Karen Cairns:
This Gleaming City
5th to 30th
September
An Interview with Karen Cairns
To imagine one of Glasgow’s best-loved views
– Buchanan Street, say, thronged with shop-
pers and flanked by all those spidery metal
awnings, jutting from the sandstone - and then
to compare it with its recreation in a painting
by Karen Cairns, is to realise a remarkable
process by which each
– the mental image,
and the artistic im-
pression – is trans-
formed by the other.
It is almost as
though the streets, the
buildings are breath-
ing with a varying
intensity.
Spires snake; build-
ings blur – and yet, no Above: ‘Walking in Gold, Argyle
Street’, watercolour, £950
matter how much
liberty the artist al-
lows herself, each
scene is always in-
stantly recognisa-
ble. Something we
have always
known, just
changed utterly.
For an architectur-
al painter, Karen is
unusual in that she
almost invariably uses the notoriously difficult
wet in wet technique, mixing colours on the
page itself – the effect is as though she were
dissolving the solid structures of buildings, in
order to reconstitute them in rich colour.
Above: ‘Glasgow Crown,’ watercolour,
£550
Until her career as an artist took off after sub-
mitting her portfolio to scotlandart.com twelve
years ago, Karen was working full-time as an
architect. It is perhaps surprising at first, that a
profession which seems to demand absolute
precision should function as an apprentice-
ship for an artist who is characterised, above
all, by freedom. Yet, as Karen puts it, architec-
ture has imbued her with “an intrinsic under-
standing of how buildings stay up”; having
Above: ‘Molten Gold, River Clyde’, watercolour, £950
studied at the Edinburgh School of Art, before
a postgraduate in Urban Planning, Karen has
an intimate knowledge of all the manifold
ways in which one may visualise the city.
“Architecture is even more precise now than
when I was studying – with computers, it’s be-
come possible to plan buildings on a scale of
one-to-one, down to the nearest millimetre. I
suppose, in some
respects, my
painting is an es-
cape from this – a
means of freeing
up. Of course, wa-
tercolour was the
architect’s origi-
nal medium – we
presented our
Left: ‘Steel Giraffes at Sunset on
the Clyde’, watercolour, £975
projects in it. Over the
years, I’ve become more
and more experienced
at working from a num-
ber of sketches, to the
point where I barely
draw or sketch at all
now. I’ve learned to
take great pleasure in
the struggle for control
which wet in wet paint-
ing demands; in allow-
ing the colours to carve
out the scene in front of
me.
“What I’m aiming at is
a sense of flair. When
you’re looking at how
city lights at night re-
flect on water, there’s a
Above: ‘April Showers, St Mark’s
Square, Venice’, watercolour, £550
Above: ‘An Apéritif, The Rogano’,
watercolour, £550
sense of excitement, of vibrancy, which you
can only capture in watercolour with an un-
derstanding of the paint’s inherent spontanei-
ty.”
The impression we get is that, though sponta-
neous – though she will paint quickly, creat-
ing two or three visions of each scene which
strikes her, con-
stricted as she is
by the speed at
which the paint
dries – there is
nothing haphazard
about Karen’s art.
It is all the accu-
mulative product
of many years’ ex-
perience working
in this medium –
moreover, it owes
Above: ‘Glamour and Glitz, The Rogano’, wa-
tercolour, £550
much to her continuous lived experience of
the artistic qualities hidden within the surfac-
es of the city.
“The moment of inspiration isn’t something I
tend to thing about; it will happen uncon-
sciously. But sometimes I catch myself looking
up perhaps more than usual – it’s only in look-
ing up, rather than, say, at shop window level,
Above: ‘The Turn of the Swilcan Burn, St Andrews’, watercolour, price
available on application.
that you realise the overall power of a place.
So most of my paintings are depicted from
ground level, attempting to capture the emo-
tional response to a scene which anyone could
pass, on any given day. I think that sense of
recognition is what many people experience
with my paintings – they may have walked
down that street countless times, but just nev-
er experienced it as a piece of art.
Above: ‘Guardian Angel, Paisley
Rd West’, watercolour, £550
Above: ‘Streetlights & Headlights,
University Ave.’, watercolour, £285
“I’m most excited by the evening light, and I
think in part that’s related to emotional associ-
ations – the moment just before the pubs fill
up, people walking home from work. It’s the
blending of a communal mood with the most
beautiful light of the day.”
One thus gets the sense that, for Karen, art is
an extension of her life in modern Glasgow.
There’s a sense of intrepidity in her evening
wanderings, an enthusiasm for new architec-
tural developments grounded in the fact that
“nobody will ever have painted them before”.
Above: ‘Evening Façade, Glasgow University’, watercolour, £650
Below: ‘Night Life, River Clyde’, watercolour, £650
When we view her paintings, we are induced
to view a familiar scene with keener eyes, to
read a deeper beauty into its lines and recon-
sider it as something entirely new; likewise,
Karen will manipulate her walk to work each
morning to ensure she crosses over the Clyde,
simply because “every day, it shows me some-
thing different”.
Image: The artist at work at ScotlandArt’s artist in residency, Lucca, Italy.
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