Artist: Karen Weihs
Medium: Oil
Website:  www.karenweihs.com

As a contemporary oil painter and colorist, I love to create abstracted images that depict endless visual space. Trying to stay in a modern, loose simplified look, which is about forsaking all details, I conjure patterns of light, air, weather and reflection that feel ethereal and diffused. Layered pigments, contrasting colors and geometric shapes breathe life into my images, and while my landscapes are minimal in representational content, I find viewers often see the familiar in the abstract. I use soft brushes & a very large palette knife laying layer after layer of transparent paint to construct larger paintings. Inspiration comes from small field studies which gives me information to produce larger contemporary textural paintings using glazing techniques and swipes of the cake knife size palette knife. My look is simple in theme, the familiar in uncomplicated content. I also likes to create intuitive expressionistic paintings.

Karen Weihs is a native of Charleston, SC with a BFA from the University of Georgia. She began her professional career as a graphic designer for Sea Pines Corporation. After marrying restaurateur Chris Weihs, she worked with him to develop and operate restaurants. Chris was noted as one of the fathers of the new Charleston Cuisine in a Charleston Magazine interview of late and Karen was his partner. She also multi-tasked as a mother, businesswoman and artist while developing her art career. Chris and Karen owned and operated 7 Charleston restaurants for 30 years before retiring to NC. She started showcasing her works of modern art in the family restaurants before founding a gallery space in Charleston in 1995. No longer a gallery owner, Chris and Karen divide their time between visiting often in Charleston and Houston, living in Asheville, NC, and Cashiers, NC. She paints for 6 galleries and does many ‘semiarts” a year which are speaking venues on creativity on finding your inner voice. She calls their 48 acres in western NC, Skylight Farm, where the light shines always on creativity. There she privately teaches art, paints full time and he mentors young restauranteurs and teaches cooking.