Studies in Fine Inks

Kären’s work is in private and corporate collections including the SunTrust Bank and Days Inn and numerous private collections in Florida and Colorado. Early in her career, she exhibited at Fordham University, Lincoln Center, New York; Rollins College; the Paint Locker Gallery in Vero Beach and other venues. She has a private studio in Winter Park, FL. and has spent time at McRae Studios in Orlando. Kären also studied painting at Rollins College where she graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in English Literature.

"I love to think of myself as a colorist. It seems to me that color connects the spiritual and the material in some mysterious and wonderful way and is far more profound and important to the soul than we mortals comprehend.  Having married an art historian, I've spent much of my life gazing at the world's great art and noting the artist's deep relationships with color and form. Like those artists, I seek, through gesture and paint, to interpret the radiance and light and incredible mystery behind the ordinary days of our lives."

Many of Kären's works are abstract homages to the Neapolitan 18th-century Golden Age master colorist, Francesco de Mura, whom she has studied extensively, having served as a researcher for ten years for the exhibition "In the Light of Naples: The Art of Francesco de Mura." Kären is also inspired by Japanese artist Makoto Fujimura's canvases with glints of gold, the 1950s French Tachisme painters, and Helen Frankenthaler's massive stained canvases. (Above: De Mura's "Charity" from the Castelluccio collection).