Rachel Karr
Rachel Karr is a Nashville, Tennessee-based visual artist whose work focuses on themes of legacy and conservation. These themes are deeply inspired by her experiences in motherhood, particularly her efforts to instill a love of nature and good stewardship in her children. Karr is an avid traveler who enjoys frequent visits to the National Parks that often appear in her paintings.
She received her BFA from Austin Peay State University and is an alumni of the Arts & Business Council of Nashville’s Periscope Artist Entrepreneur Training program. Karr has exhibited in a variety of both in-person and virtual group and solo exhibitions.
Artist Statement
In my brightly colored gouache landscape paintings, I create a surreal juxtaposition of the familiar and the alien. These landscapes bear a striking resemblance to earthly locations, yet they are transformed by the presence of otherworldly skies and a vivid neon palette. My artistic intention is to provoke contemplation, using color to convey the profound messages hidden within these fantastical scenes.
The neon palette serves a dual purpose. Its artificiality alludes to the prevalence of the unnatural in our daily lives—from the flavorings in our foods to the plastics in most consumer goods. At the same time, vibrant colors in nature often serve to attract mates and pollinators. Similarly, these candy-colored vistas lure the viewer in, inviting them to explore. In this context, the colors stand in for the temptations of fast, cheap products marketed as solutions to our problems. Rainbows appear as distant, intangible forms—glimmers of hope and a belief that our environment can still be revitalized. Yet nestled within these vibrant worlds are eerie black portals, ominous reminders of the lurking dangers that lie beneath the surface. These portals are the only use of black paint, symbolizing the inky petroleum pumped from the depths of the Earth. Easy to overlook, they are tucked into the landscape like the fine print of chemical lists on food packages, petroleum-based fabrics on clothing labels, and polymers in beauty products.
In these artworks, I hope to awaken viewers to the pressing need for change. They are a testament to our shared responsibility to protect and preserve our fragile Earth, to recognize the consequences of our choices, and to act swiftly to mitigate the damage we have done. My gouache landscapes serve as a vivid reminder that there is no “Planet B,” and it is our duty to ensure the future of the only home we have ever known.
https://www.rachelkarr.com/
Who and/or what were your influences when you first started out, and how do they compare to now?
I have a beautiful memory of a visit during college to the Frist Museum in Nashville, TN. I walked into a small, tucked-away gallery displaying Darren Waterston’s show Delirium and was awestruck. I sat on the gallery floor, taking it in, and felt like I had been shown a path. Those paintings taught me how to pick apart the world and pull out what I needed. Influence is a strange thing; some things we actively respond to, while others we don’t realize were there until we look back. Looking back at my earliest paintings, I can see the influence his work had on me. I still follow his art, and it never fails to inspire.
I’ve always been drawn to artists who dissect their world and construct something new from the fragments. Over the last few years, I’ve deep-dived into the work from the Dutch Golden Age. The landscape artists of that era would create new topographies by piecing together landforms seen only via trade routes, inserting mountains into the naturally flat Dutch landscape. Rachel Ruysch’s paintings from that period featured elaborate and impossible floral arrangements, combining flowers that never would have grown at the same time. Through the influence of artists like these, I’ve learned how to find and fit my pieces together in a similar way.
What is your favorite thing about the materials you use?
I can be obsessive about the materials I use. I need the perfect hue of a pigment, the texture of my painting surface has to be tight and smooth, and the way light interacts with the finished product is always on my mind. I had been making my own acrylic-based paints for many years; it’s a wonderfully versatile medium. However, I eventually felt conflicted about using plastic and polymer paints to create art that speaks against the negative impact of those products on our environment. This realization occurred at the beginning of quarantine, when I lost my studio space and had to scale down my work significantly.
