ARTIST STATEMENT

    Karma Kitaj’s paintings, whether they are purely abstract or abstracted figurative, display her love of color. Brilliant saturated primary and secondary colors offer her endless opportunity to experiment with different values juxtaposed against neutrals. She often uses humor, mystery, and whimsy, especially evident in the figurative environments. There she enjoys painting poses and gestures in imaginary spaces, using texture, pattern, and color that blends from figure to environment and back. Her interest is in portraying distorted or exaggerated human images both to convey that humans come in all shapes, sizes, and colors or to portray a sense of intrigue for the viewer.

    Rather than beginning with a theme, Kitaj enjoys allowing the painting to emerge and surprise her, but certain imagery reappears– a fragment of her historical mentors’ paintings (Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, Dali) on the wall, a mysterious figure peering in from a window, a flat or askew household item as seen from above. Her own work often makes her smile and giggle.

    In her abstract work, Kitaj typically uses undulating lines, with splotches of bold color and unusual shapes, sometimes made from her own stencils. She creates textures by applying layers of encaustic (hot wax) or placing the wax under oil and collage or other mixed media, such as embroidery thread, tar, glue, glitter, or encaustic monoprints. Often the abstract pieces are suggestive of an imaginary natural world.

     She aims to create :

·      Arresting color combinations

·      Mystery, awe, surprise, and humor

·      Balance within asymmetry

·      Flowing lines intersecting with hard edges

·      Innuendo, implicit messages that invite a story

    Kitaj’s favorite mediums are oil mixed with cold wax over layers of encaustic, encaustic monoprints, collage, and other mixed media. She is known to resurrect an old painting by creating a new one over that, leaving some of the old visible as history.

   Kitaj is a member of the Outer Cape Art Collective, a cooperative composed of students of Laura Shabott, esteemed Provincetown artist who studied with Robert Henry (student of Hans Hoffman). She exhibits widely in her area of Western MA, southern Vt, the Boston area, and Provincetown, MA.