As a child in suburban Baltimore Karen was privy to a small bit of nature, a forested field where she played and searched for all those treasures kids love to find. She was one of those children who lingered on a find, marveling at hidden secrets. She spent hours exploring this little world while outside the world was booming with growth, a growth spurred by the economies of post WWII.
Her father bought a town home in a neighborhood close to where he grew up in Fells Point. Her mother was the youngest of ten children who grew up in an area across town. Her father’s heritage was Polish and the neighborhood he grew up in was and is solidly Polish. Her mother’s family was from Germany. Karen’s mother still lives in the same home her father bought in Dundalk, Maryland, during the 1950s.
Karen attended public elementary, middle and high schools in Dundalk. She grew up in the Catholic Church surrounded with its pomp and glory: white dresses lined up for confirmation ceremonies, nuns, priests, beautiful architecture with its stained glass windows and all of the older religious traditions.
Karen’s memories as a child are trips to open-air markets in Fells Point, at the time a thriving seaport to the Chesapeake — a place where oysters, fish, plentiful crabs and ducks were brought ashore from the rich briny waters of the bay. Here one would see plucked chickens hanging on spits, see fresh garden vegetables, taste exquisite crab cakes, smell freshly baked breads and southern fried chicken. Around Fells Point existed then as it does today the Polish, Greek and Italian neighborhoods each with their distinctive ethnic qualities.
By the time the sixties arrived Karen was four, by 1970 she was fourteen, Vietnam, love-ins, bell bottoms, burning bras, rejected fifties materialism, parties and the beach at Ocean City, Maryland. As a teenager, jobs could be found along the boardwalk in the carnies, pinball parlors, knick-knack stores, bikini shops and pizza parlors. Those days are filled with memories of playing guitars, shared shacks and friends with shag-carpeted vans, a teenage kaleidoscope of opportunity.
During her high school years in Dundalk she was fortunate to have an inspirational teacher who gave her the confidence to continue her belief in painting. Out of high school she continued to paint with an artist’s dream. Later she entered into college at Towson State University receiving a Bachelors degree in art education. Out of college and into the world exposed Karen to many creative individuals who desired independence built on their own artistic endeavors. She found herself in circles of artists and surviving as a sales rep in a well-established craft store in Baltimore city.
By 1986, she had been exposed to Santa Fe, New Mexico, the home of her husband John. In the early 1980s John was a graphic designer for The Johns Hopkins University Press. Karen left Baltimore in 1987 and moved to Santa Fe where she discovered a place completely different, different culture, landscapes and languages, a world filled with other artists both successful and not. Santa Fe with its large blue skies and old organic communities appealed to her, giving back to her that little field she once knew behind her home in Dundalk, a different stage in life’s journey.
As Karen became acclimated to Santa Fe she found herself in the local bohemian scene surrounded by individuals surviving off their art in one form or another. She worked selling art in galleries, substitute taught and bore a son. Then nine years after her son’s birth she was accepted into and started selling her own art with the Santa Fe Society of Artists, an art sales venue held every weekend during the warm months in a tent behind the First National Bank off Santa Fe’s plaza. These were great years for Karen, she worked very hard to develop her painting and became more convinced that she was on the right track in developing her artistic focus. She strongly developed her series thinking and managed to sell work successfully. With her career in sight she explored galleries and is presently in a gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona and retains her membership with the artist’s society.
For Karen, the process of creating an oil painting involves several steps. She playfully takes photographs of flowers to obtain her initial concepts and compositions. Following her first ideas, she sets down a base composition layer. Then she may depart from those ideas by applying different visions as her discoveries unfold. As she patiently paints, her paintings change by adding curves or different colors, all the time working with compositional balance. Layer on layer of oil color combine to build up luminescence and light. For hours she’ll paint, seeing new shapes and relationships on her canvas. Finally she comes to a stop, an end that is clear to an artist but not always too clear to a viewer. She completes her process with a finishing varnish and plans for a professionally taken photograph of her finished work. Only this process satisfies her. This process is what gives Karen that sense of accomplishment and that a job is well done.
“Time disappears until I have reached my standards of perfection.†Karen paints her visions out of her small home studio in Eldorado, a community southeast of Santa Fe. There she spends her time bringing together her insight and paints whenever she can find the time. A studio window faces to the west and gets very bright as the sunsets. Her future looks full as she finds success in being accepted into upcoming shows to exhibit her latest work. Expect more to come from Karen, for all her efforts are bound to pay off . . . and let her visions fill that place in your life that always needs a little caring and a little nurturing. Written by John Cole, husband and Graphic Designer graduate from Rhode Island School of Design, class of 1979.