I switched to gouache paint as a more eco-friendly option that suited my new workspace, and I quickly fell in love with its rich pigmentation, smooth blending, and versatility. It complemented the style I had begun shifting toward and allowed me to refine it. I often mount my paper works onto wood panels and have started experimenting with different finishes on the edges. Adding mirrored tiles and small crystals has introduced a new interplay with light, echoing the stars in my landscapes and expanding the visual experience beyond the painted surface.
What would you say is hidden just underneath the surface of your work? What are you revealing to your viewers?
I process a lot through my work, as most artists do. We all have a private relationship with our art, and we understand that the viewer will have their own connection to it as well. My themes of conservation and legacy are rooted in my own grief and how I have come to process the loss of my mother. I went to her funeral and gave birth to my twins within the same 24-hour period. I struggled with caring for newborns and my two-year-old daughter while handling her estate. At a time when many women would naturally want their own mother the most, I not only lost mine, but many of the physical reminders of her. It made me think about how permanent loss is and how fragile our own legacies and histories are if we don’t nurture and protect them.
The portals in my paintings have always coexisted with the vivid palette and, for me, they allude to my mother’s vibrant personality and her own private battle. It’s a juxtaposition intrinsic to the human experience. When we create to inspire change and ask our audience to act, we as artists have to call to the deepest and most raw parts of the spirit—and be willing to expose our own in kind.
Can you tell us about a turning point in your practice? Was there a moment when things started clicking?
This feels like the portion of the interview where everyone brings up quarantine, right? It doesn’t feel so long ago that it could be cliché, but here we are. In addition to refining my baking skills, I also found myself suddenly homeschooling three children aged six and under. My husband began working from home, and my studio became his office out of necessity. I had been mostly free to sling paint and leave wet panels about until then, so long as I could tidy up by 2 p.m. Suddenly, time and space were in short supply—and it was a disaster. There are still tiny fingerprints in my paintings from that time, and likely matching paint splotches still lingering about the house somewhere. It just wasn’t tenable.
I even bought a tent to try working out in the yard, but that wasn’t practical either. I eventually moved my desk to the nook beside my bed and learned how to make small things. Smaller paintings meant faster dry times and allowed me to progress through ideas more quickly. The imagery that had been dynamic and detailed in my previous work felt awkward and unrefined at this size. I turned back to my infrared photography for inspiration and started experimenting with clouds before moving on to landscapes.
Introducing gouache allowed me to accomplish a level of detail in these landscapes that satisfied my grand ideas. Paintings could be finished quickly enough to hold my interest and dry quickly enough to be safely put away by the end of naptime. My ambition and attention span are very different sizes, and it took some trial and error to find a balance. But these challenges stripped away distractions and forced me to focus. It’s easy to overcomplicate things and mistake doing more for doing well. We all benefit from pulling back from time to time and revisiting who we are and what our art is at its core. Despite the challenges of quarantine, I’m grateful that it pushed me to do just that.
In honor of our women’s issue, who are three women and/or gender nonconforming artists that inspire you?
It’s difficult to narrow it down, especially having had the opportunity to meet and discover so many amazing women artists over the last few years! These are the artists I found myself coming back to over and over this past year or so.
There's a good chance the audience is familiar with the work of Sarah Detweiler. Her art gave me permission to be a serious artist and a mother, and to let those worlds intertwine without feeling that I had to be less of one to be good at the other. Her ability to paint whimsical images imbued with deep meaning and nostalgia is remarkable. I own a small boxed collection of her prints and love thumbing through them when I need a creative kick in the pants.
Another artist who combines playfulness with sometimes heavy themes is Devon Walz. Her color palette is dreamy, and I love seeing the sculptural pieces she’s been sharing recently. Her variety of techniques—stenciling, airbrush, and hand painting—come together in such a beautiful way. I was given a print of her piece Please, Come Back for my birthday and haven’t managed to hang it yet because it elicits so much emotion in me.
Finally, artist Ashley Eliza Williams (whose interest in mosses and lichens rivals my own) is what I would call a modern naturalist, documenting a world that seems largely of her own invention. She breaks her work into diagram-like segments, even mapping
