| Karen Mortensen |
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Karen Mortensen exhibited a profound interest in creating fine art from an early age. She was born into an artistic family in Copenhagen, Denmark. She studied fine art at Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles before moving from Santa Barbara, California to the Big Island of Hawaii in 1999. Karen's work is a reflection of experiences garnered from a lifetime of traveling and living among diverse cultures and in countries throughout the world. She has garnered dozens of awards in the mediums of sculpture and painting. Her work has been shown extensively at galleries and art exhibitions throughout Hawaii. The culture, legends and people of Hawaii have been a great inspiration to her. Karen was thrilled to discover the medium of bronze mesh because it was light and could be painted, thus allowing her to merge both painting and sculpture. Large sculptures are definitely a labor of love, since the mesh is sharp and cuts her fingers as she shapes the volumes. She painstakingly designed and developed the process, which turns relatively soft flat bronze screen into large sculpture. She applies various chemicals to "set" the sculpted shape so it can be pigmented like a painting. "I'm inspired by the translucent qualities of the medium, which I sometimes take further advantage of by painting images inside the piece as well." |
