"What is my work about? Well, I've never liked trying to describe it - that doesn't matter to my way of working. I don't have a mission to declare. I paint. I want to get something down on paper or canvas in flat lines, build up from there to see what I can see. It starts with the materials and where I am, what I see when I start. I try to solve a problem, that's all. Each painting is different, trying to solve a different set of problems - each is a response to the first strokes or tones set down, the first sensibility I feel or determine or express. I suppose they are abstract expressionist at their base, and yet I work through a series of formal considerations, trying to sort out how the paint is giving me or not giving me what I want."
Karen Hamre was born in Riverside California in 1937 of first and fourth generation Norwegian parents, studied at San Jose State College and received her Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts from University of Southern California in 1970. She married in 1960 and has three daughters. Hamre moved to New York in 1977 and later joined Pleiades Gallery, an artist-run cooperative, remaining a member throughout the 1980s and 90s. Her work in this period was influenced by architectural forms, and were in her words, "very New York-ish." Hamre returned to California in 1999 and focused on interpretations of the arid and evergreen landscapes of the desert, mountain and urban Los Angeles. She exhibited in galleries and museums in California, New York, Paris. She moved to Rhode Island in 2005 where she was a member of the South County Art Association for seven years, making works of cut and torn paper, books, drawings and paintings. Hamre once again lives and works New York City.
Karen's work is simultaneously contemplative and visceral in impact, refusing to be wholly claimed by either. The work conveys her clear fluency with color and form as she moves them across the plane using layers of texture, wash and line that are applied thoughtfully and resolutely. Each painting seems somehow to be an illustration of what is seen through a microscope on a laboratory slide - tiny bodies and cellular vehicles travelling effluvia like highways to points of synapse, recreation or replication. The result is something much larger than what we see while feeling contained and, for the most part, controlled.
She starts with a set of elements and works them out in all their possible combinations until the right thing is spelled out; until the idea reveals itself. I think of them always as landscapes though that's too general a term because they read more like concentrated examinations of natural structures. She told me someone once said, "everything's connected." I think she likes that, believes that nothing stops or is separate. I also experience each painting or drawing or collage as a kind of hand-print of a place in which my mother has spent time, leaving traces, taking traces.
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