Primal and immediate, Karen Crompton’s paintings in oil exist between the abstract and the realistic. Her work celebrates woman, female myth and archetype, from Great Mother to Goddess. Informed by cave art and naive painting styles, creating her art is a soulful, intuitive process. Each painting is a conversation in a wider dialogue that emerges across a series of paintings. Collectors experience her work as expressive, powerful and emotional.
As an aphantasic artist, with no internal visual imagery, story, emotion and the physicality of painting are significant in the development of the work. Using oil and mixed media, contrast of light and dark, control and chaos, her paintings emerge through layering, disrupting and repeating symbol, text line and form. A surface rich in history develops, the forms and colour palette inspired by its emotional and psychological meaning.
Karen has always searched for meaning and understanding of experience, this being motivational in her previous professional career as a psychotherapist working with survivors of trauma. The belief in the transformational power of relationship and the human spirit is fundamental to her view of the world and approach to art making.
She invites the viewer to finish the painting through their own meaning making process, to interpret and respond, rather than dismiss and move on.