The Crown

Karen’s The Crown is a static ode to movement that rejects straight lines and figuration in favor of dancing gestural mark-marking. The patches of soft blues, oranges, reds, activated whites, and beiges ground the work but remain static and unpredictable. They bleed into each other, overlap, separate, and bring together. Without the stability of their presence, the painting would become lost and murky, but the picture would be dull and lifeless without their frenetic appearance. This marriage of movement and permeance underlies the work's allure and gets to the heart of what separates successful abstract painting from its convoluted counterparts. The gestural lines pirouetting across the composition are ballerinas whose dance is highlighted by their tonally subdued surroundings. One of my crazier theories is that painting is more aligned with dance than any other art form. This is obviously a rather ridiculous thing to think. Still, dancers' adherence to freedom of expression within a stringent framework seems so analogous to painting whenever I have the pleasure of viewing a work like The Crown.