“Painting is my way of making sense out of our chaotic world and creating calmness in my crazed and chaotic life. My paintings are cluttered and busy and frantic and loud…as is my life. Painting is my meditation, my calming grace. The painting process is at first fast and furious, then tentative and time consuming, and finally slow and tedious.

My paintings deal with the organization of interrelating patterns and spatial planes that develop one behind another, emphasizing the play between “real” and “unreal.” I like to manipulate images that are of a personal nature. I want my paintings to read like good books… novels with several layers of plot… sometimes very blunt and easily understood and sometimes tenuous and vague. I like to interweave my images like the plots and subplots in these novels. The layers of image, symbolism, spatial planes, color and pattern work together to create tension and harmony…with a little humor.”

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The paintings of award-winning artist Karen Tucker Kuykendall have been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout Florida, including the Tampa Museum of Art, the Jacksonville Art Museum, the Museum of Florida Art in Deland, the Polk Museum of Art in Lakeland, the Boca Raton Museum of Art, Clayton Galleries in Tampa, and the Morean Arts Center in St.Petersburg. Her work was also featured at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Arts in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In addition, Kuykendall’s paintings are in numerous corporate and public collections, including those of the Tampa Museum of Art, the Polk Museum of Art, The City of Clearwater, Pensacola Community College, Rollins College, the Capitol Building of the State of Florida and the Florida Department of Natural Resources.