Walking with Dog, Karen Burns

                                         

Artist Statement

"For me, painting doesn’t come from a place of words. So when writing about my work, I have to dig deep to put my visual ideas into a verbal context. Here are two quotations that resonate.

If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing. Marc Chagall

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love. Claude Monet

It is a mystery, even to me, why I paint what I paint, where ideas come from, how paintings develop and, in the end, how the paintings themselves lead the way. My work is often specific to a certain time of day, a season, or a particular place. These paintings can lead to new, distilled and abstracted works. Sometimes my paintings emerge from fleeting images, color juxtapositions, or remembered shapes. I can be inspired and fueled by new and distant places, but my most successful paintings come from the familiar surroundings I live and breathe every day, places that over time become part of me."

                                                                                                   -Karen J. Burns, 2017

                            

                                 Winter Hillside                                Junius Evening