KAREN TEARNAN

I hope to engage the viewer in personal reflection and questions of a deathless spirituality liberated from the dogmatic interference of religion that fuels unbelief. My work reflects my own search for spiritual meaning and practice within a tumultuous world, reflecting a spiritual journey common to all mankind regardless of religion, culture, race, gender or age. My pieces contain a duality of knowing and not knowing, of having specific known and chosen imagery representing universal man, and imagery resulting from the process of painting as an act of meditation itself, the place where images and mark making are birthed from. The surfaces of my canvases are populated with layers of paint from translucent washes to impasto paint applied with a palette knife. My paintings conceptually are related to the contrast in spiritual clarity of hearing God (sound) and not hearing God (silence). Sound and silence become related to various aspects of music, such as rhythm, melody and how colour and format respond to music and the interpretation of music.