Colourful Seaside Villages: Painting by Karleen Kareem
Quaint Town by the Sea, acrylic
Florida-based artist Karleen Kareem uses acrylic and watercolour paints to depict colourful seaside villages. Karleen’s style is bright and friendly, and she has a knack for rendering complex collections of buildings and foliage in a deceptively simplified manner.
Birds and Flowers, watercolour
I really enjoy Karleen’s acrylic paintings, particularly those where she paints houses on seaside hills as stacks of differently coloured geometric shapes. The artist adheres to a sense of slight imperfection, with houses and other buildings jutting out of exaggerated hillsides at slightly impossible angles, creating an almost cartoonish sense of movement that really draws the viewer in. Set against backgrounds of bright blue ocean water, these stacked buildings are quite pleasing.
The front page of Karleen's art website
In her watercolour paintings, Karleen more frequently looks at plant forms, with twisting tree branches and flowers covering many a page. With these subjects Karleen is freer to experiment, and her portfolio offers examples of trees and flowers depicting in varying styles.