Show Preview | Karen Roehl

Evergreen, CO
Evergreen Fine Art, September 1-24

Karen Roehl, Thinkin’ On It, acrylic/ink/graphite, 36 x 48.

Karen Roehl, Thinkin’ On It, acrylic/ink/graphite, 36 x 48.

This story was featured in the September 2016 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art  September 2016 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

Evergreen Fine Art represents a stable of artists whose works embody the western spirit and lifestyle. Although the gallery’s solo show this month for Denver painter Karen Roehl is no exception, Roehl’s works exhibit a fresh, distinctive style that challenge traditional expectations of western art. Her show, titled Horse With Beach Ball and Other Western Amalgamations, presents 15 to 20 acrylic paintings that boldly blend abstraction with representational forms rooted in equine subject matter and other western themes. A few works are entirely abstract, anchored in an earthy color palette.

“One thing Karen doesn’t do is 100-percent pure, very representational, very tight stuff,” says Doug Kacena, director of exhibitions at the gallery. “Certainly there are parts of her work where it is very tight and very well executed, but then it loosens up from there. And that’s exciting to me. It’s a fun blending of the two stylistic genres.”

Roehl explains that, for her, painting is an exercise about who she is and becoming more of who she wants to be. For example, she notes, “I’m a bit of a perfectionist by nature, and I want to loosen up.” When painting horses more realistically, Roehl sometimes leaves sections of the horse unpainted, allowing her abstract backgrounds to show through, as in THINKIN’ ON IT. “What I discovered in doing that is really cool,” she says, “which is that the abstract mark-making underneath the horse starts to take on very organic qualities, as if it is part of the horse’s infrastructure. It becomes muscles and tendons and bone structure, just because of how our brain works to perceive the
visual world.”

In other works, such as HORSE WITH BEACH BALL, Roehl abstracts the equine form a bit more. “This is very hard for me to do,”  she says, “because when I start moving over to something figurative, it immediately switches me over to my left brain—my perfectionist side—and it’s really hard for me to leave an image of a horse not looking like a horse.”

Roehl gives an informal talk about her work during an opening reception on September 10 at 2 p.m., but the show officially opens September 1. —Kim Agricola

contact information
303.679.3610
www.evergreenfineart.com

This story was featured in the September 2016 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art  September 2016 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

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