Page 14 - Pastiche 6

Karen Atkins

Montville Art Gallery

Horses are a subject she returns to over
and over, a profound love in her life,
symbolic of freedom and power, and a
link to her Scandinavian heritage and the
horses of Norse myths.

Karen’s pugs have been constant com-
panions throughout her life, and appear
in her paintings regularly, always happy
to model and pose. Their absolute loyal-
ty, tragic faces, and clownish behaviour
make them irresistible subjects.

Many paintings begin with
a fragmentary image that
Karen lives in a crooked cottage on Victoria, a land of huge clear blue skies lodges in Karen’s mind.
Sydney’s North Shore where her studio and endless expanses of flat red soil. She will often wake in the
overlooks parklands dotted with the The soundtrack of her life then was morning with a remnant of a
headstones of Sydney’s early settlers. sheep, birdsong, sheepdogs, cattle, dream that demands paint-
Amidst an array of random curios the whinny of horses, distant rumbles ing, and so she will begin,
amassed because they are interesting, of headers and tractors and the wind weaving threads of love,
and accompanied by her pug Bronte, singing through the she-oaks. loss, strangeness and won-
she paints worlds that explore connec- der that she has gathered
tions and disconnections. She has painted obsessively her entire over time.
life, filling sketchbooks with great me-
Karen’s narratives are profoundly nageries of animals. Some paintings be- Karen’s paintings are shown permanently
personal, yet invoke universal themes of gin as landscapes of places she knows at Montville Art Gallery, 138 Main Street,
feelings and experiences. well that have an emotional resonance, Montville, and are also shown on the
and she uses these as ‘theatres’ for gallery website:
Prior to living in Sydney, Karen lived her characters to tell their stories. Every
on an isolated farm in North Western aspect of Karen’s paintings has symbolic www.montvilleartgallery.com.au
meaning for her.