NYAB Event - Linda Pearlman Karlsberg "Transient Visions"

Linda Pearlman Karlsberg "Transient Visions"

Galleries at the Interchurch Center

This event has ended.

ARTIST STATEMENT:
I explore still life and landscape with equal concentration and pleasure. Light, and its play on space and form, is a catalyst for my work; it compels my attention and ignites a desire to render its moods and drama.

A particular time and light is the generating spirit of my Landscape Paintings. I paint the resulting interplay of color and atmosphere; the play of one texture and shape against another. I depict places that suspend me in their stillness and trigger a visceral, emotional response. A sea of purple loosestrife that flowed across a marsh was a visual wonder in early August, and I was enthralled by the play of late afternoon light and the spilling cool deep blue violet shadows over the brilliant magenta and rose fields. I aim to capture that startling moment when overtaken by this visual encounter: my delight in the fleeting expression and mood of the depicted moment, and the enfolding, lush tranquility of these still corners. The scenes I paint range from striking to subtle, yet they all evoke the pervading serenity that suffuses my time spent exploring the natural world. While celebrating this splendor these scenes also evoke life’s fragility inherent in this perpetual reshaping and reordering, this cycle of abundance and loss.

The Water Lilies series are landscapes in a foreshortened space. Here too I depict transient visions that arrive through the power, color and atmosphere of a particular time and light. I hope to capture the glow that emanates from blooms reaching for the sun, the magic and mystery of the water’s reflection, the varied lily pad forms that dance, twist or plod across the surface. In the summer months I feel pulled incessantly to the lily pond to witness the awesome, yet largely unnoticed beauty quietly unfolding every day. The pads multiply, move, and grow and blooms appear, mature, unfurl and disappear in this constantly morphing environment, as the light changes with the hour and weather. The Water Lily paintings seek to tell of this infinite richness, vibrancy, lushness and variety that appears elusively.

I return each time to the pond, marshes or other pastoral places knowing there will be moments when a flower is aglow or a tree is aflame or the water is shimmering in a way that I find arresting and haunting; asking to be held on to and described. The challenge in each painting is to elaborate on these moments: to reflect the intimacy of these encounters, to hold the melancholy engendered by this perpetual and metaphorical play of birth, growth and death, and to convey the awe that results from witnessing the infinite creativity in every living corner.

BIOGRAPHY:
Linda Pearlman Karlsberg is a still life and landscape painter and draughtsman based in Newton, Massachusetts working in oils, graphite and lithographic crayon. She studied visual art at Tufts University and Boston University College for the Arts with Conger Metcalf, Jack Kramer, Arthur Polonsky, David Aronson, James Weeks and Philip Guston, earning her BFA and MFA. She was awarded a teaching assistantship while an undergraduate, the Stein Memorial Award for Merit in the Arts upon graduation, and a graduate teaching fellowship in painting as a graduate student. After earning her MFA Linda Pearlman Karlsberg continued to teach drawing, design and painting at Boston University, The Art Institute and other colleges in the Boston area. With her husband, photographer Mark Karlsberg, she founded Studio Eleven, a professional photographic studio, in 1975. Their photographic images have earned and continue to earn a wide range of awards and accolades.