public reception: September 20, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
The Ashtabula Arts Center gallery is open Monday-Thursday, 9 a.m.-9 p.m., Friday 9 a.m.-4 p.m., and Saturday, 9 a.m.-1 p.m., as well as before productions and during intermission. Admission to the gallery is free.
Beyond Language
The written word is designed to (often) land on paper with the use of language. Its purpose is to communicate. Karen is seeking to bring forward another form of communication that works with a different tool set: the vocabulary of paper itself. She is proposing an alternative way of seeing and comprehending through the fine art of collage.
Karen didn’t always enjoy this specialized love affair with paper. Her path to collage has been convoluted, every side road as important as the next, all lending to each other and to the progression of her career.
Her future seemed to hint the way in high school when she took a shot at entering a competition she had heard about, then casually submitted some of her work. It won her a scholarship to the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. There Karen majored in Fashion Illustration, and once graduated, went on to be an on-site fashion illustrator for three department stores in downtown Cleveland for a ten-year stretch.
After marriage and children, her course shifted to freelance work at home. While doing work for greeting card companies, she researched and studied everything about the world of children’s books. That yielded opportunities that eventually resulted in twenty-three children’s books, all told.
Some of Karen’s clients over these earlier years have been The Atlanta Braves, Georgia-Pacific, Georgia Tech, American Psychological Association, Harper Collins, Cricket Magazine, and American Greetings. Later, she also became an instructor at Virginia Marti College of Design.
Another natural shift led Karen to abandon a more commercial effort with a new hankering to please herself rather than continuing to gain approval from art directors. This, she admits, has been very freeing and satisfying.
Please enjoy Karen’s gallery on Instagram, @karenmaizel and give her a follow.
My process for collage is intuitive; the primary muse is my subconscious. I am fascinated by paper in all its forms, whether it be textured, hand-stamped, or monoprinted. Its possibilities seem endless to me, so much so that I feel I am never done with what I’d like to say with paper. I create my own snippets to work with, using all manner of medium. I consider them to be my precious little gems. I stamp it, paint it, print it, draw on it, cut it, shred it, stencil it, rip it, peel it off or sand it. I have explored many areas of art using collage, challenging myself in abstract, realism, figurative, and non-representational pieces. My interest tends to cycle among all of these in order to keep the inspiration fresh. I strive to project a specific feeling tone with some work, but always yielding to the direction into which it seems to be leaning with some unidentified life of its own. For figurative work, my goal is to make a mysterious narrative that might trigger the viewer in some way. This is where language enters. Not words, but communication that touches memory, common human experience, or something more ethereal such as the collective unconscious. I love the idea of incorporating symbols or archetypes in my work.
Do I love the language of collage? There are simply no words.
— Karen Maizel
