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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