About
Artist Bio
Kara Wilson is a Western Mass born visual artist, working in printmaking and painting. She currently resides with her family in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. Her growing body of work started in 2019, with an unexpected crack of illumination, a vision left imprinted in her mind after a dream. Regularly experiencing vivid dreams throughout her life, Kara finally knew how to wield them, her artist's eye had opened. The people that play starring roles in her dreams become the subjects of her abstract portraits.
Using the same visionary technique as her dream portraiture, Kara’s work also explores the abstraction of landscape. The geometric deconstruction of these subjects first lend themselves to the precision of digital drawings. Kara’s twenty plus years experience as a professional graphic designer has made this stage of her process an effective tool. The digital images are then brought to life, through the use of traditional and non-traditional printmaking processes and painting.
Kara holds a BS from Skidmore College, where she double-majored in studio art and art education. She also attended Deerfield Academy. It was in both of these institutions that she was exposed to a myriad of art making media, including printmaking techniques like wood block printing and lithography.
Making and designing things — be it books, meals, costumes, art, or renovating, has always been an integral part of her life. The process of creating, and the notion of something being finished, is at the core of her sense of fulfillment, satisfaction and pride.
Artist Statement
Existing between the dream world and awake, I envision the people who visit my dreams as deconstructed ideas. They calcify themselves into their own unique forms. The rebuilding of the individual takes place through shape and color, layer by layer, to fill the framework of a flat plane.
Rendering my dream vision portraits and landscapes, using screen printing techniques on paper, gives me clarity and resolution to otherwise hypothetical concepts. The resulting effect is both a formal and informal exploration of geometry, color and focus. There’s a formality inherent to the printmaking process. I’ve chosen to use this in a more relaxed and intimate way. My works are small scale and small run, original numbered screenprints. This allows for the precision and crisp qualities that my shapes are asking for, while also allowing for imperfections, exploration, and variation. Each piece is uniquely handcrafted.
Inspiration for my life, and work, comes from the weirdness of human nature, the brilliance and humility the natural world gives, and how humans and nature can never seem to quite connect. They can overlap, they can mimic, they can push each other around, but inevitably it gets messy and complicated. Can I make a space or a world in between? A world that combines the messiness of humans with the surprising forms of nature, clarifying and condensing them down into their most elemental forms.
As with abstract art in general, my conceptual forms, of portraiture and landscape, aim to give the viewer a break from reality. A journey into the unfamiliar, where shapes are both recognizable and completely new, the audience is invited to piece together their own identifiers, labels and affects.