Hear Karen talk about her work and career in our Spotlight Series!

Using mostly palette knives and particular brushes, Karen Weihs applies pigment in lush impasto layers interspersed with thin glazes that enrich colors and result in canvases that glow with mysterious light and form. The vague forms and evocative spaces in her paintings become magnets that draw audiences into the mystery of creation by way of human imagination.

Her works radiate an otherworldly ambience of shimmering colors and swirling shapes, representing whatever subject matter the viewer chooses to see. Drifting clouds reflected in a lake, a distant skyline of forest or city, grey fog rolling across the horizon are these forms real or imagined Weihs galvanizes her audience's natural curiosity with compositions that border between abstraction and landscape. She alludes to the familiar without telling the story.

No narrative of detailed brushwork exists in her pictures to constrict the meaning of what viewers envision in their mind's eye. Her abstracted representational subject matter is deliberately simplified to capture the "idea" or essence of a place, not the reality of it.

Weihs invents each new journey of creation by trusting her intuition completely and by following wherever her hand and intuition lead inside the very textural composition. Like memories that bubble to the surface of the mind, the images her palette knife creates as it carves, smoothes, jabs and dances across the surface eventually coalesce to form a holistic picture.

Her obvious lack of fear or attachment to outcome as she completes each painting models an attitude of joy in abandoning fears and preconceived notions. Weihs is a master of following creative impulses that inspire courage, uplift the spirit and elevate art-making to a new level of intellectual stimulation.

She is also an extraordinary teacher known for giving permission to students to explore their creativity, encouraging them to make marks with joyful abandon and experiment with tools and techniques that lead to individual style. Weihs studied with LaMar Dodd at the University of Georgia earning a BFA degree. His repetitive, coloristic modern style was great influence.