Artist Rachel Karr
Rachel Karr is a visual artist currently residing in Philadelphia, PA. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art in 2006 from Austin Peay State University in TN. She has developed her painting practice for nearly 20 years alongside her work as a professional photographer. By reinterpreting her own landscape photographs, she illustrates the human connection to place and memory. Karr has had several solo exhibitions including Black Heart Gallery, Aspire Gallery, Story Forge, and Daily Grind. She has also had work included in several juried national and virtual group exhibitions and has been featured in multiple online and print publications such as Create! magazine.
"My chromatic gouache paintings explore the emotional resonance of places encountered, remembered, and imagined. I am interested in the way our experiences become intertwined with the landscape, altering not only how we remember a place, but how we perceive it in the present. Working from my own photographs, memory, and imagination, I use a vibrant color palette to move beyond literal representation. Color becomes a vehicle for emotion and memory—capable of intensifying a moment, distorting it, or revealing something that may not be visible in the physical landscape. A familiar forest, river, storm, or horizon can become something more psychological: a place shaped by longing, wonder, fear, nostalgia, or the feeling of returning. The small scale of these works invites an intimate encounter. Each painting functions like a snapshot: concentrated, heightened, and incomplete. Atmospheric shifts, unusual color relationships, and moments of visual ambiguity allow the landscapes to hover between the recognizable and the imagined. I am drawn to the tension between the specificity of a place and the deeply personal associations we attach to it. Ultimately, these paintings consider landscape as both an external world and an internal one. They ask how memory colors what we see, how experience shapes our connection to place, and how a landscape can become part of our understanding of ourselves."
Tell us a little about yourself (where you are from) and your background in the arts.
Before moving to Philadelphia, PA a few years ago, I grew up in California and then moved to Tennessee. In Nashville, I was very close to my artistic grandmother. I was very fortunate that she and many adults in my life encouraged me from an early age to explore my creativity.
I earned a BFA in 2006 from Austin Peay University and studied both photography and painting. I've been a working artist ever since and have worked as a commercial photographer for most of that time alongside my personal painting practice.
What kind of work are you currently making?
I'm spending a lot of time deep diving into subjects and exploring their visual language. I'm a little fixated on water right now as I prepare for a series of work about my time visiting the Cape Hatteras National Seashore. The ocean under a full moon is one of the most beautiful and satisfying things to paint. There's something really special about the simple composition but the complex way light reflects and illuminates the water.
What is a day like in the studio for you?
My days start long before the rest of my house is awake with a run, walk, or a little time outside, coffee in hand, feeding my cat and the crows that visit my studio window. This hour is how I mentally think through my plan for the day. I'm pretty sure I solve more problems with my art here than in the studio.
Working with gouache often means that the first thing I have to do in the studio is wake up the paints. Rewetting the palette to get that creamy goauche consistency takes about 10 - 15 mins and I spend that time; taping off my watercolor block, sketching, selecting my brushes, refreshing water, and prepping my desk. I'm a total book lover and always have an audiobook playing while I work.
I have three school aged children so my painting hours end around 3pm with a phone alarm reminding me to wrap it up. Before I leave, I always photograph everything I worked on that day. This keeps a good progress record, but also lets me review the day's efforts from a different perspective and helps me course correct if something feels off.
What are you looking at right now and/or reading?
I've been spending a lot of time with Georgia O'Keefe's aerial landscapes and Lawren Harris's work, he renders water in this stunning way that I find both instructional and inspirational. My books list lately has been a deep dive into the history, science, and psychology of color and am currently enjoying the book True Color by Kory Stamper.
Where can we find more of your work? (ex. website/insta/gallery/upcoming shows)
Website: https://www.rachelkarr.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nuclearmystic/
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