Primal and immediate, Karen Crompton’s paintings exist between the abstract and the realistic. Her work celebrates female myth and archetype, from the Great Mother to Celtic Goddesses, reinterpreted in response to both personal and universal experiences in everyday life. Informed by cave art and naive painting styles, creating her art is a soulful, intuitive process. From initial impulse and inspiration, each painting is a conversation in a wider dialogue that emerges across a series of paintings. Her painting process is one of discovery, a metaphor for the search for meaning as we face the ups and downs of living. Collectors experience her work as expressive, powerful and emotional.

As an aphantasic artist, with no internal visual imagery, story and the physicality of painting are significant in the development of the work. Using oil and mixed media, contrast of light and dark, control and chaos, her paintings emerge through layering, disrupting and repeating symbol, text line and form. Over time a surface rich in history develops, the forms and colour palette inspired by its emotional and psychological meaning.

Karen has always searched for meaning and understanding of experience, this being motivational in her previous professional career as a psychotherapist working with survivors of trauma. The power of creativity in transforming experience has been present throughout her life, art expression being an important part of her own healing process. The belief in the transformational power of relationship, the power of the human spirit is fundamental to her view of the world and approach to art making. She invites the viewer to finish the painting through their own meaning making process, to interpret and respond rather than dismiss and move on.