Through the medium of oil and mixed media, Karen’s paintings explore relationship to people and place. She is informed by her love of female myth, archetype, and her previous career as a psychotherapist. Her art is an intuitive and expressive process of discovery

 Her current series explores the push – pull of the mother- child relationship. Using aspects of the Great Mother archetype, creation and destruction. They are emotional and symbolic expressions of the complexity and tensions of being in relationship, considered through abstract form, colour and line.

Forms hang expectantly in the space of the canvas. Softness of colour and tone are held by energetic, darker areas of line or shape. Neutral space containing the forms and shapes hold the unknown, the yet to unfold, the chapters to be written. Messages, writings, doodles, visible or obscured are embedded in the works. Each painting is a conversation in a wider dialogue that emerges across a series of paintings. Collectors experience her work as expressive, powerful and emotional.

As an aphantasic artist, with no internal visual imagery, story, emotion and the physicality of painting are significant in the development of the work. Using contrast of light and dark, control and chaos, her paintings emerge through layering, disrupting and repeating symbol, text line and form. A surface rich in history develops, the forms and colour palette inspired by its emotional and psychological meaning.

Karen has always searched for meaning and understanding of experience, this being motivational in her previous professional career as a psychotherapist working with survivors of trauma. The belief in the transformational power of relationship and  the human spirit is fundamental to her view of the world and approach to art making.

She invites the viewer to finish the painting through their own meaning making process, to interpret and respond, rather than dismiss and move on.

Karen is cofounder of BlueHouse artspace, a working gallery in Surrey, UK. She is mentor for Creative Shift, an online creative mind programme and Fellow of Royal Society of Arts. She lives in Surrey, UK and Andalucia, Spain, with her husband and walks the land with her canine companion, Bentley.

Her works are in private collections in the United Kingdom, Europe and United States and can be viewed at BlueHouse artspace.