Wendy: This is the first interview for Emerge, and hopefully I will get to do lots more, because that was my intent, to have a reason to meet lots of people. This is an interview that is not just about your art or just about being a mom, but it is about how you juggle the two and how becoming a mom has impacted you as an artist.
One thing I was curious to know is way back to when you were young, what was your first experience or feeling that you love to draw or paint. What are some of your early memories about art?
Karen: We had a babysitter when I was little that always encouraged me to draw. That was one of the biggest starts. I loved the Snoopy characters, so I would draw Snoopy all the time, drawing him lying on his dog house looking up at the sky. That was one of my first things. And then I also had an aunt who lived in Minneapolis. We lived South of here, in the farm lands. I would come and visit her. She was an artist, so I got a lot of taste of stuff from her. I think I got to draw on my first easel at her house. It was pretty early on. I remember always asking for color books, paper, drawing paper, so it has always been there.
Did you take art classes in high school?
Yes, I took as many as I could. And I was encouraged to pursue my art, so I attended a graphic arts program, which back then wasn’t computerized at all. We did everything by hand so we were drawing all the time. Then I quit school and moved to Chicago at 18 for a year and a half I think.
What did you do there?
I was at the U and then I studied Gerontology and created my own degree, The Sociological Aspect of Aing in this country. I quit again after 3 years, moved to LA, and I started to water color paint. It as just so weird to be a Midwesterner (I was in Palm Springs for a while), and to see the desert.
A very different climate!
The weird rocky sandy mountains, and the sunsets…then I moved back here, started painting in acrylics, and started painting these kind of bizarre figurative works of women, real characters. A lot of them were based on characters I met out in LA, because there were women out there who were just fantastic, you know, 80 years old walking around in bikinis. Just great. So a lot of my paintings are based on people I met out there.
(Meow!) A kitty stops by to visit.
How old are you now? 42.
Where did attend school?
The college of visual arts in St. Paul. It was great, all the people that I had really loved as artists in my community were teaching there, so I got to learn from all these people that I really respected and kind of had already gotten to know before I even went to school. It was great. It was almost like a graduate experience, because I think they were glad to have someone older in their classes who knew what as going on in the world a little bit. So it was a really good experience.
Then I became a mother (laughs)!
I wanted to ask you about two organizations that you are involved with. The Shanty Project, and Franconia, the outdoor sculpture garden by Taylors Falls. We went there this summer and just loved it.
I was an artist for The Art Shanty project http://www.artshantyprojects.org/ for two years. My friend Marlene and I were both new mothers at the time of our first ice fishing house proposal.
So it’s like an art show of fish houses? 
Yes, a little village. I think they select twenty artists, or twenty groups of artists that each make a house. We made a house with transparent walls, filled with stuffed animals, and it was hilarious. And they acted really well as insulation too. So it was called “The shanty of miss-fit toys.” It as really fun. It was hard. We were out there for five weeks. You have to be there every weekend. She and I built it with some help from our husbands. We had little games, like we would paint the ice cracks with colored water, and have story time. We had sleds people could pull around on the ice. Nothing big, but other shanties were the drawing shanty, with drawing exercises every hour. You could go there and draw.
The Minnesota version of Burning Man. Instead of being out in the desert it is on a frozen lake. So, do you have heaters in there?
Yes, we have little propane heaters.
Is there food?
There is a shanty that has hot dogs and brats all the time because when you are cold, you are hungry. People finally figured that out after a few years.
So then visitors come and walk around,
Yes. They do what ever is going on in each shanty. One has its on radio station. There was one that had a sauna this year, which was really cool.
It didn’t fall through the ice?
No (laughs) the ice is very thick. One year there was a really big robot shanty that you could climb into and walk it around on the ice, on skis. That as so fun! It isn’t just art related. Architects come, scientists come, all different kids of people build these shanties, and make an experience out there. I didn’t do a shanty this year. I am on their advisory board.
How far out is it? What lake is it on?
Medicine Lake in Plymouth, so it is pretty close to Minneapolis. It’s a half of a foot-ball field walk out. Not very far. They don’t want to take up ice fishing space. The ice fishermen wouldn’t be very happy (laughs).
So then the outdoor sculpture garden. Franconia.
I remember the firs time I drove past them, I didn’t even know the park existed and I saw this huge clothesline with white men’s shirts hanging on it that were as big as this room, and I said, “what is that!” and we stopped and looked, and wandered around the park. It was just two years ago that they moved to the new place here you saw it. The Franconia Sculpture Park http://www.franconia.org/ gets funding from the Jerome foundation, and people come to work for a summer to build sculptures. Every time I go there it is really magical to me. I have seen some work there has been a little bit life altering, or, not life, but it’s altered the way I have thought about art work.
