Gallery
Wave Series
The paintings of waves in each header on this website come from founder Karen Nease’s Wave Series.
These were a collection of wave paintings that came about from studying reference photographs of particular waves coming ashore on Lake Superior. While viewing these enlarged photos, Karen was struck by the difference in surface and form between subsequent waves – reminiscent of no two snowflakes being alike.
Once started, it became important to Karen that these paintings acted as “portraits” of distinct entities. She began with a gridded reference photo which was carefully transferred onto larger gridded wood panels. After the pencil outlines were established, Karen built up multiple layers of thinly applied glazes of oil paint using a small rag on her finger tip.
Gesturally applied, each layer was a response to the one preceding it. The motion of her hand was analogous to the motion of the wave, allowing Karen to study its form, surface and facets more closely. The compositions show only water, nothing else.
They are strongly horizontal; reinforcing the certainty that water always finds its own level. They present the waves as a primal, elemental force.
Horizon Series
A secondary series of paintings has been used as a backdrop for many of the pages on this website.
This ongoing series of paintings was deeply personal to Karen. They integrated so much of what is important to her as an artist. They were influenced by two great American painting traditions – 19th Century Transcendentalist landscape painting and Abstract Expressionism; along with Karen’s own architectural education and experience.
Using sculpturally applied paint in limited color fields, Karen explored the distant and ever changing horizon between sky and water with references to those histories of gesture and luminism. The paintings’ design relied on the sacred geometry of the golden rectangle incorporated into the lower portion of the perfect square. The use of a square format was simultaneously modernist and ancient.
The golden rectangle acknowledges the common format used in both classical architecture and traditional northern European landscape painting.
