Artists

After a first career in marketing, Karen has finally returned to painting.  A Gloucester University Masters graduate, she draws inspiration from artists and poets alike including Hamilton, Pissaro, Monet, Kircher, Beckmann and Baudelaire.  Her oil paintings demonstrate a similar interest in the freedom within a city and in the anonymity of a crowd.

 Karen feels her crowd paintings capture the rythm of life; people going 'to and fro', exploring the dynamics of the individual and their relationship to anonymous urban crowds.  She views as if through a camera lens, compressing the image as a way of understanding something contemporary about the visual world.  Using little colour, some figures are recognizable, some barely discernible.

Often viewed from above, her latest work shows distorted images viewed through glass and rain.  She uses oil and mixed media, often applying the paint with rags, working the paint across the canvas, scratching and rubbing into it, leaving surface traces of physical movement and energy.