Karen Cairns: This Gleaming City 5th to 30th September
An Interview with Karen Cairns To imagine one of Glasgow’s best-loved views – Buchanan Street, say, thronged with shoppers and flanked by all those spidery metal awnings, jutting from the sandstone - and then to compare it with its recreation in a painting by Karen Cairns, is to realise a remarkable
process by which each – the mental image, and the artistic impression –
is trans-
formed by the other. It is
almost as
though the streets, the buildings are breathing with a varying intensity. Spires snake; buildAbove: ‘Walking in Gold, Argyle Street’, watercolour, £950
ings blur – and yet, no
matter how much liberty the artist allows herself, each scene is always instantly
recognisa-
ble. Something we have known,
always just
changed utterly.
For an architectural painter, Karen is
Above: ‘Glasgow Crown,’ watercolour, £550
unusual in that she almost invariably uses the notoriously difficult wet in wet technique, mixing colours on the page itself – the effect is as though she were
dissolving the solid structures of buildings, in order to reconstitute them in rich colour.
Until her career as an artist took off after submitting her portfolio to scotlandart.com twelve years ago, Karen was working full-time as an architect. It is perhaps surprising at first, that a profession which seems to demand absolute precision should function as an apprenticeship for an artist who is characterised, above all, by freedom. Yet, as Karen puts it, architec-
ture has imbued her with “an intrinsic understanding of how buildings stay up”; having
Above: ‘Molten Gold, River Clyde’, watercolour, £950
studied at the Edinburgh School of Art, before a postgraduate in Urban Planning, Karen has an intimate knowledge of all the manifold ways in which one may visualise the city. “Architecture is even more precise now than when I was studying – with computers, it’s become possible to plan buildings on a scale of one-to-one, down to the nearest millimetre. I suppose, in some respects,
my
painting is an escape from this – a
means of freeing up. Of course, watercolour was the architect’s
origi-
nal medium – we presented
our
Left: ‘Steel Giraffes at Sunset on the Clyde’, watercolour, £975
projects in it. Over the years, I’ve become more and more experienced at working from a number of sketches, to the point where I barely draw or sketch at all now. I’ve learned to
take great pleasure in the struggle for control which wet in wet paint-
Above: ‘April Showers, St Mark’s Square, Venice’, watercolour, £550
ing demands; in allow-
ing the colours to carve out the scene in front of me. “What I’m aiming at is
a sense of flair. When you’re looking at how city lights at night reflect on water, there’s a
Above: ‘An Apéritif, The Rogano’, watercolour, £550
sense of excitement, of vibrancy, which you can only capture in watercolour with an understanding of the paint’s inherent spontaneity.” The impression we get is that, though spontaneous – though she will paint quickly, creating two or three visions of each scene which strikes
her,
con-
stricted as she is by the speed at which
the
paint
dries – there is
nothing haphazard about Karen’s art. It is all the accumulative
product
of many years’ experience Above: ‘Glamour and Glitz, The Rogano’, watercolour, £550
working
in this medium – moreover, it owes
Above: ‘The Turn of the Swilcan Burn, St Andrews’, watercolour, price available on application.
much to her continuous lived experience of the artistic qualities hidden within the surfaces of the city. “The moment of inspiration isn’t something I
tend to thing about; it will happen unconsciously. But sometimes I catch myself looking up perhaps more than usual – it’s only in looking up, rather than, say, at shop window level,
that you realise the overall power of a place. So most of my paintings are depicted from ground level, attempting to capture the emotional response to a scene which anyone could pass, on any given day. I think that sense of recognition is what many people experience with my paintings – they may have walked down that street countless times, but just never experienced it as a piece of art.
Above: ‘Streetlights & Headlights,
Above: ‘Guardian Angel, Paisley
University Ave.’, watercolour, £285
Rd West’, watercolour, £550
Above: ‘Evening Façade, Glasgow University’, watercolour, £650
“I’m most excited by the evening light, and I think in part that’s related to emotional associations – the moment just before the pubs fill up, people walking home from work. It’s the blending of a communal mood with the most beautiful light of the day.” One thus gets the sense that, for Karen, art is an extension of her life in modern Glasgow. There’s a sense of intrepidity in her evening wanderings, an enthusiasm for new architectural developments grounded in the fact that “nobody will ever have painted them before”. Below: ‘Night Life, River Clyde’, watercolour, £650
When we view her paintings, we are induced to view a familiar scene with keener eyes, to read a deeper beauty into its lines and reconsider it as something entirely new; likewise, Karen will manipulate her walk to work each morning to ensure she crosses over the Clyde, simply because “every day, it shows me something different”.
Image: The artist at work at ScotlandArt’s artist in residency, Lucca, Italy.
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