Karen Covic

I love to experiment with materials and therefore many of my paintings or works on paper are mixed media. My last exhibition was a series of contemporary watercolours on canvas but for this exhibition I have tried to combine watercolour, ink and oil paints. I heard another artist describe his style as ‘contemporary expressionism’, and I liked the sound of that, however, an abstract landscape often seems to emerge. Recurring themes are of free flow and control, entanglement and release. Emotional landscapes.

I have a space in Studio 6, downtown at The Sunday School Union building on Queens St. I am also a member of the Railway Street Gallery in Newmarket.

Favourite colour?
Green but when painting I seem to use a lot of yellow ochre.

How do you take your coffee?
small cappuccino double shot in morning, but later prefer long black with a dash of milk.

Is there something you can’t live without in your studio?
music, podcasts, audible. I need some noise. Silence is sometimes overwhelming as then it’s just you and the canvas.

Who is your favourite artist of all time + now?
I have a big soft spot of Munch. I visited his museum in Norway when I was 18yrs and his work up close was incredible, raging with emotion, radically colourful and so ahead of his time. But there are so many, the female American expressionists, Robert Rauchenberg, Cy Twombly.

Now: Tracy Emin (paintings), Toby Raine, Lottie Consalvo, Christina Pataialii, Antonia Perricone-Mrljak, Catherine Cassid