I render the majesty and abundance of nature, brimming with tender detail, emotional mark-making, and color. Sensations, those experienced through seeing, mingle with those that cryptically ebb and flow inside me. My inner and outer worlds synthesize. The result is a delicate merger that I earnestly attempt to translate on to canvas.

I cut stencils as my personal alphabet and brush, smear, glob, drip, and scrape to write lush and explosive environments into existence. I find meaning through the act of painting. It is a metaphysical journey exploring the ranges of human essence through the expression of paint, of what cannot be reached through an objective study of the material reality. I evoke the methods of nature, growth, and creation rather than provide a pictorial likeness. They are self-portraits of how my brain and heart work as internal awareness becomes visual.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower. Dylan Thomas, 1914-1953

“With the energy of abstract expressionism, Karen Rudd’s paintings seem to explode, a riot of color with all the chaos and movement of an armory explosion. Slowly, however, they reveal their sense of composition and their organic roots. Decisions and layers of composition seem to have grown through the same natural processes that we see in a spring mountain meadow, or an abandoned Victorian garden. The direct observation of nature revealed here is not solely in the visible contours and lines but rather in a sense of growing inner observation and expression revealing itself. Like a garden in full bloom, their composition comes through layers of competing thought and feeling, an expression of interior growth reaching out to us in the world, striving for their own bit of sunshine.”

Knox Garvin, curator Perrell Gallery, Norfolk, Virginia