"My work is inspired by the possibility of making a painting that is abstract and self-contained, while simultaneously suggesting a relationship to nature, a painting that is unfixed, evoking changing conditions of form, light, color and atmosphere.
I begin by mixing a palette of colors that I derive from either my direct experience in nature or one mediated by a color photograph. When I start, all I know is my need to put these colors together to make a painting. I do not know what the painting will look like in advance of its making and rid my mind of any pre-conceived plan, image or technique.
I work with a vocabulary of organic processes, like puddling, staining, dripping and pulling. I have evolved this vocabulary over many years, through trial and error, to gain an understanding of how paint can behave. I paint on small panels as a way to establish intimacy with the painting and to rapidly generate new organic forms, color interactions and concurrent formal decisions, to create a balance between chaos and control, accident and intention. The resultant painting is then enlarged via a technical process that calls to mind the gesture of spreading one’s fingers on a touch screen to see an image in greater detail, allowing the viewer to be both inside and outside the image, to experience intimacy on a grand scale.
My objective is to make a painting that reinvigorates the language of abstraction and forges a renewed bond to nature. What I seek is a connection to the larger world via a painting that suggests a confluence between nature, paint and technology as process and the sense of immediacy and aliveness that this fused experience provides for me."
- Karen Barth, 2014