KAREN K LEWIS

Karen K. Lewis is primarily a studio painter who works in oils, sometimes on a large scale. But, upon moving to Ojai in 1990, she fell in love with the landscape and joined the throng of local plein air painters. She now divides her time between plein air painting, studio painting and printmaking.

One of her large-scale oil paintings, inspired by a London garden scene, is in the Museum of Ventura County collection. Other paintings and prints by Karen grace the collections of the Ojai Valley Museum and the City of Ojai, and scores of private collections across the United States and in Mexico, Switzerland, and Japan. She regularly exhibits at the Ojai Valley Museum, the Santa Paula Art Museum, the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts, the Ojai Center for the Arts, the Santa Barbara Printmakers annual shows, the Ventura County Government Center gallery, and the Ojai City Hall gallery. She also has participated in exhibits at the Museum of Ventura County and the Carnegie Art Museum in Oxnard. A longtime member (and past president) of the Ojai Studio Artists, she shows her work during the group’s annual studio tour.

Karen was born in Glendale, CA, and raised in the Philippines and in Los Angeles, where she earned a BA in art from UCLA. After moving to the East Coast, she earned a master’s in fine arts from Lehman College in New York City, and plunged into New York’s vibrant SoHo art scene as a member of the Pindar Gallery, just across Greene Street from the legendary Leo Castelli Gallery. She showed her work at Pindar throughout the 1980s. (The New Yorker featured one of her exhibits in its “Goings On About Town” section.) In 1982 she participated in “Views By Women Artists,” a New York citywide exhibit sponsored by the Women’s Caucus for Art.

Since her return to California, in addition to painting the Central Coast landscape, Karen has continued her art educational journey by indulging herself with cutting-edge printmaking workshops in New York (Art Students League, Manhattan Graphics Center); Santa Fe, N.M.; Lucca and Florence in Italy; and Santa Barbara. In 2011 she was the subject of a cover story in Ventana Magazine, and in 2012 she was honored by Focus On The Masters, a Ventura County arts organization that “documents, preserves and presents the works and lives of accomplished contemporary artists.”

Karen’s work can be viewed online in the galleries here, or by appointment at her Ojai studio. Email her at LewisOjai@mac.com or call her at 805-646-8877.

*Photo credit Cindy Pitou Burton