KAREN KUCHARSKI

Visual Artist, Educator, Dancer

I enjoy creating images with meaning, release, and beauty to shape answers to better my world.   I take pride in making each work sing with a sense of quality and I delight when my art resonates with others.

I pull upon my research and teaching, especially at Cornell University that exercised my knowledge in anatomy, fashion, the studio practices of art, and indigenous cultures of the Americas. I draw upon my love of dance, especially the Argentine Tango, and the wonderful experience of responding to rhythm, and the marvel of living on this planet.  I create art to expand and enrich life experiences.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My desire to refine the marks I make with a quality that sings compels me to investigate the reasons behind my mark-making and the choice of imagery that carries those marks.  What draws me to suspend water over or around a subject or paint dancers in the cosmos?

The pureness of love and water, the freshness of a landscape, cultural richness and dance bring forth a drive to know how my world comes together with that of unknown or unseen forces.  I draw upon these to create work with light and movement, primarily in two-dimensional artworks, including drawing, painting, and print forms.

I present the viewer with both imagery relating to movement, and with rhythms associated with mark-making.  Undulations, tapering lines, and staccato pulsations harmonize for visual flow, like a dance.  Edges are carefully shaped, and tonal gradations are balanced among hot lights and shadowy blacks. 

As an artist with a female perspective, I find communication and equality in relationships important components.  These are often metaphors, such as dance companions sharing a common goal, that explore the act of coming together and shaping a collective moment.  They suggest a power both within us and beyond that I am inspired to make mark of.  The Tango Light Paintings, for instance, offer a world of movement and partnership with imagery that explores the spatial light of a Tango setting and hint at the dancers' physicality while emphasizing an ephemeral nature.  Professional Argentine Tango dancer and performer, Florencia Taccetti, stated, "Tango dancers use the beat of the music like water.  It is liquid and always changing, and we use it to respond to the dance," (in essence, to who we are and how we respond to our world.)  In my art, the beat of the music and the marks that shape an image, like water, are metaphors for life.  I use these to express my personal response and my understanding of a collective sense.

Thank you for your interest.