Karen Kosoglad

Karen Kosoglad’s figurative paintings capture women during their introspective moments. Her expressive style, sometimes monochromatic, sometimes colorful, reveals her interest in what she describes as “the gestural moments in everyday life and the balance between weight, rhythm, shape and color.” Black contour lines highlight the curves and form of her live models who she has pose in chairs, with her dog, or occasionally outside in the landscape. She uses mirroring to increase narrative ambiguity in her works and introduce the idea of contemplation with figures pictured alongside their reflections. The paintings reveal various moods, not necessarily those of the models, but of the artist responding to the moment and process of paintings itself. The artist embraces the significance of gesture as the infrastructure to her work, informed by working from life. Deconstruction is her process, always inspired by the search for rightness of the form.

In addition to her oil and acrylic paintings on board and canvas, Karen Kosoglad also makes monotypes and intimate collages composed of vintage sheet music and other found printed materials. From time to time she works en plein air creating landscapes in which no figures appear. Regardless of subject matter, her compositions show a dynamic pulling and pushing between representation and pure abstraction.

Kosoglad studied at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and earned her Bachelor of Arts at University of California at Santa Cruz where she came under the influence of Don Wiegandt, in the circle of Richard Diebenkorn. She has a Masters in Education and has taught in the Seattle public schools since 1993. She has exhibited primarily in the Northwest at galleries and invitational museum exhibitions at Maryhill Museum of Art and the Whatcom Museum of History and Art. Her work is in private collections in Boston, Chicago, New York as well as on the West Coast and in Italy.