative box.
Over the years she has worked in oils, watercolor, murals, tattoo, sculpture, graphic design, airbrush, brushed metal, mixed media, and large-scale installation art. Each medium gives her another way to explore color, storytelling, movement, and connection.
Christie’s lessons started first with the fine art mediums of watercolor and oils from her grandmother Mimi. That built a grounding base to explore from.
In 2001, Christie bought her first brand-new car—and almost immediately decided the factory paint job needed a little help.
Rather than leave her silver Nissan Xterra alone, she taught herself custom automotive painting, built a spray booth in the garage, and covered both sides with Japanese-inspired finger waves using candy polyurethane paints, pin-striping, and clear coat.
Because apparently buying a perfectly good new car and sanding it down felt like a reasonable creative decision. 😄
The project taught Christie how to airbrush, a skill she later carried into her mural work—especially the large, atmospheric skies that became part of many of her painted environments.
And naturally, instead of the usual hot-rod flames, she painted water.
Murals have been another recurring love throughout Christie’s creative life.
She painted her first solo mural at eleven years old, and apparently never completely got over the urge to make things very, very large. 😄 Over the decades, she has created more than twenty large-scale murals, with another major wall seeming to find her every few years.
Murals give Christie a different kind of creative freedom—the chance to think beyond the edges of a canvas, work with people's dreams for a space, architecture and environment, and create something people can physically move through and experience.
Whether the subject is nature, community, family history, wildlife, or something completely unexpected, she still loves the transformation of taking a blank wall and turning it into a place with its own energy, story, and personality.
Some pieces begin with a spark of an idea and then lots of research and careful planning.
Others begin with a photograph from an adventure with friends or loved ones, a memory she can’t shake, a place she wants to visit, or a dream that claims a spot in her soul and begs to be put on canvas.
Kauaʻi Christie’s Art
In July 2025, Christie opened Kauaʻi Christie’s Art, her gallery and working studio with a view of Kalapaki Bay in Līhuʻe, Kauaʻi.
Part gallery, part studio, and very much a living creative space, it is where visitors can experience Christie’s original paintings, fine-art prints, and other work in person—and sometimes catch a new painting coming to life in the back of the gallery.
She also shares a curated collection of artful jewelry created by Hawaiʻi makers.
When Christie isn’t painting, she is usually happiest somewhere outside—near the ocean, in the mountains, exploring a trail, chasing snow, or finding her way into the next adventure that may very well become a painting. Lately, she has also found her way back onto a board—this time in the ocean—learning to surf and discovering a new way to move with water, this time in its liquid form.
Visitors are invited to follow along with her newsletter and online for new work, works in progress, limited releases, exhibitions, behind-the-scenes glimpses of the creative process, and the occasional surf- or snow-filled adventure.
From the Archives
For a glimpse into Christie’s earlier creative life and her roots in Lake Tahoe:
Tahoe Quarterly — “Early Inspirations”
Written by Alison Bender
Winter 2015–2016
Read the Tahoe Quarterly interview →
Mahalo for visiting. 🌊
