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Karen Rose has been a painter for over 30 years in New York City, San Francisco, and Raleigh. She has been painting an ongoing series of landscapes on both sides of the Mexican border, with the notion that landscapes transcend borders. Her identity and heritage straddle these places, as the product of a Mexican family that emigrated to California during the Mexican Revolution and a Scots/Irish San Francisco family. A cancelled trip to the Mojave Desert during the pandemic led her to use film stills of movies shot in Mexico, Southern California, Arizona, and Utah as source material for digital, watercolor, oil, and acrylic paintings. She expanded this series to encompass the Spaghetti Westerns by Sergio Leone and others shot in Spain to stand in for Mexico. Having recently relocated back to the SF Bay area, she is simultaneously painting bay and and coastal landscapes.