ARTIST PROFILE OF KAREN TOOTH

After teaching high school students visual arts for 25 years, I’m now relishing the freedom to practise my own art. The impact of art teaching has lead to a diverse art practice that includes various drawing mediums, printmaking; photography; oil and acrylic painting; soft sculpture; welded sculpture; decorative, sculptural and functional ceramics. I believe in the therapeutic powers of art and have watched the shift in angry teenagers into more mature, calmer and self respecting beings – the creative arts versus the destruction of self, others and property. As a result of aiming to enthuse teenagers about art, I have developed a broad range of artistic and personal themes. These include: explorations of personal, social and working relationships; human personality traits and their impact; the inland landscape and environmental issues; questions on spirituality and the direction of life; the sensuality, form and potential wicked humour of fruit and flowers; the use of colour to describe form.

To avoid boredom (or perhaps an impatience to create), I can have up to 10 different works going at the same time – exploring different themes and media. I am stimulated by many things – interviews; poetry; images torn from magazines; dreams; excerpts from novels; quotations; humour; puns; and the art of others.

Artists I admire include Chris O’Doherty; the Renaissance men for their draughtsmanship and diversity (eg. Da Vinci; Michelangelo); the Dutch Masters for their detail and polish; traditional Japanese art for linear simplicity; Picasso: Modigliani … the list is endless.

My passion for art stems from my culturally aware upbringing in coastal NSW, and a mixed ethnic heritage ranging from Europe to China. Extensive overseas travel and admiration for the cleverness of its creators be they sculptors, architects or painters, have fed the love art, need to learn, experiment and create.

When people look at my work, I want them to be lost in the layers of meaning and then come out the other side. As Braque once said, “ The spectator who looks at a painting goes over the same path as the artist, and since the path counts more than the thing itself, the journey is what interests us most.”.