Horizon Series

This ongoing series of paintings is deeply personal to Karen. They integrate so much of what is important to her as an artist.  They are influenced by two great American painting traditions – 19th Century Transcendentalist landscape painting and Abstract Expressionism; along with Karen’s own architectural education and experience. 

Using sculpturally applied paint in limited color fields, Karen explores the distant and ever changing horizon between sky and water with references to those histories of gesture and luminism.  The paintings’ designs rely on the sacred geometry of the golden rectangle incorporated into the lower portion of the perfect square.  The use of a square format is simultaneously modernist and ancient.

The golden rectangle acknowledges the common format used in both classical architecture and traditional northern European landscape painting.