Seasoned, contemporary Canadian artist, Karen Phillips Curran, was concieved in Newfoundland and grew up in Nova Scotia and the Ottawa Valley. Her Air Force father gave her a grounding in discipline, and her artistic mother encouraged her creative sensibility.
At a young age, her artistic abilities earned her a place in a 4-year vocational art program. Many of her creative skills were ingrained in her then. Since then, she has used them to make her living in many ways. She has always exhibited her paintings, but drafting, cartooning, sign painting, photography, graphic arts, and murals have taken her work to new places… for 17 seasons, she painted the stage sets at Canada’s National Arts Centre as head painter.
Having been a practising artist for over fifty years, her work is centred around capturing those moments when the moment meets time, and pauses. She works in series, exploring contemplative watercolours of stones and water, or sun-drenched architecturals and landscapes of the local countryside, wherever she is.
There is a sense of pause in her work.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

“I think of myself as a realist, of a sort. I am a watercolourist at heart, creating in transparent layers. In my lifelong dedication to my art, I have extended my facility to several other mediums, mixing and creating subtle connections between medium and message.

I have always been fascinated by the ephemeral nature of the moment. That is why I work in series. I tell visual stories of watersides, of elusive, dancing shadows on textured surfaces, or fleeting vignettes of juxtaposition that render a tale…obscure as it may be, making it open to each viewer’s interpretation."