Since I last wrote about painter Karen Hollingsworth in 2006, she has continued exploring her luminous room interiors, which have evolved into “windowscapes”.
Many painters will work to fill rooms with light, but Hollingsworth’s rooms are volumetrically filled with the palpable presence of light and air. Sea air lifts gossamer curtains, through which sunlight slides, scatters and bounces, playing across polished wooden floors and chairs, cascades of linen bedsheets or tablecloths arrayed with colorful fruit.
Light and air almost seem like competing forces, light filling a space like water in a jar, and air stirring it around, moving your eye through the space across the diagonals of swept up curtains.
In the galleries on her site you can browse through her recent archives of windowscapes, along with “roomscapes” with somewhat weightier contents, as well as portraits, still life and commissioned work.
Karen Hollingsworth is married to painter Neil Hollingsworth, who I profiled here and here.
I spy with my eye…the spirit of Andrew Wyeth breezing through the curtains.
Fantastic sense of atmosphere
Incredible stuff.
karen’s work is so delicate and strong at the same time. these days she’s got a great sense of color going, much richer than in the past, and there’s a lot more life in her paintings. the curtains really do move.