Karen

Rose

Karen Rose has been a painter for over 30 years in New York City, San Francisco, and Raleigh. She hales from Marin County, California, got her BA from UC Berkeley and MFA from the School of Visual Arts. She spent 7 years working for one of the biggest art consultants in New York (Art Advisory Services, Inc.) on Park Avenue, helping procure collections for firms such as Price Waterhouse, Ford Motor Company and Andersen Consulting. She spent the next 7 years working at Lucasfilm in Publicity and Marketing and being a graphic designer to George Lucas as well as providing materials for all three Star Wars prequel releases. She then moved to Raleigh, where she became an art teacher in Catholic, public and now at the private high school, Cary Academy. She is also a graphic designer for Roztayger, an online slow fashion company based in San Francisco. Throughout her career she has managed to produce at least 20 paintings a year. She was an abstract painter until she moved to North Carolina and began painting plein air, in gardens and in the Galapagos Islands. The use of color has always been a hallmark of her work.

Karen Rose has been painting a series based on the North Carolina Mountains to Sea Trail. She has hiked, biked and kayaked portions of the trail throughout 2021. She also is working on an ongoing series of landscapes on both sides of the Mexican border, with the notion that landscapes transcend borders. Her identity and heritage straddle these places, as the product of a Mexican family that emigrated to California during the Mexican Revolution and a Scots/Irish San Francisco family. The border wall, immigration policies, political vitriol against Mexicans, and children in cages are all recent matters that aggressively spotlight these regions and what it means to be Mexican/American. A cancelled trip to the Mojave Desert during the pandemic led her to use film stills of movies shot in Mexico, Southern California, Arizona, and Utah as source material for digital, watercolor, oil, and acrylic paintings. As a long time enthusiast of native plants that inhabit these landscapes, Rose appreciates that plants are regional, not divided by country, but by ecosystem. Some native plants even transcend these partitions, such as the prickly pear and the yucca, native to North Carolina as well as Mexico and the Southwest desert areas of the United States. As a California transplant in North Carolina, Rose has been able to reroot as well as gain perspective on her heritage and her native lands.

Acrylic, Graphic Design, Oil / Alkyd, Pastels/Oil Pastels, Photography, Pottery/Raku, Watercolor/Gouache

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