Layering Fluid Forms: Art by Karen Holland
Karen Holland is a painter and mixed media artist currently based in British Columbia. In her practice, the artist primarily works in abstraction, layering fluid forms and textures across a canvas in such a way as to draw the viewer’s eye along a non-linear path, and provoke further exploration.
Passages, mixed media on panel
I like the way that Karen works and how her conceptual processes come to the forefront in her finished paintings. The artist tends to take an intuitive, flow-based approach to building her paintings, utilizing abstraction as a way to get beyond the realm of strictly planned forms and compositions. The resulting works are unpredictable, yet still incorporate a satisfactory amount of pattern and repetition -- while each new canvas may be an adventure in its own right, the viewer is still able to find a comfortable resting place within each image.
In some of the artist’s series, like Doors and Keys, fragmented sections of recognizable images blend seamlessly with planes of texture and colour, creating a sense that the whole image is hidden within the composition, obscured just beyond view.
