Karen Darling graduated from the Illustration program at Sheridan’s faculty of Animation, Arts and Design. After a few years as a freelance illustrator in the advertising community, Karen turned her focus to the restaurant industry and opened a successful restaurant that is still going strong today.
Karen has since returned to her art career and has been working as a fine artist painting and sculpting for the last several years. Karen has won numerous awards and is represented in private collections across North America and the UK.
In 2010 Karen was asked to provide all the artwork to be used in the motion picture ‘Dream House’ starring Daniel Craig and Rachel Weiss released in the fall of 2011.
Recently Karen has been included as one of the international artists represented in a beautiful line of wall murals by Area Environments.
Karen is also a guest artist in the book 'Painting With Cold Wax' by Serena Barton published in 2015 by North Light Books.
“Because of my training as an Illustrator, I was very comfortable doing things in a realistic manner. However, at some point I felt I needed to let go of what I felt most comfortable doing and challenge myself further.
Exploring new ways of expressing myself led to a much looser and more abstract feeling in my figurative work, and in turn, led to completely nonobjective abstract paintings.
Recently the introduction of wax into my painting process has allowed for multiple translucent layers that add depth and ambiguity. Scraping back through these layers reveals even more than anticipated. It is this constant push/pull between happy accident and purposefulness that captivates me, and hopefully the viewer."
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