Kara Greenwell

"Drowning Out the Crowd" - Neutral Contemporary Abstract Painting 2022

2022

My black greyhound (Abstract painting) Acrylic, oil pastel and charcoal on canvas Artwork exclusive to IdeelArt. This artwork will be shipped rolled in a dent-resistant tube. This...

My black greyhound (Abstract painting) Acrylic, oil pastel and charcoal on canvas Artwork exclusive to IdeelArt. This artwork will be shipped rolled in a dent-resistant tube. This...

The Mediterranean (Abstract painting) Acrylic, charcoal and oil pastel on canvas - Unframed. This work will be shipped rolled in a tube. Artwork exclusive to IdeelArt. Adrienn Krah...

Monochromatic Series – Nr 2 (Abstract painting) Acrylic, charcoal, graphite and oil pastel on (off-white) canvas - Unframed. Artwork exclusive to IdeelArt. This artwork will be sh...

Monochromatic Series – Nr 1 (Abstract painting) Acrylic, charcoal, graphite and oil pastel on (white) canvas - Unframed. Artwork exclusive to IdeelArt. This artwork will be shippe...

The Mediterranean (Abstract painting) Acrylic, charcoal and oil pastel on canvas - Unframed. This work will be shipped rolled in a tube. Artwork exclusive to IdeelArt. Adrienn Krah...

Monochromatic Series – Nr 2 (Abstract painting) Acrylic, charcoal, graphite and oil pastel on (off-white) canvas - Unframed. Artwork exclusive to IdeelArt. This artwork will be sh...

Artist's statement: "Separate from the tar paintings I have been doing, I am creating a series of work in which I am channeling some of the things I have always loved about Cy Twombly along with qualities of a painting I saw in a local collection by a Cuban painter that I really admired and have thought about a lot since. Of course both share a graffiti quality; Twombly was the first to work with a sort of automatic drawing, beginning in the 1950s, and what he did opened up this new language for countless painters. You still see traces of it in so much contemporary art. Antoni Tapies has been a big influence on me as well, and you can see some of him in this work as well. I limited the color palette in this one as a sort of exercise in discipline, since it is easy to let color get away from you in a painting like this one. There are areas of three-dimensional paint that help flatten the picture plane and restrict the eye from reading depth into the painting; they function in the same way as Barnett Newman's 'zips' and Susan Rothenberg's lines across some of her horse images...

Robert Motherwell Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 110C 1968 Acrylic and graphite on paper 15.2 x 20.3 cms (6 x 8 ins) Robert Motherwell's Elegies series represent one of the iconic motifs of Abstract Expressionism.  Based on a 1948 ink illustration the artist executed accompanying a Harold Rosenberg poem, “A Bird for every bird,” the drawing shows the hypnotically repetitive patterning of ovoids and vertical beams.  The stark contrast of the black ink on white paper references the symbolic use of the color black by artists such as Goya, Manet and Matisse to convey death, loss, and tragedy.  Motherwell was quite affected by the turbulence of the Spanish Civil War and alludes to the Spanish republic in his Elegies. Motherwell’s plumbing the depths of poetry, history, and primordial art in the Elegies is considered a hallmark of nascent Abstract Expressionist painting in its desire to "excavate" essential imagery of mankind. Motherwell, who originally trained as a philosophy scholar and later became of the great editors of 20th century art documents, grasped very early on the crucial importance that in order to contribute meaningfully to the canon of modern art, one must create a principle of aesthetics. Through the surrealist concept of automatism, the artist finally found the creative principle that eventually governed his extraordinary artistic output and produced the Elegies, one of the most salient, immediate painterly images of 20th century abstract painting. In fact, he has alluded to the fact that each one of his Elegies begins as an automatic drawing, and certain shapes are then blocked to create the signature armature of the vertical bars and ovals. The Elegies seem to possess the power of an archetypal image, an image the mind already grasps on a subconscious level. Motherwell's play of dualities of black and white as well as other dichotomies—the geometric versus the organic, chaos versus order, death versus life—was a condition of living through a tumultuous period in American history. During an interview, he vividly recalled the 1940s as the time when society was ordered by a set of contradictions.  In Motherwell's Elegies, he not only discovered an incredibly elastic pictorial language that would communicate on multiple levels but also acknowledged these contradictions in a manner that would resonate in abstract form.  The present work served as a model for a painting, Spanish Elegy...

"I have been painting seriously for somewhere around 35 years, but have only ever sold regionally - most recently, through my gallery on Magazine Street in New Orleans. Through 1stDibs and other online platforms I am now (thankfully) able to reach a worldwide audience and am selling paintings...