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To celebrate the launch of this solo art show by renowned British watercolourist Karen Cairns, ScotlandArt.com has published this programme to provide an insight into her inspirations and to showcase selected works from the exhibition. All of the works included in the exhibition are available to view and purchase at http://scotlandart.com/Artist/Artist384.aspx
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Karen Cairns:
This Gleaming City
5th to 30th
September
An Interview with Karen Cairns
To imagine one of Glasgow’s best-loved views
– Buchanan Street, say, thronged with shop-
pers and flanked by all those spidery metal
awnings, jutting from the sandstone - and then
to compare it with its recreation in a painting
by Karen Cairns, is to realise a remarkable
process by which each
– the mental image,
and the artistic im-
pression – is trans-
formed by the other.
It is almost as
though the streets, the
buildings are breath-
ing with a varying
intensity.
Spires snake; build-
ings blur – and yet, no Above: ‘Walking in Gold, Argyle
Street’, watercolour, £950
matter how much
liberty the artist al-
lows herself, each
scene is always in-
stantly recognisa-
ble. Something we
have always
known, just
changed utterly.
For an architectur-
al painter, Karen is
unusual in that she
almost invariably uses the notoriously difficult
wet in wet technique, mixing colours on the
page itself – the effect is as though she were
dissolving the solid structures of buildings, in
order to reconstitute them in rich colour.
Above: ‘Glasgow Crown,’ watercolour,
£550
Until her career as an artist took off after sub-
mitting her portfolio to scotlandart.com twelve
years ago, Karen was working full-time as an
architect. It is perhaps surprising at first, that a
profession which seems to demand absolute
precision should function as an apprentice-
ship for an artist who is characterised, above
all, by freedom. Yet, as Karen puts it, architec-
ture has imbued her with “an intrinsic under-
standing of how buildings stay up”; having
Above: ‘Molten Gold, River Clyde’, watercolour, £950
studied at the Edinburgh School of Art, before
a postgraduate in Urban Planning, Karen has
an intimate knowledge of all the manifold
ways in which one may visualise the city.
“Architecture is even more precise now than
when I was studying – with computers, it’s be-
come possible to plan buildings on a scale of
one-to-one, down to the nearest millimetre. I
suppose, in some
respects, my
painting is an es-
cape from this – a
means of freeing
up. Of course, wa-
tercolour was the
architect’s origi-
nal medium – we
presented our
Left: ‘Steel Giraffes at Sunset on
the Clyde’, watercolour, £975
projects in it. Over the
years, I’ve become more
and more experienced
at working from a num-
ber of sketches, to the
point where I barely
draw or sketch at all
now. I’ve learned to
take great pleasure in
the struggle for control
which wet in wet paint-
ing demands; in allow-
ing the colours to carve
out the scene in front of
me.
“What I’m aiming at is
a sense of flair. When
you’re looking at how
city lights at night re-
flect on water, there’s a
Above: ‘April Showers, St Mark’s
Square, Venice’, watercolour, £550
Above: ‘An Apéritif, The Rogano’,
watercolour, £550
sense of excitement, of vibrancy, which you
can only capture in watercolour with an un-
derstanding of the paint’s inherent spontanei-
ty.”
The impression we get is that, though sponta-
neous – though she will paint quickly, creat-
ing two or three visions of each scene which
strikes her, con-
stricted as she is
by the speed at
which the paint
dries – there is
nothing haphazard
about Karen’s art.
It is all the accu-
mulative product
of many years’ ex-
perience working
in this medium –
moreover, it owes
Above: ‘Glamour and Glitz, The Rogano’, wa-
tercolour, £550
much to her continuous lived experience of
the artistic qualities hidden within the surfac-
es of the city.
“The moment of inspiration isn’t something I
tend to thing about; it will happen uncon-
sciously. But sometimes I catch myself looking
up perhaps more than usual – it’s only in look-
ing up, rather than, say, at shop window level,
Above: ‘The Turn of the Swilcan Burn, St Andrews’, watercolour, price
available on application.
that you realise the overall power of a place.
So most of my paintings are depicted from
ground level, attempting to capture the emo-
tional response to a scene which anyone could
pass, on any given day. I think that sense of
recognition is what many people experience
with my paintings – they may have walked
down that street countless times, but just nev-
er experienced it as a piece of art.
Above: ‘Guardian Angel, Paisley
Rd West’, watercolour, £550
Above: ‘Streetlights & Headlights,
University Ave.’, watercolour, £285
“I’m most excited by the evening light, and I
think in part that’s related to emotional associ-
ations – the moment just before the pubs fill
up, people walking home from work. It’s the
blending of a communal mood with the most
beautiful light of the day.”
One thus gets the sense that, for Karen, art is
an extension of her life in modern Glasgow.
There’s a sense of intrepidity in her evening
wanderings, an enthusiasm for new architec-
tural developments grounded in the fact that
“nobody will ever have painted them before”.
Above: ‘Evening Façade, Glasgow University’, watercolour, £650
Below: ‘Night Life, River Clyde’, watercolour, £650
When we view her paintings, we are induced
to view a familiar scene with keener eyes, to
read a deeper beauty into its lines and recon-
sider it as something entirely new; likewise,
Karen will manipulate her walk to work each
morning to ensure she crosses over the Clyde,
simply because “every day, it shows me some-
thing different”.
Image: The artist at work at ScotlandArt’s artist in residency, Lucca, Italy.
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