Karen Campbell

Karen Campbell is a native Atlanta artist.  She has been working towards an MFA from University of Georgia and is currently working as a high school visual arts instructor.  Karen enjoys her ability to excite young people about art by introducing them to a variety of ways to express themselves, helping them to make better aesthetic choices, and encouraging them to support the arts within their community.

In her artwork, Karen creates very much in the moment, almost in an abstract stream of consciousness, producing images that are very close to becoming self portraits.  She finds that she focuses on interpreting pain, frustration, anxiety, and sometime s a little twisted humor that comes from being a woman, a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a friend, and a living breathing human being who is awake and aware of the world around her.  Thoughts, feelings, dreams, and nightmares are represented by figures and images that may seem simplistic, however, each one complex with it’s own physiological make-up.  Colors, shapes, and seemingly obsessive mark-making all play integral roles in dissecting the persona of each creature.  As a printmaker, Karen is fascinated with the layering of visual effects on top of each other.

Karen hopes that the combination of the imagery, color, and texture lures viewers into searching thought the violent and sometime playful psychobabble in order to find something that links their lives with the figures and the chaotic two-dimensional environment in which these creatures live.