Karen Silve’s evocative paintings flow from a reservoir of emotions and impressions, unfolding through layers of vivid color and gesture. Surrounded by the scenic beauty of the American Pacific Northwest, where she is based, and the countryside around her family home in Provence, France, she distills the grandeur and quiet serenity of the natural world into abstracted narratives, which celebrate life’s small but profound epiphanies. Each painting begins with a meditation or attunement to a synesthetic experience: the friction of wind caressing skin, the chirping of birds in a park, fragrances that bring back a meaningful time and place, and above all the colors flooding her optical field. Only after immersing herself in these memories and reflections does she begin to visualize the artwork soon to be created.

This was the case with Passage (2024), the artistic distillation of her grueling hike last September into the depths of the Verdon Gorge in southeastern France. The 7.5-hour journey into and out of that majestic but harrowing chasm demanded total commitment and exertion, both physically and psychologically. In the end, emerging from the canyon and the inward trek it inspired, became a metaphor for confronting the anxieties, insecurities, and tragedies we traverse in modern life. In the symbolic narrative of the composition’s three panels we glimpse a passageway to a different kind of space, where growth and hope present themselves against all odds.

Passage exemplifies an approach to mark-making in which natural environment and interior world align on the picture plane. “Nature,” as author John Mendelsohn observes, “is not simply a vista or a scene in Karen Silve’s paintings, but an enveloping experience: complex chromatic interplays, seeing through planes to the space beyond, and a sense of radiant light...” Placing the artist in the lineages of Cézanne, Monet, de Kooning, and Mitchell, renowned critic Peter Frank adds:  “For all their brushy, dripping exuberance, Silve’s paintings are composed with an almost architectural rigor that emulates nature’s own glorious rhythms.”

This heightened sensitivity to the natural world may stem from her early work in figuration and landscape.  It was as an emerging artist, studying in Aix-en-Provence at the Leo Marchutz School, that she found her true passion for painting, color, and nature, as well as the work ethic that would power her through the years to come.  Since those formative years, she has exhibited in museums, art centers, and galleries in New York City, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Miami, Santa Fe, and Sun Valley, as well as the United Kingdom, Qatar, Brunei, and Mexico, where her work is included in the permanent collection of the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey. The recipient of prestigious grants and residencies, she has won critical praise in publications such as The Washington Post (“Her free hand and lively spattering recall Jackson Pollock... and parallel the technique of Gerhard Richter”) and from ARTnews and New York Times contributor Ann Landi (“Because many of her works are human-scaled, we relate to them with our own bodies and enter into her dialogue with materials”).

Written by Art critic, Richard Speer.