karen doyle

KAREN DOYLE
Karen Doyle is an award-winning Impressionist oil painter. She paints luminous, colorful landscapes of the West Coast in her studio and en plein air outdoors. Her oil paintings are filled with juicy color and thick impasto brush strokes. Karen nurtures two careers: Engineering Director at Nike, and Professional Fine Artist. She is a member of the Laguna Plein Air Painters Association, a group of artists dedicated to painting the landscape.

I paint oil on panels, en Plein Air (outdoors), and in my home studio, creating luminous, impressionist landscapes of Oregon and California. I paint with a palette knife and brush, often beginning with a few pencil lines to mark out my chosen composition, then blocking in large areas of color with a brush. As the composition unfolds, I build up buttery, thick impasto layers with a palette knife, often scraping up piles of paint from my palette to create new colors with each swipe of the knife. My impressionist landscapes reflect the intense feelings I get from observing the ordinary beauty that surrounds me every day.

I attended UC San Diego and studied a variety of subjects in the arts and sciences, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and minors in Visual Arts and Philosophy. Off to graduate school I went, to pursue a PhD in Social Psychology. My studies were interrupted when I moved to the Pacific Northwest and began pursuing my goal of becoming a working artist. I studied life drawing at the Oregon College of Arts and Crafts and enrolled in the Museum School (now the Pacific Northwest College of Art, or PNCA) to pursue a Certificate in Fine Art.

I am painting for myself now, not for events, and I'm finding that this freedom has invited abstraction back into my work. ~Karen Doyle