Linda Pearlman Karlsberg
Biography
Linda Pearlman Karlsberg is a painter and draughtsman based in Newton, Massachusetts, working in oils, watercolor, graphite, and lithographic crayon. She has been seeking to realize the world around her with pencil and paint for as long as she can remember. At Tufts University and Boston University College for the Arts Linda immersed in a study of visual art and rigorous studio practice. Her work was transformed through the mentorship of BU artist professors Conger Metcalf, Jack Kramer, Arthur Polonsky, David Aronson, James Weeks and Philip Guston. Linda earned both her BFA and MFA magna cum laude at BU, was awarded a teaching assistantship while an undergraduate, the Stein Memorial Award for Merit in the Arts upon graduation, and a graduate teaching fellowship in painting as a graduate student. After earning her MFA, Linda continued to teach drawing, design, and painting at Boston University, The Art Institute, and other Boston area colleges. With her husband, photographer Mark Karlsberg, she founded Studio Eleven, a professional photographic studio, in 1975. Their photographic images have earned and continue to garner a wide range of awards and accolades.
Linda has shown her work extensively in group and solo exhibitions in museums, galleries, and universities throughout the United States. Landscapes and paintings from the Water Lily series were presented in three recent solo exhibitions: “Transient Visions”, at The Interchurch Center Treasure Room Gallery New York, NY in 2011; “Light, Landscapes and Lilies” at the Newton Public Library Gallery, Newton, MA, in 2013; and “Recent Paintings” at the Daniels Gallery HRCA, Jamaica Plain, MA, in 2014. Linda has recently participated in group exhibitions at the New Britain Museum of American Art, CT; Annapolis Maritime Museum, MD; Westbeth Gallery, NY; Edward Hopper House, NY; Whistler House Museum of Art, MA; Danforth Art Museum, MA; Monmouth Museum, NJ; Foundry Art Center, MO; National Steinbeck Center Museum, CA; Noyes Museum, NJ; Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art, GA; Hebrew Union College, CA; Point Park University, PA; The Art Gallery, University of Maryland, MD; Towne Art Gallery, Wheelock College, MA; The Gallery of Contemporary Art, Sacred Heart University, CT; and HUB-Robeson Galleries at Penn State University, PA. Linda’s work was chosen twice, in 2008 and again in 2013, for inclusion in “8 Visions” at the Attleboro Art Museum, Attleboro, MA.
The recipient of numerous awards for her drawings and paintings; Linda was honored in 2015 with juror’s awards from the Danforth Art Museum, Annapolis Maritime Museum, Attleboro Arts Museum, and the National Oil & Acrylic Painters’ Society, and in 2014 with the Helen Stark Andrey Memorial Award for Painting in the 125th NAWA Annual Members’ Exhibition. Other recent juror’s awards were bestowed by The Riverside Galleries at the Garrison Art Center, Artist Portfolio Magazine, Still Point Art Gallery, and the Maryland Federation of Art Circle Gallery. In addition Linda’s work has been featured in art periodicals, written about in blogs and newspapers, and shared in numerous catalogs. Her work is in various private collections throughout the United States.
Artist Statement
My work is about light: about the conflicts of light and shadow, desolation and beauty, and about the emotional responses light provokes.
I paint the resulting interplay of color and atmosphere, of one texture and shape against another, and the dynamic exchange between forms and line in space. But most essentially I portray places that suspend me in their stillness or turbulence and trigger in me a visceral emotional response. I search for those times and places where beauty is startling and suddenly present. In depicting these fleeting visual encounters I paint the arresting color relationships that flare and bring a momentary expressiveness to the enfolding, lush tranquility of still corners or the immense intensity of roiling skies. In these moments I depict, the light orchestrates a compositional balance and order interrupting abundant disarray.
The Water Lily and Lotus paintings are landscapes in a foreshortened space. In these transient visions of a particular time and light, I work to evoke the glow that emanates from blooms reaching for the sun; the magic and mystery in the water’s surface; the multifarious lily pad and leaf forms that dance, twist, or plod across the surface.
In the Cloud paintings, I depict an amorphous and fluid subject: the elusiveness and heightened presence of the atmosphere’s rendering in form, color, and light. The clouds’ constant turmoil and ongoing metamorphosis index the tumultuous, ever-changing and inevitable forces of life. My paintings register ephemeral glimpses of fearsome power, grandness, stunning beauty, optimism, lightness, brooding darkness, softness, quiet, and sublimity.
All three series celebrate nature’s splendor while evoking the fragility of life inherent in this perpetual reshaping and reordering, this cycle of abundance and loss. A bittersweet sadness tussles with the pleasure this natural beauty engenders. These paintings, so dependent on the light of the moment depicted, call up temporality and all it implies in nature, in our lives and in the lives of those around us. Each painting renders the beauty and ambivalence of these moments: to hold the melancholy engendered by this perpetual, metaphorical play of birth, growth and death: to impart the compositional magic of this random intersection of light, color, texture, shape and form; and to convey the awe of witnessing life’s infinite creativity.
Engaged by the graphic complexity of these environments, I am by necessity a keen observer of the change wrought by light, weather, wind, seasonal changes, and human presence. Savage storms, invasive species, unmitigated development and the passage of time reshape and erase these microcosms. These are evanescent visions that I capture. Time spent with nature has heightened my appreciation of the interrelatedness of all things, deepened my respect and reverence for the earth, and awakened my solemn awareness of our place within it and the urgency of our responsibility to care for it.
Exhibits
Dedee Shattuck Gallery | November 29 - December 22, 2017 | Small Works, 2018
Dedee Shattuck Gallery | November 29 - December 22, 2017 | Small Works, 2017
Dedee Shattuck Gallery | May 4 - May 29, 2016 | A Closer Look
