About

Karen Rose is half Mexican from Marin County, California and has been painting in New York, San Francisco and currently in Raleigh, NC. She was an abstract, loosely grid based artist for 20 years before she turned her brush to the natural world of landscape and plants. Her work has always been driven by color.

She received her BA from UC Berkeley and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Last year she showed over 30 paintings of NC natives at the North Carolina Botanical Gardens in Chapel Hill. She teaches art at Wiley International Studies Magnet Elementary.

This past year she has produced three distinct bodies of work: 

Narrative Seascapes based on traumatic experiences on the coasts of Mexico, France, Greece, Hawaii, San Francisco, and the Galapagos.

The Tenuousness of the Outerbanks - a series devoted to these slender and imperiled bodies of land on the coast of North Carolina, ravaged by hurricanes.

Mexican Indigenous Flora painted in watercolor and oil.