About

Laurence Karasek is an artist whose work moves between landscape and abstraction. Working primarily in oil, his paintings are built slowly, each one a meditation on place and perception. His work focuses on creating large-scale, vibrant, chromatic abstractions inspired by landscapes and the people who sometimes inhabit them. Laurence has exhibited widely and his work is held in private collections throughout the United States and abroad.

Laurence is passionate about exploring the balance of opposites - surface and form, abstraction and figuration - through representational painting techniques, classically trained at the Royal Academy of Art, London. He enjoys leading master classes that inspire emerging artists, reflecting a lifelong dedication to understanding the meaning and purpose of art and its masterpieces.

Paintings derive from drawings made from what Laurence sees and feels. Compositions, usually thematic series, emerge in the painting process, the physical act of painting. Transcriptions, as charcoal on canvas, have an intermediary life of their own and are motions towards resolution. Charcoal and oil paint work together, transforming the canvas surface as form and space. At some point, there is an end to the procedure, moments, color washes or brushstrokes, suspended in time. Sometimes spontaneous and direct. Sometimes complex. Transcendence is not easy. Practicing artists have complex and involved lives, as Laurence knows from his own experience.

Inquiries and correspondence welcome.