En Plein Air (outdoors) and in the studio, I paint luminous, impressionist oils of our West Coast landscape and colorful, abstract acrylics from my mind’s eye.  When I paint on location, I use a palette knife and brush, sometimes beginning with a few pencil lines to mark out a landscape design, then block in large areas of color.  As the composition develops, I build up buttery, thick impasto layers of oil paint on my canvas, often scraping up piles of paint from my palette to create new colors with each swipe of the knife.  Painting outdoors is a sensory experience for me, as I take in the sights, sounds and smells of my current surroundings.  When I paint abstractly in the studio, I am inspired by my time outdoors to paint from memory, enlarge a Plein Air study, or abstract the landscape.  Indoor painting often transports me back to the location as I recall my time spent there.  Recently, I have begun incorporating mixed media and photocollage elements with acrylics on canvas to create large abstract collages and paintings.

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An artist at heart, creating runs through my blood.  My mother was a draftsman, oil painter, crafter, and my first art teacher.  My father created handmade books, designed and built functional things for our home, and photo-documented our lives through slides and home movies.  Music and film and the arts were ever-present in our lives. As a child, drawing was my favorite activity.  I began formal art lessons at age 13, learning oil painting and pastels at Jordan Arts in Redwood City, CA.  I remember watching my mother paint at the kitchen table.  She helped me enter local art shows, and I won ribbons in my teen years.  I always wanted to be an artist, but it was not until much later that I was able to call painting a career.

After high school, I attended UC San Diego.  I studied a variety of subjects in the arts and sciences, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Psychology and dual-minors in Visual Arts and Philosophy.  Off to graduate school I went, to pursue a PhD in Social Psychology.  By the time I'd begun the program, I was questioning why I wasn’t pursuing a Masters in Fine Art instead.  I wanted to continue taking painting classes, but the school would not allow it while I was in a Psychology PhD candidate.  I tutored undergraduate psychology students, worked on my research, and spent the occasional evening in a coffee shop drawing.

A year later, I moved to the Pacific Northwest, to Beaverton, Oregon, and began to pursue my goal of becoming a working artist while working full-time at Nike.  With two local art colleges available, I studied life drawing at the Oregon College of Art and Craft, and later enrolled in the Museum School (which became Pacific Northwest College of Art, or PNCA) to pursue a Certificate in Fine Art.  Throughout the 90's and early 00's, I painted and drew regularly when I wasn't at work, spending vacation time and my sabbaticals attending painting workshops and traveling, photographing and sketching.  During this time, I created large abstract landscapes, often reflecting the jewel-like colors and light of the California Bay Area, which still ran deep in my blood.  In 2004, while showing my paintings at the inaugural SE Area Art Walk in Sellwood, OR, my husband and I learned that we were pregnant with our first child.  For the next several years, I spent time doing all kinds of art projects with my two children, but no real artwork of my own.  There was a void.

On New Years Day 2015, an artist friend from high school sent me information about an online Art Journaling class.  I signed up for the lessons and created a mixed media piece that tapped into my emotions and reignited my passion for painting and creating - for myself.  I decided it was time to invest in my own art again.  That year I took two outdoor painting workshops, participated in a local show for the first time in a decade, signed up for my first Plein Air painting competition and a local Quick Draw event and show.  My eight year old daughter came with me and painted in the Quick Draw at our local Farmers Market.  We did this every October for three years, and her paintings of pumpkins are framed in our home.  I got hooked on painting en Plein Air, which I’d done several times in the early 2000's, before it had become the international movement that it is today.

Immersing myself into the plein air movement, I started to attend the Plein Air Convention and Expo annually with 1,000 other painters.  I began to travel with my oils and painted on location in many parts of California and Oregon, including San Francisco, Palo Alto, Cambria, Paseo Robles, San Diego, and La Jolla, as well as Maui, Tucson, Santa Fe, and many towns in Oregon including Central Oregon, the Oregon Coast, and all of the beautiful areas of Washington County where I lived for over 30 years.  In 2020 when Covid shut down galleries, events, workshops and conventions, I needed to rethink my involvement and lifestyle.  Attending workshops online was a lifeline and I explored water media and figurative studies as well as my Plein air landscapes in oil.  As things reopened, I chose to focus on painting and engaging locally.  I became a member of Sequoia Gallery, joined the Oregon Society of Artists and began showing my work at Fairweather House + Gallery in Seaside, Oregon where I am became a well-known Resident Artist and encouraged many other Portland artists to join. 

More recently . . .

In the spring of 2022, my daughter and I visited Palm Springs.  It was so bright, light, and vibrant.  The experience inspired me to create a large abstract painting and also shift my focus toward traveling with my daughter (for dance), and taking a break from art showings.  In 2023, several major life events occurred to completely change our lives.  In March, I was diagnosed with Invasive Lobular Carcinoma: breast cancer.  This was a shocking disruption to our lives.  Our family had recently decided to move to the Palos Verdes Peninsula near Los Angeles for a change in my husband's career.  After completing surgery, recovery, and radiation treatment, and with the help of many friends, we moved to Palos Verdes Estates at the end of July.  This move to a painter's paradise gave me a beautiful place to recover.  My painting had been on pause, but with the move to the light and ocean, as I recovered I soon become involved with local artist groups.  I joined the Palos Verdes Art Center and The Artist's Studio (TAS) group, and renewed my membership with the Laguna Plein Air Painters Association.  Before long, I had an overwhelming number of opportunities for local art engagement and was attending local openings with friends.  Just 6 months after relocating, my position was eliminated during a large restructuring at Nike. After over 30 years in the corporate world, I decided to turn my focus to my art.  I welcome you to follow along on this new chapter in my life.

With gratitude,

Karen Doyle 

[email protected]