Well, it is amazing because you can make anything as big as you want in such a large space.
And they have the equipment to help you make big things. Yea, it is pretty neat. My two favorite things: art, and nature…hanging out in the big open sky, grass, trees.
I remember when I as living in SF I made a series of paintings of my view of the sky through the day. It was really amazing how little the rectangles were of blue. Through wires, out the window a little diamond of blue. When I as a kid I would hike out into the middle of a field, and be really careful not to leave tracks in the grass so that my brothers couldn’t find me (I have four little brothers). It was really tall, and then I would spread out the blanket, and look up through the grass at the sky.
I can remember that I used to walk up a dirt road by our house, and there was a giant rock in the ditch that had lots of grass, and I would just sit on the rock, look up at the sky through the grass.
That is one thing that is hard about winter, is having the sky out of reach.
I feel differently. I feel like the sky is weirdly close, and the color shifts are so much more subtle in the winter. I mean I always say look, look at the different grays, and my husband says, “You are crazy!” I say, “No, really, stop and look up, it is beautiful.”
I am huddled over to look at my feet to make sure I don’t fall. Of course I have been pregnant every winter I have been here (laughter).
That doesn’t help as far as looking up! (pause). I think one of my better bodies of paintings has been about the winter sky, and about ice, because it is like being in the desert. Everything is so subtle, like a newcomer might not see that the desert looks different after a rain-fall, but if you live there you see there are little green shoots on things, and soft pink flowers. That is what I feel about winter here. Light affects the color of the snow, and the sky can be crystal clear and ice cold at night, and the stars turn colors
How old were you when your first daughter was born?
Thirty eight or thirty nine. I can’t even remember. And it as funny because I was in school and a friend of mine found out I was pregnant, and she said she remembers thinking “Oh, she was going somewhere! She as really going somewhere with her art and now she is going to have a baby and it is never going to happen!” I think that sometimes. How am I going to pull this off? Unless I stick them in daycare or something which I don’t’ want to do. Yea, I don’t know how I am going to have it happen. Maybe when they go to school?
Have you been able to do any painting?
I have. While pregnant with my second daughter, and after she was born. Ruby went to day care twice a week and I just worked in my studio those days because I had a show coming up. Frances as born in June. I had a show at the Phipps in Hudson, WI http://www.thephipps.org/. I had something to focus on, which really helped. I was able to do it. Frances was home with me and she just slept on the studio floor and I painted, and I would nurse her and paint and nurse and paint and nurse, but it was interesting because it as the first body of work I had done after children really.
Had anything changed?
Yes, I think the basic ideas in my paintings stayed the same. My work has always pretty much been either about looking at the sky or falling into little moments during the day. I like to think about infinity a lot. Not infinity in a grand sense or religious sense, more just in your day to day life. If you are present it can be this amazing thing. It might only be for two minutes.
Like what for example?
I have a painting called “Cicada Cantaloupe”. Someone gave me a bunch of cantaloupe one summer that they grew in their garden and they were the best cantaloupe I had ever eaten in my life. I was sittingoutside eating them and juice as running down my arms and there were Cicadas buzzing outside, and it was this really pure moment. The painting was trying to capture that moment. And with the kids, I am not sure how it is still there.
That underlying theme is still there but you don’t have very many moments (Laughter).
I have the moments but I don’t have the time to make moments into a painting! Someone said to me about my last group of paintings that the titles were much more interesting than the paintings. I think I agree with them. The titles were very poetic, the titles got across what I wanted to get across but I didn’t have time to do the paintings. So my paintings before were more subtle, more sublime. The paintings now with children seem to be a little bit edgy and to me a little wacky, scary sometimes.
Like your life!
Yea, it is just crazy. So I really want to keep working to see where it will go, because something there, there is definitely something really t
here if I just had the time.
I have a similar problem with time. I have a babysitter, and she is great, but I use most of the time she is there to do my schoolwork, and I have been working on Emerge for a while here-and-there but it has taken so long. I started working on this idea gosh, more than a year ago and it has been so agonizingly slow pulling it together!
It is agonizing!
If I could just spend 2 weeks full time, it would be done!
It’s funny, time changes when you have kids.
