Karen Woods

On the Way 2

2023

Karen Woods paints a traveler’s view through the window of a moving vehicle rendered in subtly nuanced gestures in oil on canvas or panel. These views from the front seat of a car looking through an often rain-splattered windshield or side window, are always about water: water from above, as a rainstorm, or from below, as a man-made sprinkler system. She is drawn to the interplay of water and light, and how it affects our perception of reality through reflection, distortion, and transformation. The compositions often include a bit of the car - the edge of a window, a side mirror, the clear curved area left by a windshield wiper - these markers situate the viewer on the journey Woods is on - we are taken inside the vehicle and shown the vignettes that catch Woods’ eye. The paintings reclaim that point in time, explore its detail, and unearth its emotional content. Woods’ work freezes and compresses a moment of everyday life; then elongates and decelerates it and in so doing, reveals its accompanying emotional weight: its anticipation, reflection, isolation, and longing. Woods is coaxing us to recognize the transcendent experiences offered by the most mundane or ordinary surroundings of our daily lives. Karen Woods was born in Seattle, WA, in 1963. She received her BFA from the California College of the Arts (Oakland, CA) in 1987 with additional studies at California Polytechnic State University and Studio Art Centers International, Florence, Italy. Her paintings have been exhibited throughout the United States with solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, and Boston, among others, and her work has been published in New American Paintings, American Art Collector, art ltd, Artweek, Western Art & Architecture, Fine Art Connoisseur, and the Idaho Statesmen. Woods’ paintings are included the public collections of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, UK, James Castle...

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"One Of The Ways" depicts a densely populated grove. As with other of Carpenter's paintings, this scene invites viewers to look closer and also to go out to explore nature. As a painter, I examine how the depiction of light contributes to our experience of paintings. The portrayal of light helps a painting to convey the atmosphere and mood of a scene, and is much of what enables a painting to convey depth and realism. Our perception of lighting features occurs largely through pathways in the brain that carry only black and white information, pathways which are distinct from areas that encode the colors and details we use to delineate specific objects. By painting in grayscale, I try to interact specifically with this region of our visual system, with the hope of conveying some of the spaciousness and emotional significance that light can imbue on scenes. Light, whether as the crisp contrast of a back-lit forest or the gray haze of an industrial landscape, is what defines a scene. Its power to communicate the feel of a place is the principle subject of my paintings. The Blue Azul Collection...