Karen Weber
Oil Paintings
Oil Paintings
…a bit about Karen
The trajectory of Karen’s art career is winding and colorful. Although she has been painting for many years, she didn’t start out as an oil painter. She always enjoyed making things and was often creating sculptures and pottery as a child growing up near St. Peters Village in Chester County. Graduating with a BFA focusing on ceramics and sculpture, she pursued this medium for several years until she met her husband and started a family. As can happen, her life took a turn and for the next fifteen years Karen worked as a librarian and then as an art teacher after returning to college to get her certificate to teach art grades k-12. Her desire to create her own art never left however, and it was during this time that she began to teach herself how to paint at her kitchen table while juggling a career and raising children. She worked from books and artists on the internet and after experimenting with oil paints, she found the versatility and beauty of oils so alluring she soon fell in love with the medium. As her own artwork began to take up more and more of her mental space, she decided in 2013 to take her painting to the professional level and began seeking gallery representation. Today, Karen is a full-time artist and shows her work in galleries around the region.
...a bit about her paintings
Remarkably versatile and enthusiastically collected, Karen is perhaps best known for her ability to capture unique quirks and personalities of animals ranging from blackbirds to elephants and fauna of any size and stripe in between. Her passion is to create whimsical paintings that are expressly designed to make you smile. She is also fascinated by combining seemingly unrelated yet familiar imagery and animals to create a visual story on the panel. “I never know exactly what to expect when I sit down to start designing my paintings” She says. Using Photoshop to create digital “sketches” she collages elements together and makes generous use of sacred geometry to create a sense of balance and joy in the final image. “While I’m designing at my computer, I will sometimes laugh out loud at the unexpected story that comes when I put two or three things together that otherwise have no business being in the same painting. When I get this surprise laugh, I know I have a winner.”
Whether her subject is animal, landscape or purely imaginative, Karen’s favorite method of oil painting is alla prima, a wet-into-wet technique she uses masterfully to achieve spontaneity, liveliness and character with purposeful and expressive brush work.
Most of Karen’s finished artwork is exceptionally organic in nature, starting with panels that she personally cuts and preps, through frames that she makes herself in her basement woodshop.
Karen lives in St. Lawrence, Pennsylvania with her husband Kevin, children Meilea and Rowan and her wayward rescue hound, Ember.
The trajectory of Karen’s art career is winding and colorful. Although she has been painting for many years, she didn’t start out as an oil painter. She always enjoyed making things and was often creating sculptures and pottery as a child growing up near St. Peters Village in Chester County. Graduating with a BFA focusing on ceramics and sculpture, she pursued this medium for several years until she met her husband and started a family. As can happen, her life took a turn and for the next fifteen years Karen worked as a librarian and then as an art teacher after returning to college to get her certificate to teach art grades k-12. Her desire to create her own art never left however, and it was during this time that she began to teach herself how to paint at her kitchen table while juggling a career and raising children. She worked from books and artists on the internet and after experimenting with oil paints, she found the versatility and beauty of oils so alluring she soon fell in love with the medium. As her own artwork began to take up more and more of her mental space, she decided in 2013 to take her painting to the professional level and began seeking gallery representation. Today, Karen is a full-time artist and shows her work in galleries around the region.
...a bit about her paintings
Remarkably versatile and enthusiastically collected, Karen is perhaps best known for her ability to capture unique quirks and personalities of animals ranging from blackbirds to elephants and fauna of any size and stripe in between. Her passion is to create whimsical paintings that are expressly designed to make you smile. She is also fascinated by combining seemingly unrelated yet familiar imagery and animals to create a visual story on the panel. “I never know exactly what to expect when I sit down to start designing my paintings” She says. Using Photoshop to create digital “sketches” she collages elements together and makes generous use of sacred geometry to create a sense of balance and joy in the final image. “While I’m designing at my computer, I will sometimes laugh out loud at the unexpected story that comes when I put two or three things together that otherwise have no business being in the same painting. When I get this surprise laugh, I know I have a winner.”
Whether her subject is animal, landscape or purely imaginative, Karen’s favorite method of oil painting is alla prima, a wet-into-wet technique she uses masterfully to achieve spontaneity, liveliness and character with purposeful and expressive brush work.
Most of Karen’s finished artwork is exceptionally organic in nature, starting with panels that she personally cuts and preps, through frames that she makes herself in her basement woodshop.
Karen lives in St. Lawrence, Pennsylvania with her husband Kevin, children Meilea and Rowan and her wayward rescue hound, Ember.
