For the past two years, in addition to her artwork, Karen Harton '01 has been a faux painter and muralist in Austin. Last June she had a collaborative show sponsored by Zita Design, and in December, she showed at the Guadalupe Arts Center. Karen is currently the president of Artspoken Incorporated, which offers original artwork, faux painting, color design consultation, murals, and more.

Karen's recent work explores the relationship between abstract and representational languages, and investigates the complex ways those languages interact in contemporary paintings. Each painting is a resemblance of a natural object, and the stylized presentation of each object produces am image that is ultimately indefinable. The resulting uncertainty creates a space that defies the forward movement of modernity.

The inspiration for this series lies in out innate relationship with nature, with form in nature, and with out own flesh perfectly molded from nature. The artist ascertains that some images feel familiar to us, and that this perception is a primal and instinctual response. As Daniel Wheeler has said in describing Holderin’s work, Karen seeks to “master the innate in order to achieve the universal.”

Accordingly, each of her images depicts something Karen considers “innate”: a plant, animal, person, or piece of land. During the process of painting, she concentrates on the object’s color, line, and texture. Therefore, she display how she unconsciously perceives the object in the painting, rather that interpreting the object as a sign or referent.

Karen's work has a larger significance. Consider that the paintings you see, although inspired by the natural world, are removed from the nature to the extent that they exist as objects independent of those that inspired them. Her painting is a resemblance of nature because it is neither the original object, not a representation of the original object. This subjective, stylized manner in which each section of a form in nature is depicted, further separates what exists on canvas from what we see of nature. Even titled pieces only relate to the subjective experience. Ultimately, the image can only be connected to nature through the familiarity of color, shape, and texture.

This familiarity intrigues Karen. It stems from our own innate relationship with the natural world, and she hopes to call attention to it by presenting images that provoke it. She suggests that the color, line, and texture of each painting create an image with which the viewer will immediately identify, despite the fact that one has no way of knowing the source-object it is derived from. Karen hopes the experience of this connection will compel the viewer to consider the underlying structure of the world around us. Why, upon close inspection, and without objective distance, might an animal resemble a plant or a skyline resemble a shoreline?

Karen intends the uncertainly developed by the indefinable source of the painting to arouse awareness of individual levels of discomfort, which can only be surmounted when the viewer accepts that there are many facets of the underlying structure of the world that exist. She suggests that our society is integrated with a concept that we must “create” to know, to replace the fear of what we don’t know. However, Karen would argue that we must first see clearly what already exists and progress with this knowledge, to truly live without fear.