Art and Design Come Together

When visual artist Karen Lehrer steps in front of a blank canvas, she has no idea where it will take her. Each piece — or series of pieces — develops organically, step by step, revealing itself to her as she applies color, shape, dimension, and depth. Her mixed media and collage paintings are a lot like life — layer upon textured layer, colors peeking through one another to build a rich, multi-hued history.

Lehrer’s work is currently on display at Santa Barbara Interiors, 10 E. Figueroa St. It is, in some ways, a dream come true for the painter who, as she said, “purposely creates artwork people want to hang on their walls and live with.”

For Lehrer, who is also a licensed marriage and family therapist, it’s not so much art as a statement or art with a message, but art that brings pleasure. “There’s a lot of very edgy contemporary work, and it has its place,” she said, “but it’s not what I want to do. People need something to hang above their sofa or in their dining room that pleases them, that makes them happy to look at.”

Lehrer’s take is not surprising given that her art career began with textile design she mastered at the Fashion Institute in Los Angeles. “It was the key in the lock for me,” she recalled. “It happened to be exactly perfect for my sensibility and the kind of art I like. I like design — basically, I’m a designer.”

The elements of textile design imprinted on her creative sensibilities and became the basis for the artwork she does now. While Lehrer uses her art to explore themes in an abstract, non-objective way, she also welcomes the challenge of mastering new and novel techniques. Take the pieces from her Brushstrokes Series, for example, that are done on Yupo, a waterproof, tree-free, machine-made alternative to traditional art paper.

“Another artist turned me on to it,” she said, “and I was just intrigued to learn how to paint on it. It’s not absorbent and I use acrylic paint, and it was challenging to figure out how to work with it. It took months and months of experimentation.”

And it was particularly challenging given the multiple layers she incorporates into each piece. She worked in multiples, she said, with as many as five going at one time. “They took a really long time to dry because of the Yupo,” she said. “There’s no absorption, and if I used the hair dryer on them to get the paint dry, it would have spread. So, it was paint and wait, paint and wait. And generally speaking, I’m an impatient person, so that was a big lesson for me.”

The series — 10 pieces in all — presented another challenge for Lehrer, in the form of the brushes themselves. “I couldn’t find a brush to use to get the quality of the mark I wanted,” she said. “I practiced and practiced, and I couldn’t get a brush that would work. Then I realized I had to make my own.” So, she did. And after creating five prototypes, she found the winner — a piece of linen fabric (gleaned from a pair of pants) wrapped around a stick of driftwood she’d picked up on the beach.

“This whole brushstroke thing took me a long time, but it was enlivening for me because I had this project and I was trying to work something out,” she said. “It wasn’t easy — I had to figure it out on my own. But that’s what makes it interesting.”

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Karen Lehrer’s work will be on display at Santa Barbara Interiors (10 E. Figueroa St.; santabarbarainteriors.com) throughout the summer, with some pieces remaining into the fall. For more information on the artist, see karenlehrer.com.