Karen Cornell is a painter and printmaker who has lived and worked in the Seattle area since 2004. She received her MFA in painting in 1998 from California College of the Arts in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Her work is comprised of paintings on paper, panel and canvas, and monotype collages.

ABOUT THE WORK

Karen Cornell’s colorful paintings and monotype collages use quilt-like modular arrangements, or compositional space, as the common thread between processes—the quilt representing connection and healing. Distinct processes — spontaneous and quick, meditative and slow — complement one another, resulting in a varied body of work. She draws her inspiration from the natural world, both inner and outer. They show up abstracted, like concentrated seeds of a deeper consciousness ready to break through. Attending to process, her work moves forward, building a visual language. Forms printed and painted, graffiti-like layers, calligraphic lines, come together over time to reveal their story.

Mixing colors is meditative and focused. She has rolled out large sheets of paper onto the floor, gessoed them and begins to paint quickly and spontaneously. Paint is applied in various ways: gestural brushstrokes, paint roller, printed, squeegied off, and lines drawn into. Building layers, editing areas out, painting back over. She then cuts the large sheets down into smaller rectangles and begins painting again, turning them around, rearranging, making connections, finding meaning. What started as quick, gestural, experimental is refined, distilled and resolved. The painting is formed intuitively and consciously, a push-pull process of a creative journey. The finished paintings are often arranged in series where the dialogue can continue.

In her large wall-sized pieces, paintings on paper are pinned to the wall in a quilt-like fashion. These “healing” quilts are for our environment that suffers and need our focused attention to return to balance.

Simplified compositions of color, line and form are painted on wood panels, suggesting symbols, the elements, the seasons and the connection of all things.

Monotypes, spontaneous and colorful, are cut and pieced together. Lines suggesting fibers, interweave blocks of color and texture. Some break free from a rectangular format, into organically stacked quilt-like structures.