Karen Lynch – Imaginative Reality

 

I, like most of you guys, spend lots of time mindlessly scrolling through Instagram. On one of my many days of endless scrolling, I ran across an account that was full of collages. Not the kind you make in first grade to describe your personality, but beautiful works of art that spoke to me on a metaphysical level. After some digging, I discovered the artist – Karen Lynch. Karen lives in South Australia and is new to the art world, only beginning her journey in 2013. 

Karen’s creative process is creative in and of itself – she defines herself as an old-school cut and paste artist. Over time, she has curated a library of material to pull from. Before starting any new project, she filters through her paper scraps – all of which are organized by color and object – and puts together a plan to work from. Karen is inspired by surrealist art and 20th c architecture. Most of her work depicts new worlds, all created from old magazines, books, catalogs. It sounds contradictory but, she considers herself a retro-futuristic artist, Karen enjoys taking the past and making it anew. 

In the past, Karen has worked closely with music producers to create album covers, finding creative harmony between two genres of art and music. 

In reading Csikszentmihalyi’s Chapter from his book “Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention”, I found connections to Karen’s art. Csikszentmihalyi described common contradictory character traits of creative individuals, like being smart and naive, playful but disciplined, rooted in between imagination and reality. Karen’s artwork itself fits particularly well into the trait rooted in both imagination and reality. As you can see, the majority of her work takes common objects or people and places them in outlandish landscapes: thus, an imaginative reality is formed. 

I hope you have enjoyed discovering this creative mind with me, and that you can support her by following her Instagram and checking out her artwork!

This is a link to her page where you can find a short bio and see her work. 

Here is her Instagram