Karen Colangelo

Painting for Canadian born Artist Karen Colangelo started very young. During her childhood Karen gained insight and inspiration while travelling throughout each Canadian province. The colours of the Canadian landscape began to influence her paintings and she realized the importance of taking journeys through such diverse and contradictory environments. Since those developmental years Karen has sustained an unbroken desire to create a style of art that is distinctive and clear while embodying the concept of "contradiction" as it relates to herself, her viewers and to society as a whole. Colangelo’s paintings are titled in opposites such as, “The Even Odd”, “The Hidden Show”, “The Intentional Accident” alerting us to the contradictions the paintings hold. She pushes at the boundaries of colour, creating tension, drawing her viewers in. Her use of complementary and tertiary colour schemes immediately captures your attention. Every measure of Karen’s work is both conflict and harmony from beginning to end. Her painting technique begins with brushwork applying acrylic colours, which she refers to as the ‘dance of colour’, then by using a sheet of plexi-glass to drag the paint across the canvas her process ends with the ‘fight of colour’. Her contradictory forms and techniques create a harmonious display of colour and movement. Her style is a journey of one paint colour travelling through opposite application techniques combining with secondary colours to create tertiary colours. Each colour travels through the dance and the fight of its environment, leaving its mark and creating a new image. The paint looks for peace in a confusing world. It looks for change. It looks for growth, and realizes that the journey is about the experience. It wants to be original. It wants to be impactful, and in the same vein it asks how it can impact the world? Her work explores the “opposite” possibilities. She takes her viewers on a journey through her contradiction. She often relies on the paint and its perspective to give her the direction she needs as she forces one primary colour through a tertiary field. Karen understands the meaning for someone to take a journey and the purpose of that journey is to rarely find an answer but instead to continually ask questions. Her viewers can relate to her intent in society as we are all on the same journey; and it is a journey that involves many contradictions such as: being emotional or apathetic, starting and arriving, laughing or crying, gaining or loosing, beginning and ending, leaving the old behind and starting new, failing and succeeding, loosing yourself and finding yourself. Karen’s work is a reflection on ones journey, keeping in mind that it’s a journey of experiencing many contradictions, not necessarily looking to arrive at an end; the journey is the destination.