Karin Campbell

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Karin Campbell’s paintings are loosely rendered, held together with the rhythm and balance of a drunken sailor. They teeter on the brink of collapse: clashing styles, alternating speeds, and bright colors lie underneath and/or on top of murky ones. Abstract shapes emerge suddenly as recognizable and allow unexpected associations and open-ended narratives. In the Pond, a large unstretched canvas, is presented in a way that is somewhere in between a traditional painting and a textile work, in a sense speaking to traditional quilt making. Like that process, the painting pieces together the artist’s reference points – memory, emotion, history, culture – through the varied marks Campbell uses, from applying paint with a brush to scraping away the surface, creating new textural surprises that serve to draw the viewer in. In her drawings, Campbell pares down this process. Using charcoal and the act of erasing, figures become entangled with themselves or others, emerging in the foreground with the ghostly remnants of where they started. Campbell’s source material is tied to memory and sensory experience. For the artist, the taking in of these reference points helps to activate the dark space between the trees.