Karen Weihs
KAREN WEIHS — Karen Weihs creates luminous oil paintings from her Carolina home studio. She has been at her easel for 20 years creating contemporary landscapes and intuitive playful images from out of her mind. She teaches regularly at the Bascom Museum in Highlands as well as other places in the US. Karen is a true professional who studies and practices her craft, explores deeply her self and her surroundings, and reaches beyond her boundaries to bring new energy to the canvas. Her book, Out of My Mind, shares with readers her insights into the creative process.
Writes Karen, "Years ago, I abandoned my fear of being creative to embrace a love for it. Through the love of doing, I became afraid not to be creative. Through love, I found the courage to bring every thought, every pain and every fear with me to the canvas to discover my potential for creativity.”
Karen Weihs goes outdoors en plein air, or outside to paint from life. When not outside painting from life, and when she feels like she wants to go out of her mind, she creates in the studio some colorful, playful landscapes or intuitive abstracted coloristic paintings . She calls these her “folly” paintings. From field to folly, she like both styles of painting. The large colorful paintings always have a miniscule part of what she has seen out in the field. She says about these, “As an oil painter and colorist, I love to create images that depict endless visual space. Forsaking all details, I conjure patterns of light, air and reflection that feel ethereal and diffused. Layered pigments, contrasting colors and geometric shapes breathe life into my images, and while my landscapes are minimal in representational content, I find viewers often see the familiar in the abstract.
Karen Weihs' love of the simple, abstracted shapes led her to do colorful a geometric/figurative feeling series, one she calls her “Wild Angels Series,” another the textured “Red Series.” In 1994, Karen received Artist of America award. Many more awards and publications, Karen continues to paint with much recognition.
