About the Artist
Karen’s paintings are devoted to her love of nature and a concern for our fragile, yet miraculously resilient environment.
Karen holds a BFA in Studio Art from Emmanuel College and an MFA in Painting from the Massachusetts College of Art & Design in Boston, MA
Having taught at several colleges, universities, and private schools in the Boston area, she later established Karma Studio, a productive art workshop in her home, where she taught private art lessons for over a decade while raising her 2 children. She maintains a busy studio schedule and exhibits her work regularly.
She currently teaches full-time as the Art Specialist for grades 2-4 at Center Elementary School in Hanover, MA.
In the studio, Karen’s paintings are devoted to her love of nature and a concern for our fragile, yet miraculously resilient environment. Her other-worldly landscapes, rocky beaches, reflections on water, plant life, and memories from her travels evoke a sense of place, storytelling, and adoration of our precious natural resources.
A recent series of oil paintings and mixed media collages explores fragments of coral collected from her travels. They have provided endless inspiration for her abstract arrangements of layered forms, patterns, and imaginary underwater landscapes.
Currently immersed in a new body of work responding to the dramatic rock formations and breathtaking landscapes of Ireland, she is off on a new adventure of conjuring those memories, responses, and internalized moments onto the canvas with a fresh new palette and bold new compositions.
Her work has been shown throughout New England and in New York City. She has been an active Gallery Artist at South Shore Art Center in Cohasset since 2012 and has won several awards for her paintings. She also served as Artist in Residence at the South Shore Art Center from 2014 – 2016. Karen is also an exhibiting artist with the National Association of Women Artists in NYC and Massachusetts. An active member of the Hanover Cultural Council for almost 20 years, she is dedicated to supporting local artists and providing opportunities for arts collaboration in her community.
Karen’s paintings are held in several private and public collections, including the Massachusetts State House, South Shore Hospital and Fidelity Investments. She recently completed a large commission for a commercial property at 33 Harrison Avenue, Boston.
Artist Statement
My paintings reference landscapes, underwater environments, plant life, and natural elements. The observed reality is a starting point from which my creative process begins. As I walk in the woods or along a rocky shoreline I take note, reflect, and breathe in the experience of being one with nature. These moments of awareness are a symbolic seed from which the true art form emerges. Through the layering of thick and thin veils of paint, collaging torn papers, and adding drawn marks, I embark on a journey into the unknown; allowing pure intuition to guide me. The process is intoxicating and seductive, and through that process, the paintings become embedded with a sensual complexity of physical existence, meaning, inference, and ultimately a sense of place.
Inspired initially by nature, my work is created essentially from memory or imagination. It is a visual homage to memory itself. The layered surfaces and surprising juxtapositions mirror the endless depth and intricacy of the subconscious mind. The paintings, like memory, are infused with contradictions.
Nature is a conundrum of grandeur and intricacy. This concept has made a lasting impression on me and confirms my belief that nature and memory are kindred phenomena. Just as the landscape is at once vast and delicately complex, human memory has the extraordinary capacity for storing a lifetime of knowledge and imagery yet is quite fragile at the same time. My current fascination with rocks adds another layer to the story. These seemingly ancient, immoveable fragments of petrified earth hold entire histories in their densely packed veins. Gatherings of rock formations are prehistoric communities housing the invisible world of creatures deep within their services and centuries of untold stories that have washed over their rugged surfaces.
Unexpected compositions, color relationships, and pairings of quiet, meditative spaces implying air and water render a dreamlike quality to the work. Overlays of organic shapes, abstract patterns, and dripping washes are the harmonizing elements that stitch the images together into a cohesive visual poetry. I think of my paintings as stream-of-consciousness wanderings. They reflect the incongruous relationships that emerge in dreams and the fragmented nature of memory.