Artist Statement
Karen Ferguson PGDipVA
Adept at justifying the beauty in everything, Karen Ferguson depicts people in their truth and in their most positive light. Positively highlighting one’s most favourable features with a focus on character and personal style. Not confined to portraiture alone, Ferguson puts colour into her world and her art and exhibits a new body of work every six months. Prolific in the production of work, she strives for a likeness to her subjects in the portraits she paints combining a looser style of brushwork with a balance of tighter more detailed marks. Putting together an artwork can be a matter of combining many photographic images and reworking them to make each painting. Ferguson’s intentions are to use the truth and what can already be seen in snippets of moment and time into one painted work. Movement, flow, balance and gesture in a work are important with a focus on the formal qualities of a painting.
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Artist models are Lucian Freud, Frances Hodgkins, Alice Neel, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Elizabeth Peyton and David Hockney.
