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Karen, what inspired you to want to become an artist?

I have always had a very intense response to the physical world.  Our earth is a mighty, beautiful place.  When I was a teenager, these feelings and responses became particularly intense.  Alongside grew a deep desire to communicate what I was experiencing.  As a young person it took two forms - the visual and the written language.

What effect did growing up on a farm in Wisconsin have on your creativity as you see it today?

A farm is a very stimulating place.  There is room to roam as well as try out all sorts of things.  I remember braiding reins for my pony's bridle when I was 10 or so.  Even younger, I remember making an arrangement of fruits and vegetables on a woven basket, and being upset when a day later it was covered in black and fruit flies.  My brothers and I used to build tunnels and little houses in the hay mow.  When it was raining, we'd go in and play the whole day.  My mother always gave me my own seeds when we planted the garden and when I was older she would sometimes give me flowers to transplant.  Early in my teen years I remember planting 500 trees with my father.  We worked each evening until we had planted them all.  I know how much these things stimulated my interior world - they also gave me a sense of being able to try new things and do things on my own.

How did you go from farm country to the suburbs of NYC and how would you say the change influenced your art?

It was a gradual moving toward the city.  I began at a college close to home, living on a golf course and caring for young children.  I moved into a small city to focus on my college studies and then moved to Milwaukee to complete my undergraduate degree.  When I was 25 I chose to move to NYC to pursue the work in a place where it might be supported.  I spent a couple of years working through imagery that contained walls!  

Have you always been creative or what led you in that direction?

I have always been communicative.  Anything I have developed in the visual language has been developed based on a need to communicate the complexity of my experiences - both sensual experiences of the physical world and intellectual experiences based on reading and understanding abstract concepts.  

You have quite an impressive resume. Looking at your long list of achievements beginning with your first exhibition in 1978, what is your process for showing your work?

It is important that many people see my work.  I tend to seek out exhibition venues that have traffic that includes those people who would not seek out a gallery on their own. 

You have a Masters Degree in Fine Arts as well a Masters in Education; how have woven these two together?

I've been a teaching artist for over 20 years.  When I provide artist-in-residence services, the work is usually collaborative in some way.  Sometimes that means creating a wall mural (I completed a 28 x 56' mural with a school in Queens in 2003 - all 650 kids in the building as well as administrators, parents and teachers were involved.)  Sometimes that means working at a community level and collaborating with a larger, mixed group.  Collaboration is dynamic, fun territory to navigate.  I always feel blessed and stimulated when I am collaborating on a project.  Often this may mean that I am collaborating to design a curriculum or a professional development workshop/series.  Ideas always flow back to the studio-based work, which changes subtly as a result.  I've learned to see my studio work in a much more holistic way - when I was younger I thought of it in isolation regarding other things in my life. 

Can you tell us what tondo art is and how you got started with it?

Tondo is not necessarily a separate, distinct type of art.  The word dates from the Renaissance and simply means round.  Many artists have worked on in this form - especially those doing altar and chapel commissions during this period.  Raphael and Michelangelo have done tondo paintings.  When you look at these works and then look at their rectangular compositions, you realize the fluidity of each of their capacities to compose well within a variety of spaces.

I began with a round form based on a sample my stretcher builder gave me.  Normally I don't complain about challenges or discuss my problems with visual work.  In 1988 I was working a suite of  paintings called the 9 Mysteries.  I was having a devil of a time getting the imagery to work on the rectangle.  Simon was delivering stretchers to the studio next door and I joked to him about my quandry.  When he returned the following day with the rest of his delivery, he brought a 28" round "scrap" for me to play with.  I stretched paper on it immediately and the study I produced solved all the vexing compositional problems.  I promptly ordered 9 round stretchers and have never looked back.

Who have been the most influential characters in your life as it relates to your growth as an artist?

This is one of those questions that give me the same experience as a jar of jelly beans.  (They are all so lovely, it's hard to choose only one, or even two!)  I am always influenced by people, places and things.  Sometimes it is someone's tone of voice.  Sometimes, it is the way a person has crafted economic support alongside their studio practice.  If we think about the nature/nurture debate while considering influence as a tide in the early developmental years, my mother is a special person.  She always encouraged me and gave me the sense that doing what I wanted to do was completely acceptable.  That core belief helped me stay with steering the boat, no matter how impractical it seemed at times, or how daunting the changes were as a result of choices to go forward.  As an adult, there have been countless influences - some accepted at a deeply resonant level, some at a more shallow level of choice.  But without that very early understanding she gave me, none of the other influences would have had a place to grab on to. 

In your Artist’s Statement you mention art and spirituality as being interconnected. Please elaborate.  

There are fine texts that elaborate on this complexity much better than I can!  The Spiritual in Art is one fine discussion - I read it when in undergraduate school.  

In the experiential realm I believe most things are interconnected.  We don't have "emotional" experiences or "intellectual" experiences, or "spiritual" experiences.  We might label them in this manner after the fact - when we are communicating about them!  But raw experience is extraordinarily complex and involves all aspects of ourselves...our emotions entwine with our spirit, our heart moves in lock step with our thoughts.  I have noticed that the visual language has the potential to get at these things.  Verbal/written language can also get at these experiential complexities.  For myself, I love the way poetrydoes this.  (All the arts address this complexity - I just lack the tender resonances required for passionate involvement with the other forms, except music.  I listen to music as I work - a wide range of eclectic styles and cultural traditions.  Lately I love Persian and classical Indian music.) 

When I consider most art, it seems to me that is what a great deal of it comes down to - describing the various subtle interconnections between things as we experience them.  Cezanne has a wonderful throughline on this, ruminating in painting after painting about how his eyes, his physical vision interconnects with and creates his experience of seeing the world. 

It looks as though you have achieved many of your goals as an artist; where do you see yourself going or continuing to go with your art? What are your long-range goals?

Our world is full of specialists.  Artists are also expected to be specialists.  I have a deep admiration of those cultures that have no word for "art".  In those cultures, the arts are practiced in a way that they are embedded and integrated into daily life and cultural belief -- there is no need to separate 'art' as a special mode.  Everyone has the capacity to create, and we are all doing it all the time.  Most people don't make a connection with this ability and ongoing activity.  I feel it is very important to not be in the world as a specialist, but to show others that they have the same capacity as I do and to help them reconnect with their creative self. 

What is your most memorable and/or rewarding experience as a successful artist?

I always have trouble answering questions like these!  I think each one is rewarding; each experience enlarges my knowing capacity.  Some time ago I realized you can never really know how you are effecting others or the world around you.  So I concentrate on being in the world for the highest good of everyone. 

What are your parting words of wisdom for all of us aspiring artists?

Like gardening, an artist's work is tremendously impractical in economic terms in our present culture and society.  That doesn't mean it is unimportant or not worth serious pursuit.  Art in the economy is a little bit like Einstein's definition of space/time and matter - planets and gravity bend the continuum in which they exist.  I like to think the arts do that in our economy as well - locally, nationally and globally.  They bend the financial continuum.  Notice I'm not saying how they bend it!!  But go with the puddle.  Let your passion acrue and connect yourself with the work required to see a thought, an idea, a vision to reality.  Work hard. 

To view more of Karen Fitzgerald's beautiful artwork, please visit her website: http://www.fitzgeraldart.com/.  If you would like to send her an email, her address is: karen@fitzgeraldart.com.

All works are copyright.  Permission to use these images in any way must be obtained from the artist.