It does, it really does. Then there is all of the guilt you feel when you are sitting at the computer while the kids are playing, it’s like “Oh, I can’t do this, I have to go play with the kids!”
I know I have that too. I keep revisiting the idea that I need to be happy and fulfilled too, because I get too grouchy if I am feeling resentful for not being able to do the things that I want to do. But I still haven’t figured out the balance yet, have you?
No. (both laugh)
I read a quote that a mother doesn’t feel like herself when she is with her children, and doesn’t feel like herself when she is without her children, and I totally feel that way.
Yes, that is true, that is a good quote.
It takes so long when you bring the kids with you. You can’t just run in quick to do something.
I need the time to do those things because that helps me feel mentally clear and better about everything being organized and setup. You know if your week starts out with no food in the fridge or no diapers, you can’t get through it. It is just impossible. So I don’t know, ideally I would like to have time to do that stuff, and time to just have quiet space. I think that is what is holding me back the most about getting into my studio now is I don’t have any space to just be. And there’s no quiet time to think.
I have been getting up really early towards the end of my pregnancy. Like sometimes 2-3:00 in the morning,
How do you make it through the day?
Uh, I get pretty tired! (Laugh) But it has been so nice 
just to go downstairs, and nobody is there, nobody is going to wake up for a few hours, and then I can just do what ever I want…play on the computer or even work on something, have coffee, read the New York Times, just stare out the window
It is such a nice feeling. I did it for a little while I got up at 6:00 every day because my kids didn’t get up until 8:00, so I had two hours in the morning, but then I realized that by 4:00 I was a monster.
I guess in a couple of weeks I won’t have my early morning time. So I am trying to just get the most out of it that I can.
I think that is the other thing too, is just shifting. Making your mind shift a little, and trying not to remember, or say “I need my life to be the way it as before.” I am trying to do the mind shift so if I get a half-hour alone when they are resting in the afternoon, that’s all it is going to be. Or even if it is only 15 minutes. Then I have to be o.k. with what I get. I am not really there yet (laughing).
I still get resentful. It’s like, feeling resentful and guilty at the same time.
Yes! It’s awful, isn’t it? Isn’t it horrible?
I feel that ay all the time, I go around the house feeling guilty and resentful. (both laughing)
I remember my mom as a painter. There were six of us. I remember when I as really young, up until about age 8, she did a lot of painting. She managed to get a lot of painting done.
How did she do it?
I don’t know. But then, her 4th baby as born, and I think that was it. There as no way for her to continue, and she didn’t start painting again until …she took about a 20 year break. She did other things, like gardening.
Yea, other creative stuff
But things that didn’t take very long. You can run out and pull a weed real quick and go back into the house.
I have actually considered packing up my oil paints and just switching to paper, guash, pencil, I don’t know. I don’t even know.
Something that’s not so painful to stop. 
By the time that I get all my paints mixed, and then if you factor in brush cleaning at the end, two hours is not enough time for me to paint.
So tell me more about this babysitting exchange that you are doing.
I met a new friend at The Parenting Oasis http://parentingoasis.com/. Their focus is on new mothers and giving support to new mothers. That place saved my life this fall, because I was having a really hard time with the adjustment to two kids. Going there and being able to talk to other people…they have volunteers who say “Oh, do you want some lunch?” So it really helped to feel the love, love from your community. It was nice. My new friend and I first took care of each other’s kids back and forth, and then we decided to hire a babysitter together, and just have her do it once a week at her house, and then once a week at my house. It is only for four hours or something.
But still that is something.
Yea, but we have been doing it for two months, and I can’t figure out a rhythm. I can’t …when they are with the babysitter, I am like, “What should I do?
How do you pick one thing?
It’s like you break out jail! (laughs)
Oh, but I totally understand.
I guess I always pictured myself being a mom and having the kids in the studio with me and just working (laughs). Boy was I mistaken!
They would be off in the corner with their little sketch pad. Drawing frogs or something.
They aren’t like that are they?
They are for about ten minutes!
We do have a studio set up in the basement for the girls, they have a little painting table, and they call it their studio, which is really awesome. They will say, “Mom we are going to go to the studio and paint.”
I think I am going to change the name of my office to the studio.
That is a much kinder name isn’t it?
Yes, and it explains the mess a little better too. Because right now it is just a mess!
Well you have a big art table in there too don’t you?
Yes, and I have piles of papers, and Ranjana’s drawings and fabrics, and it’s just a huge disaster!
It’s a studio!
Yes, I think I am going to call it the studio. Then I will feel a little better about walking in there. (laughing)
